Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Patrice Lumumba / WIKIMEDIA; Léopold II / WIKIMEDIA; Tank / Kevin Dooley, FLICKR.
THE MINISTRY OF MEMORIES
From Kongo Kings to Cross-Congo Conflicts
Photo Illustration by Ezinne Osueke / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: Patrice Lumumba / WIKIMEDIA; Léopold II / WIKIMEDIA; Tank / Kevin Dooley, FLICKR.
THE MINISTRY OF MEMORIES
From Kongo Kings to Cross-Congo Conflicts
A glance at a map showing two adjacent nations named Congo might suggest a familiar story—one of division, of a country split by the twists and turns of history: much like North and South Korea or East and West Germany. But in this case, such assumptions would be misleading.
The twin Congos—the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Republic of the Congo (RoC)—owe their names not to a modern political fracture but to the legacy of a once-mighty kingdom. The Kongo Kingdom, a powerful realm that flourished from the 14th to 19th centuries, stretched across what is now southwestern Gabon, northwestern Angola and parts of present-day RoC/Congo-Brazzaville and DRC/Congo-Kinshasa.
Like Ghana, which reclaimed the name of an ancient Sahelian empire, the Congos carry a moniker harking back to this distant era. At its height, the Kongo Kingdom stood as a dominant force in Central Africa. When Portuguese explorers first arrived in the late 15th century, they encountered a sophisticated monarchy ruled by a sovereign known as the Manikongo. This empire was not isolated: it had neighbours and vassals. North of the Pool Malebo, a vast lake-like expanse along the Congo River, lay the Tio Kingdom, also called the Teke Kingdom; while to the south, beyond the Loango region, stretched the lands of the Fang. The Ovambo people lived further south in modern Angola. To the east, the Baluba Kingdom and Swahili-Arab sultanates (Kilwa Sultanate, Sultanate of Utetera, Sultanate of Zanzibar) thrived, deeply entwined in the coastal slave trade.
Western historians date the Kongo Kingdom’s reign from approximately 1390 to 1914. But its decline was long and painful. The kingdom lost key vassal states—first Loango and then Soyo—before eventually shrinking to a remnant of its former self. By the time the colonial era reshaped Africa, the kingdom was reduced to its final stronghold: the sacred city of M’banza Kongo in present-day Angola.
The diplomatic history between the Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is rooted in a 600-year tapestry of shifting regal alliances, colonial fractures and Cold War intrigues. Their shared history—punctuated by ivory, iron and ideological battles—illuminates how internal power struggles and external exploitation have shaped one of Central Africa’s most volatile borders.
THE KONGO KINGDOM: A PAN-CENTRAL AFRICAN POWER
From the 14th to 17th centuries, the Kongo Kingdom dominated territory spanning modern-day Gabon, RoC, DRC and Angola. Its capital, M’banza Kongo, thrived as a hub of ironworking and regional trade, with a bureaucracy rivalling European courts in sophistication. King Afonso I (1509–1543), the sixth Manikongo (or ruler), baptized by Portuguese missionaries, transformed the realm into a Catholic monarchy, exchanging copper and palm cloth for firearms. But this alliance collapsed as Portuguese slave raids intensified.
Dutch traders exploited this rift. In 1641, King Garcia II Nkanga a Lukeni a Nzenze a Ntumba allied with Dutch admiral Piet Heyn to besiege Portuguese Luanda. Though short-lived, this partnership marked Kongo’s first attempt to counterbalance European powers.
While Portugal and the Netherlands vied for Atlantic dominance, Oman’s Sultan Said bin Sultan carved an Indian Ocean slave empire from Zanzibar (1828–1856). His Maria Theresa dollar currency financed clove plantations, fuelled by 50,000 annual slave exports to Arabia. By the 1880s, Zanzibari warlord Tippu Tip extended this network into eastern DRC, establishing ivory and slave-trading posts as far as Kasongo in the DRC’s Maniema province. His forces later clashed with Belgian King Leopold II’s Congo Free State in the 1892–1894 Congo-Arab War, a conflict that killed thousands and cemented European dominance over today’s DRC.
These successive yet unsuccessful alliances speak to Kongo’s diplomatic craving for an ally against its local rival.
