Long before any border was drawn in Europe, the Congo basin was home to hunter-gatherers related to today's pygmy peoples —such as the Mbuti of the Ituri forest— and, for more than two thousand years, to the waves of the great Bantu expansion. Farmers and ironworkers, the Bantu peoples brought agriculture, metalworking and ever more complex forms of political organisation to the region, eventually giving rise to some of the most important states in Central Africa.
The most famous was the Kingdom of Kongo, founded around 1390 around the city of Mbanza Kongo (in what is now northern Angola, near the mouth of the river). Ruled by a sovereign called the manikongo, it was a state organised into provinces, with a tax system, markets and a shell currency, the nzimbu. When the Portuguese arrived in 1483, they found a kingdom they could negotiate with as equals: the manikongo Nzinga a Nkuwu was baptised as João I, and his son, Afonso I (Mvemba a Nzinga), who reigned from 1509 to the early 1540s, made Catholicism the religion of the court and corresponded with the kings of Portugal and with the Pope.
Further east, on the savannas of the interior, two other great empires flourished. The Luba Empire, which emerged around the 16th century near Lake Upemba, was built on the principle of sacred kingship (the balopwe) and government by council; its founding is attributed to the mythical hero Kalala Ilunga, who is said to have overthrown the tyrant Nkongolo and introduced advanced ironworking techniques. From a Luba prince, Tshibinda Ilunga, who migrated south, came the Lunda Empire, consolidated in the 17th century under the title of mwaant yaav (mwata yamvo). The Luba political model spread across the whole region and came to shape the states of what are now southern DR Congo, northern Angola and Zambia.
The encounter with the Portuguese, which at first looked like an alliance between equals, soon turned into one of the greatest tragedies in African history. From the early 16th century, the demand for enslaved labour on the plantations of the New World —above all in Brazil— turned the coast of Kongo and Angola into one of the main hubs of the Atlantic slave trade. Millions of Africans were captured in the interior and shipped from ports such as Mpinda and, further south, Luanda, bound for the Americas.
Afonso I himself, the Christian king of Kongo, denounced the problem in letters to the king of Portugal in the 1520s and 1530s: he complained that traders were kidnapping even nobles and free men, and that greed for slaves was depopulating and bleeding his kingdom dry. His protests went largely unheard. The trade fuelled wars and raids, enriched middlemen and destabilised the states of the region for centuries.
The slave trade, together with internal tensions, gradually undermined the Kingdom of Kongo. Defeat by the Portuguese at the battle of Mbwila (Ambuila) in 1665, in which King António I was killed, marked the beginning of a long decline and of civil wars that broke the kingdom apart. By the time Europeans turned their eyes to the interior of the continent again, in the 19th century, the region had already been scarred for generations by the violence of the slave trade, first the Atlantic one and later, in the east, the trade run by Swahili-Arab merchants from the Indian Ocean coast.
In the carve-up of Africa formalised at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, something extraordinary happened: a huge territory in the Congo basin was handed not to a country, but to a single man. King Leopold II of Belgium got the powers to recognise the Congo Free State as his personal possession, a private domain disguised as a humanitarian and "civilising" enterprise. Never before had one individual ruled such a vast territory in his own name.
Behind the philanthropic rhetoric was a system of plunder. First it was ivory; then, with the worldwide boom of the bicycle and the car, wild rubber. To extract it, the regime imposed compulsory collection quotas on villages, enforced by an armed gendarmerie, the Force Publique, and by concession companies that held monopolies over entire districts. Anyone who failed to meet the quota was punished with the hippopotamus-hide whip (the chicotte), with hostage-taking —women and children locked up until the men delivered the rubber— and with death. Soldiers had to account for every bullet fired by presenting a severed hand; they even mutilated living people, and baskets of severed hands became a grisly unit of control.
The demographic consequences were catastrophic. Between the massacres and mutilations used as terror, deaths from forced labour and exhaustion, famine caused by the collapse of agriculture, epidemics that swept through weakened and displaced populations, and the fall in the birth rate, it is estimated that the population of the Congo may have been cut in half. Many historians work with a drop from around 20 to 10 million people during Leopold's rule; the exact figure is disputed and is best given as a range rather than a settled fact, but the scale of the horror is not in doubt.
