Democratic Republic of the Congo
Capital: Kinshasa · Central Africa
A subcontinent in itself — the Kongo, Luba, Lunda and Kuba kingdoms, over 200 ethnic groups, and the birthplace of Congolese rumba.
Ethnic communities
- KongoAtlantic kingdom with 600 years of recorded history
- LubaSavanna empire; memory boards (lukasa) and sacred kingship
- KubaRaffia-textile artistry and elaborate royal masquerade
- MongoGreat equatorial forest lineage societies
- MbutiIturi forest people; molimo music traditions
More communities of Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Lunda · Mwant Yav's empire spanning three borders
- Songye · Power-figure carvers of the eastern savanna
- Tetela & Lulua · Kasai's farming and riverine nations
- Chokwe · Hunter-carvers who humbled empires
- Pende & Yaka · Kwango mask civilizations of initiation
- Lega · Bwami society's ivory-and-wisdom culture
- Nande · Kivu highland traders and farmers
- Azande & Mangbetu · Northern courts of harps and curved knives
- Mbuti (Bambuti) · Ituri forest's molimo singers
- Ngbandi & Ngbaka · Ubangi river peoples of the northwest
- Hemba & Boyo · Ancestor-portrait sculptors of the east
- Salampasu & Lwalwa · Kasai border mask peoples
- Bemba-linked Katangans · Copperbelt communities of the southeast
- Banyamulenge · High-plateau herders of Rwandan speech
Languages
Major languages: French, Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo, Tshiluba
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu); Nilo-Saharan; Ubangian
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Kongo
- • Luba Empire
- • Lunda Empire
- • Kuba Kingdom
- • Msiri's Yeke Kingdom
Heritage sites
- • Virunga
- • Salonga
- • Garamba
- • Okapi Reserve (natural WHS)
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Democratic Republic of the Congo
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activismb. 1955
Denis Mukwege
Surgery and human rights
Gynaecologist who has treated tens of thousands of survivors of wartime sexual violence at Panzi Hospital. Nobel Peace Prize, 2018.
- Sport1966–2024
Dikembe Mutombo
Basketball
Four-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year whose finger wag was a trademark, and who built and funded a major hospital in Kinshasa.
- Music & the arts1938–1989
Franco Luambo Makiadi
Rumba
The Sorcerer of the Guitar, whose TPOK Jazz defined Congolese rumba and whose lyrics moved between praise and quiet dissent.
- Music & the arts1949–2016
Papa Wemba
Soukous and sape
King of rumba rock and figurehead of la sape, the Congolese dandy movement that turned dress into a statement of dignity.
- Politics & liberation1925–1961
Patrice Lumumba
Independence
First prime minister of an independent Congo. His insistence on real economic sovereignty made him enemies at home and abroad; he was assassinated within months of taking office.
Deep-dive community profiles
Ababua (Boa)
Forest farmers of the Uele basin whose war masks — flat, white-and-black, with enormous projecting ears — are among the most immediately recognisable objects in Congolese art, and whose country lay directly under the Free State's rubber regime.
Open deep profile →Abagogwe
The cattle-keeping communities of Rwanda's north-western volcanoes — highland Tutsi herders of the Gishwati and Virunga slopes who were among the first killed in 1994 and who have never been counted separately since.
Open deep profile →Alur
Luo-speaking rainmakers of the Albert Nile escarpment, whose chiefs were sought out by their non-Luo neighbours to rule over them — a pattern of voluntary incorporation that gave political anthropology one of its foundational case studies.
Open deep profile →Azande
The 'great eaters of the forest edge' — a conquering Avongara-led nation spanning three borders, whose oracle-governed courts, throwing knives and Ture trickster cycles made them the classic study of an African philosophy of causation.
Open deep profile →Baamba (Bwamba)
Forest farmers of the Semliki valley at the Rwenzori's northern foot, Central Sudanic in language among Bantu neighbours, who fought alongside the Bakonzo in the Rwenzururu movement for a kingdom of their own and got one, briefly and contentiously, in 2014.
Open deep profile →Bakonzo
The people of the Mountains of the Moon — farmers of the Rwenzori's steep slopes whose god lives on the snow peaks, who fought a sixty-year campaign for their own kingdom, and whose glaciers are disappearing within a generation.
Open deep profile →Banyamulenge
Kinyarwanda-speaking cattle herders of the high plateau above Uvira, whose Congolese citizenship has been granted, withdrawn and granted again, and whose contested belonging has been at the centre of three decades of war in the eastern Congo.
Open deep profile →Banyarwanda
The people of Rwanda — one language, one religion, one culture across Hutu, Tutsi and Twa, whose royal court produced the intricate imigongo art and the towering intore dance, and whose 1994 genocide and its aftermath reshaped the continent's conscience.
Open deep profile →Bashi (Shi)
Farmers and cattle keepers of the hills above Lake Kivu, organised in a set of kingdoms whose mwami still command real deference, on some of the most densely populated and most fought-over ground in Africa.