COLONIAL CARVE-UP: BERLIN’S BARBAROUS DIVIDERS
The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference, covering the free navigation of the Congo River, formalized Africa’s dissection. In central Africa, Belgium claimed the Congo Free State; France seized the northern riverbanks as French Congo, while Germany grabbed Cameroon. The acts of the conference sealed the neutrality of the Congo River basin and laid the groundwork for the scramble for Africa. Portugal’s ambitions for a ‘Pink Map’ linking Angola and Mozambique via Zambia collapsed. Still, the legacy of the Berlin Conference, now 140 years ago, persisted.
Under the equatorial sun of 1924, thousands of Congolese labourers hacked through the Mayombe Forest, their bodies buckling under the weight of French demands. The Congo-Ocean Railway—a 318-mile artery linking Brazzaville to the Atlantic—would claim more lives than battles: an estimated 20,000 dead from 1921 to 1934 from exhaustion, disease and abuse. This ‘red ribbon of steel,’ as colonizers hailed it, epitomized France’s 80-year rule in central Africa. Reports of the atrocities reached Paris, sparking international outrage. French writers like André Gide and Albert Londres exposed the brutality, calling it a stain on the nation’s conscience. Yet, the project continued and when the railway was finally completed in 1934. In fact, there is no Michelin or modern automobile civilization without the massacre of millions in the Congo Basin rubber plantation. At the turn of the 20th century, the demand for rubber skyrocketed. French officials, eager to turn a profit, handed over nearly half of the colony’s land to 30 companies with licenses to strip rubber, ivory and timber through forced labour, allowing them to operate with near-total impunity. These firms—among them the Société du Haut-Ogooué and Compagnie Française du Haut Congo—imposed brutal quotas on the local population.
Entire villages were forced into labour and their inhabitants were beaten or killed if they failed to meet their rubber collection targets. Whips, chains and amputations—methods famously associated with Leopold’s Congo ‘Free State’—were not absent on the French side of the river.
Yet, for all the suffering, the system was a financial failure. Many companies went bankrupt due to mismanagement and by 1910, Paris was forced to consolidate its central African colonies into a single federation: French Equatorial Africa, headquartered in Brazzaville.
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TREATIES, RESISTANCE AND THE SHADOW OF KONGO
In 1880, when French colonizer of Italian descent, Savorgnan de Brazza, met King Makoko Iloo of the Téké Kingdom, he presented him with a treaty that promised military protection in exchange for sovereignty. Makoko, who likely saw the agreement as a diplomatic manoeuvre against his local southern rival of the fading Kongo Kingdom rather than an outright surrender, sealed the deal. Makoko subsequently sent Savorgnan de Brazza to the southern border of his kingdom—nkuna (meaning ‘there’ in Lingala), near the river on the Pool Malebo, to create an outpost. Sergeant Malamine Camara, of Senegalese origin, founded Brazzaville at the border of the Tio Kingdom and the dying Kongo empire. France recognized the treaty and declared its authority over the northern bank of the Congo River. Makoko’s strategy echoes recent research published in the American Political Science Review, highlighting the significance of African agency and local realities in shaping colonial divisions and challenging the traditional focus on European arbitrary imposition.
Around 1904, Belgium’s Leopold II drew global outrage for severing the hands of local people. By 1908, Leopold’s barbarities had killed 10 million locals, birthing the Belgian Congo. The king had to give up his personal property of the Congo Free State to the Belgian State. As western historiography noted, in 1914, Kongo nobles revolted against forced labour and Portuguese taxation, prompting Portugal to abolish the monarchy entirely. The 1914 revolt marked Kongo’s formal end as a political entity. Portugal absorbed its territories into Angola, erasing centuries of sovereignty. Though the title ‘King of Kongo’ continued ceremonially until 1975, it held no power.
By comparison, whereas Japanese warlords were constrained by Tokugawa Ieyasu, the last Shogun of premodern Japan, to unite and save the island from colonization, the Kongo king and their vassals played against each other through lines of ethnic division using the West as allies in an unsuccessful attempt to subjugate and dominate the Congo Basin. The former vassal, like the Tio Kingdom’s alliance with the French, birthed what would become Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon. By contrast, Belgium’s victory against the Arab-Swahili birthed the Congo-Leopoldville by consolidating in 1894 the personal property of King Leopold. The last remnant of the Kongo kingdom would become, in 1891, Angola–under Portuguese sovereignty until fifty years ago, in 1975.
