Republic of the Congo
Capital: Brazzaville · Central Africa
North bank of the great river — Kongo and Teke kingdom heritage, sapeur urban style, and deep-forest cultures of the Sangha basin.
Ethnic communities
- KongoSouthern heirs of the Kongo Kingdom
- Teke (Bateke)Plateau kingdom that signed with Brazza; famed masks
- MbochiRiverine north; trading and fishing traditions
- Aka & MbendjeleForest peoples of the Sangha
More communities of Republic of the Congo
- Kongo (Bakongo) · Kingdom heirs of the south (full profile)
- Lari · Pool-region Kongo kin of Matsoua's memory
- Vili · Loango coast kingdom of ocean trade
- Yombe · Mayombe forest carvers of phemba figures
- Bembe · Southwestern hills' compact statuary masters
- Kouyou & Makoua · Cuvette river communities of the north
- Sangha peoples · Forest-river folk of the northern basin
- Babongo · Southern forest people of Bwiti links
- Duma & Nzabi · Border-forest ironworking communities
- Pomo & Njem · Sangha-border forest villages
- Brazzaville sapeurs · The urban elegance movement — heritage in style
Languages
Major languages: French, Lingala, Kituba, Kikongo, Teke
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Kongo (northern provinces)
- • Tio (Teke) Kingdom
- • Loango Kingdom
Heritage sites
- • Sangha Trinational
- • Loango coast heritage
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Republic of the Congo
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the artsb. 1966
Alain Mabanckou
Literature
Novelist of Broken Glass and Black Bazaar, and the first writer invited to hold the annual chair of artistic creation at the Collège de France.
- Politics & liberation1899–1942
André Grenard Matsoua
Anticolonial organising
Founded a mutual aid society that became a mass movement demanding French citizenship rights. Died in detention; a religious movement grew around his memory.
- Music & the arts1940–1972
Franklin Boukaka
Music
Singer whose Pont sur le Congo and Les Immortels set Pan-African politics to rumba. Killed at 32 in the aftermath of a failed coup.
Deep-dive community profiles
Aka (BaAka)
The forest hunters of the Sangha basin — whose yodelled polyphony, sung by everyone at once in overlapping parts, is inscribed by UNESCO, and whose elephant-hunting and net-hunting knowledge is disappearing with the forest.
Open deep profile →Baka
Forest hunter-gatherers of the western Congo basin — whose yelli and water-drumming polyphonies are among the world's most admired music, whose Jengi forest spirit governs the hunt, and whose land rights are among Africa's most contested.
Open deep profile →Bomitaba
Fishers and net hunters of the Likouala swamp forest in the Congo's far north, in the flooded basin that holds one of the world's great peatlands and the persistent report of an animal nobody has produced.
Open deep profile →Bongili
Forest villagers of the Sangha basin in the Congo's north-west, long-standing partners of the BaAka, and the community living inside the Sangha Trinational forest that three countries protect together.
Open deep profile →Gbaya
The savanna-forest farmers of the CAR's west — whose Karnu prophet led the great Kongo-Wara rebellion against French rule, and whose hunting societies, initiation dances and sanza thumb-pianos hold the country's largest people together.
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 →Kota
The reliquary-makers of eastern Gabon — forest people whose copper-sheathed guardian figures sat atop baskets of ancestral bone, and whose abstract faces were among the objects that redirected European art in 1907.
Open deep profile →Kuyu
The people of the Kouyou river — northern Congolese farmers and fishers whose kébé-kébé dance sends a carved head spinning above a whirling raffia column, and whose region has supplied the country's leadership for four decades.
Open deep profile →Lari
Kongo-speaking farmers of the Pool region behind Brazzaville, whose Matsouanist movement made a martyr of a clerk who died in a French prison, and whose region has been the ground of every Congolese civil conflict since 1959.
Open deep profile →Mbeti
Farmers and hunters of the Congo's north-western plateaux around Owando and the Gabonese border, carvers of small standing figures with rounded heads, and neighbours to the forest that holds the world's largest surviving western lowland gorilla population.
Open deep profile →Mbochi
The river people of the Congo's north — Alima and Likouala fishers and traders whose canoe networks reached deep into the basin, and whose political prominence since 1979 has shaped the country's north-south divide.
Open deep profile →Nzebi
The people of Gabon's southern plateaux — ironworkers and hunters whose mvet-like epics and mungala judicial poison ordeals structured a society without chiefs, and whose region holds the manganese that pays for the country.
Open deep profile →Punu
Carvers of the white-faced okuyi masks that dance on stilts above the Ngounié — serene kaolin faces with scaled foreheads and shell coiffures, among the most recognisable images of Central African art.
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 →Tsaangui (Batsangui)
Farmers and hunters of the Niari and Nyanga valleys on the Congo-Gabon border, initiates of the Bwiti religion that spread across Gabon from the Fang and the Mitsogo, and keepers of the mukisi and mungala masking traditions.
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.
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