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Zaire
The name the Congo carried through a quarter-century of one-party rule
For 26 years, the second-largest country in Africa was called Zaire, from a Portuguese rendering of a Kikongo word for the river, nzere, "the river that swallows all rivers." President Mobutu Sese Seko imposed the name in 1971 as part of a campaign he called authenticité, which also renamed the Congo River, the currency, and many cities, and pressed citizens to drop European first names. The country held some of the world's richest deposits of copper, cobalt, and diamonds, yet incomes fell for most of the period while critics accused the ruling circle of vast personal enrichment. Zaire's collapse in 1997 opened the regional wars that still shape eastern Congo.
Zaire straddled the equator across 2,345,409 square kilometers, bordered by nine countries and touching the Atlantic only along a coastal strip of about 40 kilometers at the river's mouth. The heart of the country is the Congo Basin, a vast, shallow bowl of rainforest drained by the great arc of the Congo and its tributaries, the world's second-largest river system by discharge. To the east the land climbs into the Albertine Rift, with Lakes Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward, and Albert and the glaciated Rwenzori range, whose Margherita Peak reaches 5,109 meters. In the far south, the copper belt of Katanga, renamed Shaba under Mobutu, funded the state. The territory is exactly that of the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The former Belgian Congo became independent in 1960 and fell into secessions and civil conflict, the Congo Crisis. Army chief Mobutu took power in a 1965 coup and renamed the country Zaire on October 27, 1971, ruling through a single party, the Popular Movement of the Revolution. As a Cold War partner of the United States, France, and Belgium, Zaire received aid and military backing, including against invasions of Shaba in 1977 and 1978. Falling copper prices, debt, and hyperinflation hollowed out the state by the 1990s. After the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda, refugees and armed groups crossed into the east, and a rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, reached Kinshasa in May 1997 and restored the name Democratic Republic of the Congo.