Open deep profile →Basongora
Long-horned cattle herders of the Rwenzori plains, whose grazing became Queen Elizabeth National Park, who were pushed into Congo and came back in 2006 to find no room, and who keep the Ankole-type Sanga herds that are now a conservation concern in their own right.
Open deep profile →Bemba
The crocodile-clan kingdom of Zambia's northern plateau — whose paramount Chitimukulu still reigns, whose chisungu girls' initiation is a masterwork of ritual pedagogy, and whose miners' migrations made Bemba the lingua franca of the Copperbelt.
Open deep profile →Bembe (Babembe)
Farmers and hunters of the Itombwe forests above Lake Tanganyika, carvers of the small ancestor figures that Western collectors call Bembe, and the community from which the Simba rebellion of 1964 drew much of its strength.
Open deep profile →Bira (Babira)
Farmers of the Ituri rainforest's southern edge, long-standing partners of the Mbuti hunter-gatherers in an exchange relationship of meat for cassava that anthropology has studied for a century, and neighbours to the okapi's only home.
Open deep profile →Chokwe
The master carvers and hunters of the Angolan plateau — whose Chihongo and Pwo masks, sand-drawn sona mathematics and the epic of Chibinda Ilunga made a once-small hunting people the great art-civilization of three borders.
Open deep profile →Havu
Fishers, farmers and cattle keepers of Idjwi island and the Kivu shore, whose island kingdom is the largest in Lake Kivu, and whose community holds the highest recorded prevalence of albinism in Africa.
Open deep profile →Hema (Bahema)
Cattle keepers of the Ituri plateau, related in language and herding tradition to the Hima of Uganda, whose colonial preferment and land titles made them prosperous and then made them targets in the Ituri wars.
Open deep profile →Hemba
People of the right bank of the Lualaba in northern Katanga whose ancestor figures — serene, closed-eyed, precisely carved portraits of named forebears — are among the most admired sculptures in African art, and were unattributed to them until the 1970s.
Open deep profile →Imbo plain communities
The people of the lakeshore strip — fishers, palm-oil growers and traders on the hot plain between the Burundian hills and Lake Tanganyika, whose Swahili-speaking port quarter made Bujumbura a different place from the country behind it.
Open deep profile →Kakwa
Eastern Nilotic farmers of the tri-border country where Uganda, South Sudan and the DR Congo meet, dispersed across three states, associated in outside memory with Idi Amin and in their own with a rain-chief tradition and with Yumbe's long road back from insurgency.
Open deep profile →Kaliko
Central Sudanic farmers of the Congo-Nile watershed at the South Sudan-DR Congo border, close kin of the Lugbara and Avukaya, whose small population has been displaced by every war in either country for seventy years.
Open deep profile →Kaonde
The people of Zambia's north-west — Luba-descended farmers and hunters whose territory holds the copper of Solwezi and Kansanshi, and whose chiefs still perform the Ntongo and Juba ceremonies over ground now valued for what is under it.
Open deep profile →Kongo (Bakongo)
Builders of the Kingdom of Kongo — a centralized Atlantic-African state with six centuries of recorded history, its own Christianity, minkisi power objects and a cosmology of the crossroads that profoundly shaped African-American religion and art.
Open deep profile →Kuba
The kingdom of the nyim in the Kasai forest — a confederation famed for the world's most elaborate raffia textiles (the 'Kasai velvets'), the Bushoong royal masks, wooden ndop king-portraits and a court that dazzled every visitor with art.
Open deep profile →Lamba
Matrilineal farmers and smiths of the Copperbelt, on whose land the mines were sunk and the towns built, and who watched a copper economy grow around them without becoming part of it.
Open deep profile →Lega (Rega)
Forest people of the Maniema and Kivu interior whose bwami association graded its members through a lifetime of initiations, each stage marked by ivory and wooden sculptures that became among the most sought-after and most looted objects in African art.
Open deep profile →Lendu (Bale)
Central Sudanic farmers of the Ituri plateau west of Lake Albert, whose relationship with their Hema neighbours — reworked into a rigid hierarchy by Belgian administration — became the axis of a conflict that killed tens of thousands and produced the International Criminal Court's first convictions.
Open deep profile →Lokele
River traders and fishers of the Congo above and below Kisangani, whose long canoes ran the trade of the upper river, and whose drum language John Carrington studied so closely that he could hold conversations in it.
Open deep profile →Luba
The savanna empire of the Congo's heart — whose sacred kings traced descent from the hunter Kalala Ilunga, whose lukasa memory boards encode history in beads, and whose ideal of refined, remembered power shaped a whole region's political culture.
Open deep profile →Lugbara
The West Nile people of the Uganda–Congo border — Sudanic-speaking farmers whose lineage elders wield the power of the ancestral 'ghost invocation', and whose classic ethnography made their moral world famous in anthropology.
Open deep profile →Lulua (Bena Lulua)
People of the Lulua river in Kasai, carvers of figures covered in raised scarification so fine that collectors mistook it for lace, and whose nineteenth-century hemp-smoking reform movement tried to abolish war, and whose 1959 conflict with Luba neighbours foreshadowed the Congo's independence crisis.