THE PRIESTS, THE GENERAL AND THE INDEPENDENCE CHA CHA
Independence arrived on 15 August 1960 for Congo-Brazzaville. President Fulbert Youlou, a defrocked priest from the Bakongo ethnic group, chose to move the capital from Pointe-Noire, in the former Loango territory, to Brazzaville, closer to the heart of the former Kongo empire. In Leopoldville, independence was proclaimed on 30 June 1960. Joseph Kasavubu, also a former seminarian from the Bakongo ethnic group, became the first president of the DRC. Kasavubu’s political career began in 1954 when he transformed the cultural organization, Alliance des Bakongo, into a vehicle for Congolese self-determination. Advocating federalism to protect Bakongo interests, he clashed with Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba from the Ngala ethnic group. Youlou in Congo-Brazzaville was not at first a partisan of the independence movement. Under pressure from pan-African movements and the Algerian War, France offered its colonies a referendum on joining the French Community in 1958. The Congo voted 99 per cent in favour, becoming the Autonomous Republic of the Congo with Youlou as president within the French community. This semi-independent status allowed Brazzaville to control domestic affairs while France retained authority over defence, currency and foreign policy. Youlou had consolidated his power by aligning with conservative French interests and suppressing labour unions. His administration faced strikes and ethnic tensions, particularly with the Ngala ethnic group and colonial-imported Western African people, but maintained close ties to Paris.
The 1959 Brazzaville Massacre was a turning point in the Republic of Congo’s turbulent transition to independence, exposing the volatile mix of ethnic divisions and party-political power struggles. The violence erupted amid a deepening rivalry between Youlou, leader of the Union démocratique de défense des intérêts africains and Jacques Opangault, head of the opposition Mouvement Socialiste Africain. Youlou’s unilateral declaration of the Republic of Congo in November 1958, without the participation of Opangault’s coalition, triggered mounting tensions between their respective ethnic bases: the Lari-Bakongo, who supported Youlou and the Mbochi, aligned with Opangault. Though framed as ethnic violence, the massacre was fundamentally rooted in political manoeuvring. The French colonial administration intervened on 19–20 February 1960, deploying security forces to restore order but the crackdown only reinforced Youlou’s grip on power. Using the chaos to his advantage, he arrested Opangault and other political rivals, branding them as instigators of the violence. This strategic consolidation of power positioned Youlou as the dominant force in Congolese politics, clearing his path to the presidency upon independence in August 1960.
By August 1960, in the newly born Democratic Republic of the Congo, similar ethnic tensions between Kasavubu and Patrice Lumumba (born with the name Élias Okit’Asombo from the Tetela tribe) emerged and the relationship between the two leaders deteriorated rapidly. Kasavubu grew increasingly concerned by Lumumba’s assertive leadership style and his handling of the Katanga crisis. The situation reached the breaking point when Lumumba sought Soviet assistance to address the Katanga secession, alarming both Kasavubu and the West. This move troubled Kasavubu in particular, who preferred negotiation with Katanga’s leader, Moïse Tshombe.
How could the former master be put on the same level as the former vassal? Among the Kongo ethnic group, centuries of western influence—especially through Christianity and colonization—fostered a sense of superiority over other groups, the national unity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo meant marginalizing the Kongo minority and drowning it into a nation formed by former vassals and rivals like the Baluba or the Swahili. In Congo-Brazzaville, national unity centralized in Brazzaville was only acceptable so long as a Kongo leader ruled. The political basis of the northern leader and socialist-leaning Opangault was composed of the Ngala and the former western African laptots, who were colonial auxiliaries; therefore, they were not Congolese as they were not of Kongo descent.
