Republic of the Congo

• 1. Introduction

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  The Republic of the Congo lies on the western coast of Central Africa, just west of the Congo River, and its name causes confusion almost everywhere it goes. On the far bank of that river sits the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a different country that shares most of the same words. The republic on the western side is also called Congo-Brazzaville, the Congo Republic, or simply Congo. This documentary asks what lies behind those labels. Why does a country with an Atlantic coastline carry the name of a river? How did a French colony become a state that changed its own character several times within a few decades? And what happens to a nation when so much of its prosperity depends on oil?

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• 2. Names and Kingdoms

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  Around the time the Portuguese first arrived, in 1483 or 1484, a Bantu kingdom called Kongo held the mouth of the great river. The river took its name from that kingdom, and the modern country took its name from the river. The kingdom was named for its people, the Bakongo, whose name is said to mean hunters, from the words mukongo and nkongo.

  The capital carries a stranger name. Brazzaville honors Pierre Savorgnan de Brazzà, the founder of the colony and an Italian nobleman. His title referred to the town of Brazzacco, in the comune of Moruzzo in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. That town's name derives from the Latin Brattius or Braccius, both meaning arm.

  The land had been crowded with states long before any Italian nobleman arrived. Bantu-speaking peoples dominated the region at least 3,000 years ago and built trade links leading into the Congo River basin. About 1500 BC, during the Bantu expansions, they mostly displaced and absorbed the earlier inhabitants, the Pygmy people.

  By the 13th century, three federations of states stood in the western Congo Basin. In the east were the Seven Kingdoms of Kongo dia Nlaza, considered the oldest and most powerful, which likely included Nsundi, Mbata and Mpangu. South of them lay Mpemba, which stretched from modern-day Angola to the Congo River. West of the river was a confederation of three small states, led by Vungu and joined by Kakongo and Ngoyo.

  The Tio Kingdom emerged in the 14th century, and Loango followed in the 16th. The link between kingship and the work of smiths is believed to have begun among the Tio, then spread to Loango and Kongo.

  The Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão reached the mouth of the Congo in 1484. Commercial ties grew between the inland kingdoms and European merchants, who traded in commodities, manufactured goods, and people captured and enslaved in the hinterlands. After centuries as a central hub of transatlantic trade, direct European colonization of the river delta began in the 19th century. It steadily eroded the power of these societies.

  The Bakongo also lived across parts of what later became Angola, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their shared roots formed the basis for both affinities and rivalries among those countries.

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• 3. French Rule

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  In 1880, a treaty between Pierre de Brazza and the Tio king Iloo I placed the area north of the Congo River under French sovereignty. When Iloo died, his widow Queen Ngalifourou upheld the terms of the treaty and became an ally to the colonizers. The territory was first called French Congo, and in 1903 it became known as Middle Congo.

  In 1908, France created French Equatorial Africa from Middle Congo, Gabon, Chad, and Oubangui-Chari, which later became the Central African Republic. The French named Brazzaville the federal capital. For the first 50 years of colonial rule, economic development centered on extracting natural resources.

  The Congo-Ocean Railway shows what that extraction cost. Forced laborers built it in the 1930s, and the work is estimated to have cost at least 14,000 lives.

  Then came the Second World War. While Nazi forces occupied France, Brazzaville served from 1940 to 1943 as the symbolic capital of Free France. The Brazzaville Conference of 1944 opened a period of reform in French colonial policy. After the war, spending on administration and infrastructure expanded, helped by the colony's central position in the federation and its federal capital. A local legislature followed the 1946 constitution, which established the Fourth Republic.

  France's next constitutional revision, which created the Fifth Republic in 1958, would break the federation into separate parts.

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• 4. Independence and Rivalry

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  On the 28th of November 1958, the Republic of the Congo was established as an autonomous colony within the French Community. The new republic published its first constitution in 1959. Politics split along ethnic lines almost at once. The Mbochis favored Jacques Opangault, while the Laris and Kongos favored Fulbert Youlou, the first black mayor elected in French Equatorial Africa. In February 1959 the antagonism produced a series of riots in Brazzaville, which the French Army subdued.

  Elections took place in April 1959. By the time of independence, Opangault had agreed to serve under his former opponent. Youlou, an avid anti-communist, became the first president. Tension in Pointe-Noire was so high that he moved the capital to Brazzaville. Full independence from France came on the 15th of August 1960.