International condemnation grew thanks to missionaries, activists such as Edmund Dene Morel and the investigation by British consul Roger Casement, whose 1904 Casement Report documented the killings, mutilations and hostage-taking with names, dates and places. The pressure was such that in 1908 the Belgian Parliament forced Leopold to hand the territory over to the Belgian state: the Belgian Congo was born. It is a chapter that must be named in all its brutality, because it ranks among the darkest pages of European colonialism.
Moving from the king's personal property to a colony of the Belgian state, the Congo entered a different phase, less openly genocidal but just as colonial and racist. Belgium dismantled the worst excesses of the rubber system and built infrastructure —railways, ports, hospitals, missions— but always in the service of extracting wealth and controlling the African population, which was denied political rights.
The economic heart of the colony was mining. The southern province of Katanga turned out to be one of the most mineral-rich regions on the planet: copper, cobalt, tin, gold, diamonds and, later, uranium. In fact, the uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga was what the United States used for the atomic bombs of the Manhattan Project. Giants such as the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga built mining towns and drew tens of thousands of African workers into a harsh, segregated labour regime.
The Belgian colonial order rested on an alliance of three powers —the state, the big companies and the Catholic Church— that shared out administration, the economy and education. The system was deeply paternalistic: Africans were educated up to a certain technical and religious level, but barred from university and from positions of responsibility. On the eve of independence, the country had only a handful of Congolese university graduates. That deliberate lack of a trained elite would have serious consequences when, all of a sudden, the time came for the country to govern itself.
The wind of decolonisation reached the Congo with force and speed. After the Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) riots of January 1959 and growing nationalist pressure, Belgium agreed to an almost improvised independence. On 30 June 1960 the Republic of the Congo was born, with Joseph Kasavubu as president and Patrice Lumumba, leader of the Congolese National Movement, as prime minister. At the independence ceremony, Lumumba gave a bold, direct speech denouncing the humiliations of colonialism in front of King Baudouin of Belgium himself.
Independence fell apart within days. The army mutinied, chaos broke out and, encouraged by Belgian mining interests, the wealthy province of Katanga declared its secession under Moïse Tshombe, followed by the Kasai region. Lumumba, a nationalist who wanted a united and sovereign Congo, asked the UN for help and then the Soviet Union, which, at the height of the Cold War, made him an awkward figure for the West. In September 1960 he was dismissed and found himself at odds with Kasavubu and the army chief, Colonel Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.
The outcome was tragic. Arrested by Mobutu's forces, Lumumba was taken to secessionist Katanga and murdered on 17 January 1961, with the complicity of Belgian forces and the approval of Western intelligence services. He was 35. His body was dissolved in acid so that no trace would remain. Turned into a martyr of pan-Africanism and a symbol of the anti-colonial struggle worldwide, Patrice Lumumba remains one of the great figures of 20th-century African history, and his murder an open wound in the country's conscience.
After five years of instability, secessionist wars and a Lumumbist-inspired rebellion crushed with foreign help, Colonel Mobutu staged a coup on 24 November 1965 and seized absolute power. He would rule the country for more than three decades, backed by the West —and especially by the United States— which saw him as an anti-communist bulwark in the heart of Africa.
Mobutu imposed a one-party regime and a lavish personality cult. In 1971 he renamed the country Zaire, changed the names of the river, the currency and the cities (Léopoldville became Kinshasa, Stanleyville became Kisangani, Élisabethville became Lubumbashi) and launched an "authenticity" campaign that forced people to drop their Christian names: he himself became Mobutu Sese Seko. With his leopard-skin hat and carved cane, he presented himself as the father of the nation. But behind the rhetoric lay a kleptocracy: Mobutu and his circle looted the country's immense mineral wealth and amassed fortunes abroad while infrastructure crumbled and the population grew poorer. The term "kleptocracy" became popular precisely to describe his regime.
As the Cold War drew to a close, Mobutu lost the support of his Western backers and his regime began to crack. The economy was in ruins, and the final blow came from the east: the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide spilled over the border and lit the fuse that, in 1997, would bring down the old dictator after 32 years in power.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide was the spark. When the genocidal Hutu regime fell, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees —among them militiamen responsible for the massacre— crossed into eastern Zaire, as it was then, and settled in the refugee camps of Kivu, from where they threatened the new Tutsi-led Rwanda. In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda backed a rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila that swept across the country from east to west in a lightning campaign. In May 1997 Mobutu fled and Kabila entered Kinshasa; the country was once again called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This was the First Congo War.