In Congo-Brazzaville, Pascal Lissouba, the prime minister from 1963 to 1966, theorized that ethnic tribal allegiances functioned as social classes in postcolonial Africa, obstructing socialist progress. He argued that impoverished individuals remained loyal to the wealthy elites of their ethnic group rather than uniting with economically similar peers across tribes. This ‘tribe-class’ dynamic perpetuated patronage networks, as seen in the loyalty of Bakongo labourers to Bakongo elites over Mbochi labourers. Lissouba claimed this tribal solidarity, rooted in colonial divide-and-rule policies, undermined class consciousness and made the Marxist class struggle impossible. Building on this theory, Ambroise Noumazalaye (1933–2007), a Congolese Marxist-Leninist politician who also served as prime minister of Congo-Brazzaville (1966–1968) and played a key role in the authoritarian Congolese Labour Party (Parti Congolais du Travail; PCT), formulated the controversial axiom of the impossibility of democracy in the Republic of the Congo, arguing that entrenched ethnic divisions—legacies of French colonial ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics—rendered democracy unworkable. Noumazalaye asserted that voters prioritized tribal loyalty over policy, reducing elections to ethnic power struggles rather than mechanisms for civic representation. This belief justified the PCT’s one-party rule (1969–1991), which centralized power under northern elites like Denis Sassou Nguesso, claiming to suppress tribal chaos.
In the DRC, renamed Zaire in 1971 until 1997 by Joseph Désiré Mobutu, a self-made general from the Ngala ethnic group, long before the neo pan-Africanist fuelled a so-called African ‘authenticité’ policy. Mobutu enforced authenticité to erase colonial legacies and forge a unified African identity. This campaign rebranded the nation culturally and politically: renaming the country, Africanizing cities (e.g., Léopoldville became Kinshasa) and mandating traditional attire like the abacost tunic. Mobutu centralized power under his sole party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, justifying the suppression of opposition by framing ethnicity and regionalism as inherently divisive threats to national unity.
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COLD WAR CHESS: MARXIST BRAZZAVILLE VS MOBUTU’S ZAIRE
Notably, Congo-Brazzaville’s Youlou supported his ethnic cousin Kasavubu in the DRC against Lumumba. Youlou even pursued the dream of resurrecting the Kongo Dia Ntotela (meaning the original Kongo of our ancestors in Kikongo) in a sort of federation. When Youlou was ousted in 1963, Congo-Brazzaville became a Marxist rear base for DRC rebels against Kasavubu and Mobutu. The People’s Republic of the Congo (1968 until 1992) supported the Simba Rebellion led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, which briefly controlled eastern DRC in 1964. Pierre Mulele, the rebellion’s Maoist strategist, used Brazzaville as a logistics hub before Mobutu, with President Marien Ngouabi’s approval, lured him to Kinshasa in 1968 with false amnesty, resulting in Mulele’s public mutilation and execution.
Zaire also sheltered dissidents from the People’s Republic of the Congo (today’s Congo-Brazzaville) like Ange Diawara and Bernard Kolélas. Diawara (1941–1973), a Marxist military officer and founding member of Congo-Brazzaville’s ruling PCT. Diawara was born to a Bakongo mother and a Congolese father with Malian origins. After orchestrating a failed 1972 coup (through the M22 Movement) against President Marien Ngouabi’s regime, Diawara fled to establish a guerrilla base in the Pool region. Following a year-long evasion, he was captured in Kinshasa, Zaire (now DR Congo) in 1973 and controversially extradited to Brazzaville. His return—reportedly negotiated between Zairian authorities and Ngouabi’s government—ended in a public execution alongside 13 comrades, their bodies displayed at Brazzaville’s Revolution Stadium—now Felix Eboué Stadium.
SAME NAME, TWO XENOPHOBIC NATIONALISMS
The diplomatic relationship between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, then Congo-Kinshasa) and the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville) has been marked by cycles of hostility and uneasy détente since former DRC president Kabila’s rise to power in 1997. Kabila’s consolidation of authority in Kinshasa coincided with renewed regional instability, including his decision to deploy troops to Brazzaville in October 1997 under the pretext of investigating cross-border shelling. This intervention, which included artillery bombardments targeting areas under the control of then-President Pascal Lissouba’s rivals, exacerbated tensions with Congo-Brazzaville’s eventual leader, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. Kabila accused Sassou of supporting Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC), a rebel group that challenged Kinshasa’s authority during the Second Congo War. By 2001, Kabila had expelled Congolese diplomats, framing Brazzaville as a destabilizing actor. However, the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila that year temporarily eased relations as successor Joseph Kabila had to seek regional dialogue.
