Kinshasa & the West

The lower Congo was the heart of the Kingdom of Kongo, which by the late 15th century ruled both banks of the river's estuary from its capital, Mbanza Kongo, in present-day Angola. Portuguese ships reached the river mouth in 1483, and Kongo's kings adopted Christianity, but the Atlantic slave trade drained the region of people for more than three centuries, with Boma serving as a trading post on the river.

Henry Morton Stanley's expeditions for King Leopold II opened the route inland in the late 1870s and 1880s, and in 1881 he founded a station named Léopoldville at the foot of the rapids on Malebo Pool. Boma became the capital of the Congo Free State, and the railway from Matadi to Léopoldville, built through the Crystal Mountains at a heavy cost in workers' lives and opened in 1898, carried out the rubber and ivory of the interior. The capital moved to Léopoldville in the 1920s. In 1921 the preacher Simon Kimbangu drew crowds at Nkamba before Belgian authorities imprisoned him for life; his church later became one of Africa's largest independent churches.

Riots in Léopoldville in January 1959 hastened independence. In 1964 Pierre Mulele led a rebellion in Kwilu against the central government. Under Mobutu the city, renamed Kinshasa in 1966, grew enormously while the state that ran it decayed, and looting by unpaid soldiers in 1991 and 1993 wrecked much of its economy. The city remains the seat of power, and its elections, protests and street politics shape the whole country.

Kinshasa is a Lingala-speaking city, while Kongo Central is Kikongo country, proud of its descent from the old kingdom, and the Kwilu and Kwango savannas are home to the Yaka, Pende, Mbala and many other peoples. French remains the language of offices and schools.

The capital is the birthplace of Congolese rumba, the guitar-led dance music of Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau, later reworked as soukous and ndombolo by Papa Wemba, Koffi Olomide and Werrason. Bars and open-air venues keep it live every weekend. Kinshasa's sapeurs — members of La Sape, who treat designer clothes as a creed — its painters, and its sculptors trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts give the city an outsized artistic reputation. The Pende of Kwilu are known for carved masks used in masquerades.

Religion is overwhelmingly Christian. Catholic and Protestant churches, Pentecostal revival churches in every street and the Kimbanguist church, whose holy town of Nkamba lies in Kongo Central, all draw large congregations. Respect for elders, elaborate greetings and long, well-attended funerals mark social life.

Kinshasa has well over ten million people, making it one of the largest cities in Africa, and it keeps spreading into the surrounding hills. Most residents work in the informal economy — trading, driving, hawking, repairing — and the administrative district of Gombe, with its ministries, embassies and towers, is a world apart from the sprawling cités. Traffic, flooding in the rains, power cuts and water shortages shape the day.

Matadi, with a few hundred thousand people, lives from its port, the country's main gateway for imports, and the large hydroelectric dams at Inga stand on the lower river in the same province. Boma is a smaller port, and Muanda is the base for the country's offshore oil terminal. Kikwit, the main city of Kwilu and scene of an Ebola outbreak in 1995, is a trading hub for the farming districts that feed Kinshasa with cassava, maize and charcoal.

The rhythm in the capital is early: long commutes by crowded minibus from the edge of the city, markets opening at dawn, business wrapped up before evening traffic, and music in the bars late into the night. Rising prices, the weakness of the franc and the cost of school fees are constant topics of conversation.

Kinshasa's cooking gathers the country's staples: pondu, cassava leaves pounded and stewed with palm oil, onion and sometimes fish; fufu, a stiff dough of cassava or maize flour; and chikwangue, or kwanga, fermented cassava paste wrapped in leaves and steamed into firm loaves, a speciality of the Kongo peoples. Moambe chicken in palm-fruit sauce is the celebration dish.

River fish are grilled over charcoal or cooked in leaf parcels as liboke, and makayabu, salted fish, is soaked and stewed with vegetables. Mbinzo, fried or stewed caterpillars, are sold in season, and ntaba, grilled goat, is the classic bar snack with a cold Primus beer. Simple roadside eateries serve plates of rice, beans, fish and pondu at low prices.

In the countryside of Kongo Central, palm wine is tapped from oil palms, while lotoko, a strong home-distilled spirit made from maize or cassava, circulates informally. Fruit is abundant — mangoes, safou (a purple fruit eaten cooked), avocados and pineapples fill the markets in season.

Kinshasa's sights are its riverfront along the Congo River, where the view crosses Malebo Pool to Brazzaville; the Boulevard du 30 Juin; the Académie des Beaux-Arts; the Limete interchange tower and its statue of Lumumba; the stadium where Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fought the "Rumble in the Jungle" in 1974; and the Lola ya Bonobo sanctuary on the city's southern edge. Below the city the river pours through the Livingstone Falls, a long series of rapids.

In Kongo Central, the Zongo falls on the Inkisi river make a popular day trip, and the road south-west passes through green, hilly country to the port of Matadi, built on rock above the river, where the Matadi Bridge spans the gorge. Further downstream Boma keeps colonial buildings from its time as capital, and beyond it the Muanda coast has beaches, the Mangroves Marine Park and the mouth of the Congo at Banana, where the river's brown water stains the Atlantic.

North and east of Kinshasa lies rarely visited country: the Kwango and Kwilu rivers running north through savanna and gallery forest to join the Kasai, and in Mai-Ndombe the large, dark-water Lake Mai-Ndombe, known in colonial times as Lake Leopold II, surrounded by swamp forest and fishing villages.