  Youlou's rule ended after labor elements and rival political parties set off a three-day uprising. The military took over and installed a civilian provisional government led by Alphonse Massamba-Débat. Under the 1963 constitution, Massamba-Débat was elected to a five-year term.

  His government adopted "scientific socialism" as the country's constitutional ideology. In 1964, the Congo sent an official team to the Olympic Games for the first time, with a single athlete. In 1965 it established relations with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Industrialization began as well, with a textile factory at Kinsoundi, palm groves at Etoumbi, a match factory at Bétou, and shipyards at Yoro. Health centers and schools were created, and the school enrollment rate became the highest in Black Africa.

  Violence shadowed the experiment. On the night of the 14th to the 15th of February 1965, three public officials were kidnapped. They were the prosecutor Lazare Matsocota, the Supreme Court president Joseph Pouabou, and Anselme Massouémé, director of the Congolese Information Agency. The bodies of two of the men were later found, mutilated, by the Congo River.

  Massamba-Débat invited around a hundred Cuban troops to train his party's militia units. They helped his government survive a coup attempt in 1966, led by paratroopers loyal to Marien Ngouabi. That regime ended in September 1968, in a coup that spilled no blood.

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• 5. Marxist Decades

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  Marien Ngouabi, who had taken part in that last coup, assumed the presidency on the 31st of December 1968. One year later he proclaimed the Congo Africa's first "people's republic", the People's Republic of the Congo. The National Revolutionary Movement renamed itself the Congolese Labour Party, known by its French initials as the PCT.

  Ngouabi survived an attempted coup in 1972 but was assassinated on the 18th of March 1977. An 11-member Military Committee of the Party was named to run an interim government, with Joachim Yhombi-Opango as president. Two years later Yhombi-Opango was forced from power, and Denis Sassou Nguesso became the new president.

  Sassou Nguesso aligned the country with the Eastern Bloc and signed a 20-year friendship pact with the Soviet Union. As the years passed, he leaned more on political repression and less on patronage to hold his dictatorship together. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the Soviet aid that had propped up the regime ended. The regime gave up power.

  The Marxist-Leninist state had lasted from 1969 until 1992, when multi-party elections replaced it.

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• 6. War and Long Rule

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  Pascal Lissouba, elected in the new multi-party era, served as president from 1992 to 1997. He tried to liberalize the economy with backing from the International Monetary Fund. The first civil war broke out in 1993 and 1994. In June 1996 the fund approved a three-year arrangement worth about 100 million US dollars. It was close to announcing a renewed annual agreement when civil war broke out again in 1997.

  On the 5th of June 1997, with presidential elections set for July, Lissouba's government forces surrounded Sassou's compound in Brazzaville. Sassou ordered his private militia, known as the Cobras, to resist. The four-month conflict that followed destroyed or damaged parts of Brazzaville and killed tens of thousands of civilians. In October, Angola's government began an invasion to install Sassou in power. The Lissouba government fell, and Sassou declared himself president.

  In the 2002 election, Sassou won almost 90% of the vote. His two main rivals, Lissouba and Bernard Kolelas, were prevented from competing. A third, André Milongo, advised his supporters to boycott the vote and then withdrew. A referendum in January 2002 had approved a constitution that gave the president new powers, extended his term to seven years, and introduced a bicameral assembly. International observers objected to how the election and the referendum were run, saying both recalled the one-party era.

  After the vote, fighting resumed in the Pool region between government forces and rebels led by Pastor Ntumi. A peace treaty was signed in April 2003.

  Sassou won again in July 2009. The Congolese Observatory of Human Rights, a non-governmental organization, said the election was marked by "very low" turnout and by "fraud and irregularities". On the 27th of March 2015, he announced a referendum on changing the constitution so that he could seek a third consecutive term. The vote was held on the 25th of October. The government said 92% of voters approved, with 72% of eligible voters taking part. The opposition boycotted the vote and called those numbers false. At least 18 people were killed by security forces during opposition rallies in the weeks leading up to it.

  The system itself is semi-presidential, with an elected president who appoints the Council of Ministers. Since the 1990s, the multi-party scene has been dominated by Sassou Nguesso, backed by his Congolese Labour Party and a range of smaller parties. His rule has seen corruption revelations, along with attempts to censor them. One French investigation found over 110 bank accounts and dozens of "lavish properties" in France. Sassou denounced such investigations as "racist" and "colonial". His son, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso, has been named in association with the Panama Papers.