The resurgence of the M23 rebel group in 2023 has again reignited bilateral frictions. As Rwandan-backed M23 forces captured Goma and Bukavu in January and February 2025, respectively, DRC’s President Félix Tshisekedi accused Congo-Brazzaville of permitting Rwandan arms shipments through the Pool Department, a claim bolstered by UN reports of illicit weapons transiting the region. Sassou-Nguesso’s government denied involvement but faced scrutiny after signing a 2024 natural gas agreement with Rwanda, which Kinshasa condemned as a ‘resource alliance’ undermining the DRC’s sovereignty. These tensions echoed historical patterns: In 1997, Kabila had similarly alleged that Sassou’s militiamen facilitated cross-border attacks, culminating in retaliatory airstrikes on Brazzaville. The cyclical nature of these disputes underscores their roots in competition over regional influence, resource access and the legacy of proxy conflicts involving multiple armed groups.
Under Mobutu’s rule (1965–1997), Zaire (now the DRC) systematically targeted foreign nationals, including citizens of neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville, through xenophobic policies and mass expulsions. In November 1971, Mobutu ordered the expulsion of non-Zairian Africans, framing foreigners as economic and political threats, while state media vilified them as ‘imperialist oppressors.’ These campaigns intensified during various crises, such as the 1967 mercenary rebellion, when curfews and public suspicion were weaponized against outsiders. After Mobutu’s fall, expulsions continued but took on a more administrative character. For example, in 2009, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s immigration services (Direction Générale de Migration) conducted systematic expulsions of Congo-Brazzaville citizens in irregular situations. However, the government provided a three-month moratorium for Brazzaville citizens to regularize their status, showing a more measured approach than during the Mobutu era.
The Republic of the Congo has a long history of xenophobic policies targeting citizens of the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. After gaining independence in 1960, tensions between ethnic groups like the Kongo, Téké and Mbochi morphed into systemic discrimination against DRC migrants. Periodic expulsions began in the 1960s–1980s, escalating dramatically in 2014 with Operation Mbata ya Bakolo, a state-led campaign that forcibly deported over 150,000 DRC nationals under the guise of combating crime. This operation, marked by arbitrary arrests, violence and property seizures, reflected enduring colonial legacies of marginalization and economic dependence on resource extraction, fuelling the scapegoating of immigrants during crises.
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THE UNHEALED SCAR OF A RIVER DIVIDED
The Congo River bends like a question mark through the equatorial night, its dark waters reflecting the flicker of gas flares from distant oil platforms. On the northern bank, the skyline of Brazzaville glows with the neon of Chinese-built infrastructure projects; to the south, Kinshasa’s sprawling slums pulse with the restless energy of 17 million souls. Between them, the river that bears the name of a mighty kingdom bisects two very distinct nations.
The story of the two Congos is not simply one of colonial division but a tale that stretches back to the mighty Kongo Kingdom, a realm that once dominated Central Africa. Today, the ghosts of that empire linger in the collective memory of both nations: a ghost fuelling irredentism, both through the rejection of non-Kongo ethnic group components and the persecution of the Kongo ethnic group and dreams of a phantasmagorical golden age.
For decades, Lingala and French have blended in a cacophony of commerce in the bustling markets of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, supplanting Kikongo. The Cold War may have ended, but its echoes still reverberate along the Congo’s riverbanks. Where once Marxist Brazzaville armed rebels against Mobutu’s Zaire, today, accusations of supporting insurgents amid the ongoing M23 rebellion fly across the water, with Kinshasa pointing fingers at its neighbour for allegedly allowing Rwandan arms to flow through its territory.
However, the true tragedy of the Congos lies not in their political divisions but in the human cost of their estrangement. Operation Mbata ya Bakolo in 2014 saw over 150,000 DRC nationals forcibly expelled from Brazzaville—a stark reminder of how the fabric of a nation designed on a constructed geographical space by the European colonial powers always gives way to xenophobia.
As night falls and the lights of the twin capitals twinkle across the water, one can’t help but wonder: What might have been if the artificial borders drawn in Berlin had not sliced through the heart of an ancient kingdom? The river that once united now divides, its currents carrying the weight of six centuries of shared history and divergent futures.
In the end, the story of the two Congos is a microcosm of Africa’s struggle to reconcile its pre-colonial past with its post-colonial present. It is a tale of artificial borders and enduring kinships, of resource wealth and human poverty, of grand visions and grim realities⎈