The peace did not last. Kabila broke with his former Rwandan and Ugandan allies, and in 1998 they backed a new rebellion in the east. This time the conflict became something unprecedented: as many as nine African countries and some thirty armed groups ended up taking part. Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Chad supported Kabila's government; Rwanda and Uganda backed the rebels. Because of its scale and the number of states involved, the Second Congo War (1998-2003) was dubbed the "Great War of Africa" or the "African world war".
The human toll was appalling. Although the figures are debated, it is estimated that the conflict and its aftermath —above all the famine and disease caused by the country's collapse— led to millions of deaths; the International Rescue Committee put the toll at around 5.4 million up to 2008, while other studies bring the figure down to just under 3 million. Whatever the exact number, it was the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and succeeded by his son Joseph Kabila. The 2002-2003 peace agreements officially ended the war and installed a transitional government, but left the east of the country riddled with armed groups and a cycle of violence that has never fully died down.
21st-century DR Congo is a nation of extreme contrasts. It is one of the richest countries in the world in natural resources and, at the same time, one of the poorest in human development. Its subsoil holds a decisive share of the minerals that drive the global economy: it is, by a huge margin, the world's largest producer of cobalt —essential for the batteries in mobile phones, laptops and electric cars— and a key supplier of copper, diamonds, gold and coltan (the ore from which the tantalum in electronic circuits is extracted). That wealth, which should be a blessing, has often been a curse: it funds conflicts and feeds supply chains marked by child labour and inhumane conditions in artisanal mines.
The big open wound is still the east. The provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, on the border with Rwanda and Uganda, have not known peace for decades: more than a hundred armed groups operate there, fighting over control of land and minerals. Since 2021 the M23 has resurged with force, a rebel group that the UN and several governments link to Rwandan support, something Kigali denies. In early 2025 the M23 offensive reached its most serious point: the rebels took Goma, the main city in the east, in late January, and then Bukavu in February, unleashing a humanitarian crisis with thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. All of this should be read soberly and with warnings: much of the east is an active conflict zone and travel there is advised against.
Politically, after almost two decades of rule by Joseph Kabila, the 2018 elections brought Félix Tshisekedi to power, son of the veteran opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi, in what was the first peaceful —though disputed— handover between presidents since independence. Tshisekedi, re-elected in 2023, governs a country trying to stabilise the east through negotiation: throughout 2025 peace talks mediated by the United States and Qatar moved forward, with agreements in principle signed but hard to sustain on the ground. Despite everything, DR Congo remains a country of extraordinary cultural vitality —home of Congolese rumba, of the defiant elegance of the sapeurs, of music and art that radiate across Africa— and a land of natural wealth unique on the planet, from the deepest river in the world to the mountain gorillas of its volcanoes.
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Kinshasa was born of the river and the colonial project. In 1881, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, working for Leopold II, founded a post called Léopoldville on the bank of the Congo, right where the river widens into Pool Malebo (formerly Stanley Pool) before plunging into the rapids that block navigation to the sea. That location —the last navigable point coming from the interior— made it the great hub between the country's river network and the railway running down to the Atlantic port of Matadi.
What began as a trading station grew without restraint. In 1923 Léopoldville replaced Boma as the capital of the Belgian Congo, and after independence, in 1966, Mobutu renamed it Kinshasa as part of his "authenticity" campaign. Today it is one of the most populous cities in Africa, a megacity of more than fifteen million people that keeps growing at a dizzying pace, with overflowing energy and brutal contrasts between the well-off neighbourhoods and the vast working-class outskirts.
Across from it, on the other side of the river, you can see Brazzaville, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. Kinshasa and Brazzaville are the two closest national capitals in the world, separated only by the waters of the Congo. It's the best image for understanding at a glance that there are two different Congos, looking at each other from opposite banks.