Open deep profile →Lunda
The empire of the Mwant Yav — heirs of Ruwej and Chibinda Ilunga's marriage whose 'perpetual kinship' statecraft ruled a three-nation web of tributaries, and whose Mutomboko festival still crowns the eastern kingdom's year.
Open deep profile →Luvale (Lwena)
The people of the upper Zambezi headwaters — matrilineal cultivators and fishers whose makishi masqueraders emerge from the boys' initiation camps, a tradition inscribed by UNESCO and shared across three countries.
Open deep profile →Mangbetu
The northeastern Congo kingdom famed for elongated heads (lipombo), the harp with a carved human head, refined court art and the polygynous palaces that awed 19th-century travellers — an aristocracy of artists in the Uele forest.
Open deep profile →Mbala
Farmers and carvers of the Kwilu between the Kwango and the Kasai, once tributary to the Kongo kingdom, whose maternity figures and headrests are staples of Central African art collections, and whose province produced the Kwilu rebellion of 1963.
Open deep profile →Mbuti
The people of the Ituri forest — among the world's oldest continuous cultures, whose molimo songs converse with the forest itself, whose net-hunts are choreographies of trust, and whose polyphonies are counted among humanity's musical summits.
Open deep profile →Mongo
The great forest people of the Congo basin's heart — a vast family of Nkundo, Ekonda, Ntomba and others whose Lianja epic is one of Africa's longest oral works, and whose equatorial villages line the rivers of the cuvette.
Open deep profile →Nande (Yira)
Farmers and traders of the Rwenzori's western slopes and the Beni-Butembo corridor, who built one of Africa's most successful indigenous commercial networks out of a war zone, and whose territory has been the epicentre of the ADF massacres and of the 2018 Ebola outbreak.
Open deep profile →Ngbaka
Farmers of the Ubangi hinterland whose gaza initiation took boys into the forest for months, whose harp-zithers and slit drums furnished a distinctive music, and whose villages sit across a border that Central African conflict repeatedly pushes people over.
Open deep profile →Ngbandi
River people of the Ubangi whose speech is the base of Lingala's northern cousin Sango, the national language of the Central African Republic, and whose community produced Mobutu Sese Seko and was rewarded and then ruined by that fact.
Open deep profile →Ngombe
River and forest people of the Mongala and middle Congo, whose great slit drums carried messages across the forest at speeds the telegraph could not match, and whose men the Free State recruited into the force that policed the rubber regime.
Open deep profile →Ntomba
Fishers and forest farmers of Lake Mai-Ndombe and the Tumba swamps, whose lake was renamed for the black water it holds, and whose region became the site of the world's largest forest-carbon project and of the 1990s Congo's most notorious rubber-era memory.
Open deep profile →Nzakara
A small kingdom of the Ubangi savanna whose court harpists composed a repertoire of astonishing complexity, sung in a language now spoken by very few, and recorded in the 1960s by an ethnomusicologist who realised she was hearing the last of it.
Open deep profile →Pende
The mask-carvers of the Kwilu and Kasai — whose mbuya village masks satirise every human type, whose chiefly minganji ancestors dance in raffia, and whose 1931 revolt against the rubber and tax regime shook the Belgian Congo.
Open deep profile →Salampasu
Forest and savannah people of the Kasai-Angola border whose warrior societies graded their members by heads taken, whose copper-sheathed and raffia-bearded masks are among the most fearsome objects in African art, and who held off the Lunda empire for two centuries.
Open deep profile →Songye
The power-figure carvers of the Lomami — whose nkisi statues bristling with horn, nails and copper are among Africa's most formidable objects, and whose kifwebe striated masks belong to a society that could police a chief.
Open deep profile →Tabwa
People of the Marungu highlands and the south-western shore of Lake Tanganyika, whose scarification and sculpture worked a visual language of balanced opposites, and whose nineteenth century was defined by the ivory trade and the warlord Nsama.
Open deep profile →Teke (Bateke)
The plateau kingdom of the Makoko — masters of the Congo River's great markets whose treaty with Brazza founded Brazzaville, whose butti power-figures guard lineages, and whose round tsaayi masks became icons of modern art.
Open deep profile →Tetela (Atetela)
Forest and savannah people of Sankuru whose name has run through Congolese history out of all proportion to their numbers: Ngongo Leteta's nineteenth-century warlordism, the 1895 Luluabourg mutinies, and Patrice Lumumba.
Open deep profile →Vili
The people of Loango — a coastal kingdom that traded ivory, copper and captives with Europe for three centuries from a capital of avenues and palaces, and whose carved ivory tusks recorded the trade in spiral relief.
Open deep profile →Yaka
The people of the Kwango — whose upturned-nose kholuka masks close the n-khanda initiation with satire and acrobatics, whose slit-drums and healing statuettes are famous, and whose kings traced power to the Lunda empire.
Open deep profile →Yakoma
The river people of the Ubangi — canoe traders and fishers whose language became the basis of Sango, the Central African Republic's national tongue, spoken by nearly everyone in the country.
Open deep profile →