Democratic Republic of the Congo

A country the size of western Europe that has never been governed as one, and whose mineral wealth has been a curse with unusual consistency. It inherited the borders of Leopold's Free State and the Belgian Congo, including a territory with no shared language, almost no roads connecting its regions, and fewer than twenty university graduates at independence in June 1960. Collapse was immediate: the army mutinied within a week, mineral-rich Katanga seceded with Belgian and corporate backing, and Patrice Lumumba, the elected prime minister, was deposed and murdered in January 1961 with Belgian and American involvement now documented. Mobutu took power in 1965 and held it for thirty-two years, renaming the country Zaire, nationalising foreign holdings and running a kleptocracy while receiving Western support as a Cold War asset. His fall in 1997 was followed by the Second Congo War, which drew in nine countries and dozens of armed groups and produced the highest death toll of any conflict since 1945, mostly from disease and hunger. Fighting in the eastern provinces has never fully stopped. The country holds most of the world's cobalt, essential to batteries, mined partly by hand including by children. Kinshasa is now among the largest cities on earth. Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, faces Brazzaville across the river, the closest pair of capitals in the world. The country covers over two million square kilometres. The Congo is the deepest river on earth. Over two hundred languages are spoken, with Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo and Tshiluba as national ones. The rainforest is the second largest after the Amazon.

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