Kinshasa is a cultural powerhouse whose influence reaches across all of Africa. It is the birthplace of Congolese rumba, the genre that grew out of the meeting between African rhythms and the Afro-Cuban music that came back on records in the 1930s and 1940s, and went on to become the soundtrack of the continent. Kinshasa produced legendary figures such as Le Grand Kallé, Franco Luambo and his OK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau and, later, Papa Wemba and the soukous that got half the world dancing. In 2021 UNESCO inscribed Congolese rumba on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The city is also the capital of La SAPE (the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes) and of the sapeurs, who turn elegance into an art and a form of resistance. They are men from humble neighbourhoods who save up to wear immaculate designer suits and parade with defiant dignity. It is a philosophy of style and pride that was born between Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
A sporting milestone added to that energy. In 1974 Kinshasa's stadium hosted the "Rumble in the Jungle", the legendary fight in which Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman and one of the best-remembered sporting events of the century. Music, fashion, boxing, street art: few African cities have a cultural identity as strong as the Congolese capital's.
Right on the edge of the megacity, nature takes back its place. On the outskirts of Kinshasa lies Lola ya Bonobo ("bonobo paradise" in Lingala), the only sanctuary in the world devoted to this species of great ape. The bonobo is a close relative of the chimpanzee and one of the species most closely related to humans. In the wild it lives only in the DR Congo, south of the Congo River. Known for its peaceful, matriarchal societies and for settling conflicts through social bonds, it is one of the country's unique biological treasures.
A few hours from the capital, the Inkisi River plunges over Zongo Falls, an impressive curtain of water surrounded by forest and the favourite nature getaway for the kinois. It is a reminder that as soon as you leave the tarmac behind, the green, humid world of the Congo Basin begins.
And there is always the river. The Congo is the deepest river in the world, more than 220 metres deep in some stretches, and the second largest on the planet by discharge after the Amazon. Upstream from Kinshasa it is the great waterway that links the heart of the country where there are no roads. Downstream it rushes through the long series of rapids and cascades known as the Livingstone Falls, a steep descent towards the Atlantic. Because that stretch cannot be navigated, people have always had to go around it overland, which explains why Kinshasa is where it is.
At the far eastern end of the country, along the borders with Rwanda and Uganda, lies Virunga National Park, the oldest protected area in Africa. It was created in 1925, in the colonial era, under the name Albert National Park. UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1979. It is one of the most biodiverse places on the continent, with volcanoes, savannahs, forests and glaciers within just a few kilometres of each other.
Its most famous treasure is the mountain gorilla, one of the most endangered species in the world. Mountain gorillas survive only in the Virunga massif (shared with Rwanda and Uganda) and in Uganda. Legendary park rangers have worked and died here. Protecting these gorillas has in fact cost the lives of dozens of Congolese rangers, killed in clashes with militias and poachers. Their story inspired award-winning documentaries and made Virunga a global symbol of conservation in war zones.
This needs to be said very clearly: Virunga is in a region of armed conflict. The park has closed for periods of time for security reasons, and whether it is open to tourists depends entirely on the situation on the ground. The extraordinary beauty of this place coexists with one of the most dangerous realities in Africa. Before you start dreaming of a visit, check the official travel advice and the park's actual status.
Inside Virunga rises Nyiragongo, one of the most dangerous volcanoes in Africa and home to one of the largest permanent lava lakes in the world: a cauldron of molten rock that glows at night inside its crater. Reaching the rim after a climb of several hours and looking down into that living lava is one of the most impressive experiences on the continent, when security allows.
But Nyiragongo is also a threat. Its eruptions are notorious for how fluid and fast its lava is. In 1977, and again in 2002, rivers of lava flowed down into the nearby city of Goma and wiped out entire neighbourhoods. The 2002 eruption destroyed much of the city and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee, and another eruption in 2021 caused panic once more.
Goma sits on the shore of Lake Kivu at the foot of the volcano. It is the main city of the east and the traditional gateway to Virunga. Its recent history sums up the region's tragedy: overcrowded by waves of refugees since the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and battered by the volcano and by decades of war. In early 2025 it was occupied by the M23 rebel group and its airport was put out of action. Several governments advise against travel to the city, so any plan that involves it means checking the latest official travel advice.
Further south, in South Kivu, Kahuzi-Biega National Park is another Congolese World Heritage Site and the best place in the world to see Grauer's gorilla (or eastern lowland gorilla). It is the largest gorilla subspecies of all and lives only in the eastern DR Congo. The park was created in the 1970s and inscribed by UNESCO in 1980, and it protects a strip of highly valuable montane forest. Its gorilla population was decimated by war and poaching, and today the species is critically endangered.