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• 7. River, Forest, Coast

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  The Equator crosses the Republic of the Congo, which lies between 4 degrees north and 5 degrees south, and between longitudes 11 and 19 degrees east. Its landscapes range from savanna plains in the north to the Congo River, the rugged mountains and forests of Mayombe, and 170 km of beaches along the Atlantic coast. The southwest is a coastal plain drained mainly by the Kouilou-Niari River. The interior is a central plateau lying between two basins, one to the south and one to the north.

  Forests are under growing pressure from exploitation. Even so, the country had a 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index mean score of 8.89 out of 10, ranking it 12th among 172 countries. It lies within four terrestrial ecoregions: the Atlantic Equatorial coastal forests, the Northwestern Congolian lowland forests, the Western Congolian swamp forests, and the Western Congolian forest-savanna mosaic.

  Because of the Equator, the climate stays consistent through the year. Days average a humid 24 degrees Celsius, and nights generally fall between 16 and 21 degrees. Average yearly rainfall runs from 1100 mm in the Niari Valley in the south to over 2000 mm in central parts. The dry season lasts from June to August. Across most of the country, rain peaks twice, in March-May and again in September-November.

  In 2006-07, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society studied gorillas in heavily forested areas centered on the Ouesso District of the Sangha Region. They suggested a population on the order of 125,000 western lowland gorillas. Their isolation from humans has been mostly preserved by swamps the researchers called "inhospitable".

  In 2023, the Forest Massif of Odzala-Kokoua was listed as a natural UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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• 8. Oil and Daily Life

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  In 2008, oil accounted for 65% of the gross domestic product, 85% of government revenue, and 92% of exports. Petroleum extraction has replaced forestry as the economy's mainstay, and the country is the fourth-largest oil producer in the Gulf of Guinea. That gives it a degree of prosperity, though oil revenue is distributed unequally. Alongside oil sit village agriculture and handicrafts, support services, and a government burdened by budget problems and "overstaffing".

  In the 1980s, rising oil revenues paid for larger development projects, and GDP grew by an average of 5% a year. On the 12th of January 1994, the devaluation of Franc Zone currencies by 50% pushed inflation to 46% that year. Between 1994 and 1996 the economy went through a difficult transition, and in 2002-03 the government privatized banks, telecommunications, and transportation monopolies. Growth slowed after oil prices dropped following 2015. In 2018, the country joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

  Diamonds tell a different story. In 2004, the Congo was excluded from the Kimberley Process amid allegations that most of its diamond exports were smuggled out of the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was re-admitted in 2007. In 2009, the government signed an agreement to lease 200,000 hectares of land to South African farmers, aiming to reduce its dependence on imports.

  About 70% of Congolese live in cities, mainly Brazzaville, Pointe-Noire, or the towns and villages along the 534 km railway that links the two. The tropical jungle of the north is virtually uninhabited. French is the official language, Kituba and Lingala are recognized as national languages, and Ethnologue counts 62 spoken languages. The Kongo are the largest ethnic group, at roughly half the population. The Teke make up 16.9%, the Mbochi 13.1%, and the Pygmies 2%.

  According to the CIA World Factbook, Catholics made up 33.1% of the population in 2007, followed by adherents of Awakening Churches and Christian Revivalism at 22.3% and other Protestants at 19.9%. Muslims made up 1.6%.

  Education has suffered. Public schooling is theoretically free and mandatory for under-16s, but in practice parents bear the costs. In 2005, the net primary enrollment rate was 44%, down from 79% in 1991. By 2018, the completion rate was 66% for girls and 64% for boys. Health indicators are strained as well. There were 20 physicians per 100,000 people in the 2000s, and HIV prevalence among 15- to 49-year-olds stood at 2.8% in 2012.

  The Congolese Human Rights Observatory says some Pygmies belong from birth to Bantu families in a relationship that some call slavery, and that they are treated as property. On the 30th of December 2010, the Congolese parliament adopted a law to promote and protect the rights of indigenous peoples. It is described as the "first" of its kind in Africa.

  In the 2024 World Happiness Report, the country ranked 89th among 140 nations. Since laws adopted in October 2024, the republic has been divided into 15 departments, each split into communes and districts.

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