Between Kahuzi-Biega and Virunga lies Lake Kivu, one of Africa's Great Lakes, wedged between green mountains on the border with Rwanda. It is a beautiful and unusual lake, but also an unsettling one. Its depths hold huge amounts of dissolved methane and carbon dioxide, which makes it potentially dangerous but also opens the possibility of using it as a source of energy. On its southern shore is Bukavu, a city of Art Deco colonial architecture spread across peninsulas and hills.
Like the rest of the east, this region carries the weight of conflict. South Kivu is a province at war and travel there is advised against, and Bukavu itself was occupied by M23 in early 2025. The natural wealth here (giant gorillas, lakes, mountains) cannot be separated from a reality of violence. That calls for the greatest caution, and you should always check the official travel advice before any trip.
The deep south of the DR Congo, the vast historical region of Katanga, is one of the most mineral-rich areas on the planet. Underground it holds gigantic reserves of copper and cobalt, along with tin, gold and uranium. The DR Congo is now by far the world's largest producer of cobalt, which is key to the batteries of the electronic age. The uranium the United States used in the atomic bombs of the Second World War came from the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga.
That wealth shaped the region's entire history. The Union Minière du Haut-Katanga company dominated its economy in the colonial era and drew tens of thousands of workers. And that same wealth is what pushed Katanga, just after the country's independence in 1960, to declare secession under Moïse Tshombe, backed by Belgian mining interests. The crisis cost Patrice Lumumba his life and set off years of war and UN intervention.
Today Katanga, now split administratively into several provinces, is still the country's economic engine. It is also the clearest example of the country's paradox: a fabulously rich land whose minerals feed the global economy while much of its population lives in poverty. Artisanal cobalt mining there is dogged by serious problems with working conditions and child labour.
Lubumbashi is the second city of the DR Congo and the capital of the mining south. The Belgians founded it in 1910 as Élisabethville, next to the big copper workings. It grew as an industrial and mining city with an orderly street plan and colonial architecture that still survives. Mobutu renamed it Lubumbashi in 1966.
Compared with bustling, chaotic Kinshasa, Lubumbashi has a reputation for being calmer and more orderly, with a pleasant climate, tree-lined avenues and a lively cultural scene. Being close to the Zambian border and to the Copperbelt, the great copper belt shared by both countries, ties it closely to southern Africa. Its population is a mix of dozens of peoples drawn by the mines over the course of a century.
The city was the capital of Katanga's short-lived and turbulent secession between 1960 and 1963, one of the most dramatic episodes of the early years of independence. Today it is a thriving city at the centre of the copper and cobalt boom, which attracts investment (much of it Chinese) and workers from all over the country. It is also one of the best gateways to the Congolese deep south.
Away from the mines, the south also has wild nature. Kundelungu National Park stretches across the high plateaus and savannahs of the southeast, a landscape of rolling grasslands, miombo woodland and rivers that tumble over the edges of the plateau.
Its jewel is Lofoi Falls, among the highest single-drop free-falling waterfalls in Africa. At the height of the rainy season the water plunges more than three hundred metres down a cliff, an impressive sight in a little-visited region. In the dry season the flow drops a lot, so the best time to see the falls depends on the rains.
Kundelungu is a remote destination with limited infrastructure. Like so many Congolese parks, it suffered from poaching and neglect during the war years. Together with neighbouring Upemba National Park, it is part of the effort to bring back wildlife to the south of the country. It is a different Katanga from the mining one: a land of vast savannahs, hidden waterfalls and expedition landscapes.
In the far northeast of the country, where the vast equatorial forest gives way to rolling savannahs near the border with South Sudan, lies Garamba National Park. Created in 1938, it is one of Africa's oldest parks, and UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 1980. Its grasslands and gallery forests are home to elephants, Kordofan giraffes, buffalo and hippos, in a landscape very different from the forested heart of the country.
This is the savannah side of the DR Congo, the great arc of grassland that crowns the north of the country between the Congo and Nile basins. The climate is drier, with one long rainy season and one dry season. The wildlife is that of the African plains (herds, large herbivores, grassland birds) rather than the rainforest. Garamba protects one of the best examples of this ecosystem anywhere in the country.
In the colonial era the park was even designed as a centre for domesticating African elephants, a pioneering experiment that is still remembered in the area. With almost five thousand square kilometres of land and the hunting reserves around it, Garamba is a vast, wild and hard-to-reach area that sums up the remote, frontier character of the whole Congolese northeast.
Garamba holds a special and painful place in the history of conservation. It was the last wild stronghold of the northern white rhino, a subspecies that is now practically extinct in the wild. As late as the 1960s, more than a thousand of them still survived here, but waves of poaching in the following decades cut them down to just a handful.
Decades of poaching, often linked to the region's armed conflicts and to the international trade in ivory and rhino horn, wiped out this population and decimated the rest of the park's wildlife. Attempts to rescue Garamba's last rhinos failed, and with them the subspecies was in practice lost in the wild. The very few northern white rhinos left in the world live under extreme protection in a sanctuary in Kenya.
Garamba's story has thus become a global symbol of everything that can be lost when war, poverty and poaching come together against irreplaceable wildlife. It is a warning carved into the heart of Africa, and one of the reasons why the fate of its elephants and giraffes is followed so closely.
Against that tragic backdrop, Garamba has led one of the most remarkable recovery efforts in Central Africa in recent years. Under stronger management, with better-equipped rangers and surveillance technology, the park has managed to stop the losses to poaching and grow its elephant and giraffe populations again, in an extremely difficult setting.
Even so, it is still a remote and sensitive area. It lies close to unstable borders and in the past suffered raids by armed groups. Among them was the feared Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which spread terror across the whole cross-border region between the DR Congo, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Uganda. Safety is therefore not guaranteed and can change quickly.
For travellers, this means the northeast is a true expedition destination, not a place for conventional tourism. You need to go with specialist operators and careful logistics and, above all, up-to-date information. Before considering any visit to Garamba, check the official security advice and confirm the actual status of the park and its access routes.
Deep in the forested heart of the country, where the river is still called the Lualaba before it takes the name Congo, lies Kisangani, the country's third city and the great city of the interior. Henry Morton Stanley founded it in 1883 as Stanley Falls Station. For almost a century it was known as Stanleyville, until Mobutu renamed it Kisangani in 1966.
The city holds a prominent place in literature and history. It was the setting that inspired part of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", and in V. S. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" it is portrayed as a symbol of a country falling apart. In real life, Stanleyville/Kisangani was a centre of the rebellions that shook the Congo after independence. It suffered devastating fighting again during the Second Congo War, when the Rwandan and Ugandan armies fought each other inside the city itself.
Today Kisangani is the starting point for long river journeys. From here, boats and barges slowly travel down the Congo River for weeks to Kinshasa. It is one of the most legendary and exhausting journeys in Africa, through a country where, along many stretches, the river is still the only "road" there is.
Next to Kisangani, the river crashes over the last of the seven cataracts once known as Stanley Falls and today called Boyoma or Wagenia Falls. They are not spectacular vertical drops but a series of powerful rapids that mark the upper limit of navigation on this stretch of the river.
What makes Wagenia Falls unique is the ancestral fishing technique of the Wagenia people. For generations, these fishermen have driven huge wooden scaffolds into the riverbed and hung giant conical baskets from them, placed where the current pushes the fish into them. The system is handed down from fathers to sons and carefully regulated between families. It takes strength, balance and an intimate knowledge of the river.
This scene of men climbing log structures above the rough water to haul up their catch has become one of the most recognisable cultural images of the DR Congo. It is a living example of how the river communities have managed to make a living from one of the largest and most difficult rivers in the world.
Further downstream, the riverside city of Mbandaka sits almost exactly on the equator, in Équateur province, deep in the world of the rainforest. It was founded in the colonial era as Coquilhatville and serves as a base for heading into the immense forest basin and travelling along the most remote stretches of the river. Nearby, in Yalemba and other places, monuments mark where the equator passes.
The great treasure of this region is Salonga National Park, the largest tropical rainforest park in Africa and one of the largest in the world. It is so big that it is split into two blocks separated by dozens of kilometres of forest. A World Heritage Site since 1984, it is an almost inaccessible area with no roads that can only be reached by river or by air. That has preserved it as one of the last great refuges of untouched wildlife on the planet.
Salonga protects unique wildlife. It is one of the main refuges of the bonobo, which lives only in the DR Congo, and it is home to forest elephants, the elusive Congo peafowl and slender-snouted crocodiles. Its remoteness is both its best defence and its biggest challenge. Getting here is a real expedition into the green heart of Africa, for the most determined and well-organised travellers only.
Hardly anything that happened to Democratic Republic of the Congo happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
