By land area, the country is the second-largest country in Africa and the 11th-largest in the world. With a population of around million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most populous nominally Francophone country in the world. The national capital and largest city is Kinshasa , which is also the economic center. Centered on the Congo Basin , the territory of the Congo was first inhabited by Central African foragers around 90, years ago and was settled in the Bantu expansion about 3, to 2, years ago.
In the center and east, the empires of Mwene Muji , Luba , and Lunda ruled from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. King Leopold II of Belgium formally acquired rights to the Congo territory from the colonial nations of Europe in and declared the land his private property, naming it the Congo Free State.
From to , his colonial military forced the local population to produce rubber and committed widespread atrocities. In , Leopold ceded the territory, which thus became a Belgian colony. Mobutu renamed the country Zaire in and imposed a harsh personalist dictatorship until his overthrow in by the First Congo War. The region's largest city, Goma , was occupied by the March 23 Movement M23 rebels in and again in Since , there have also been tensions between the DRC and Rwanda, which has been providing military support to M23 and sending troops into Congolese territory.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is extremely rich in natural resources but has suffered from political instability, a lack of infrastructure, corruption, and centuries of both commercial and colonial extraction and exploitation, followed by more than 60 years of independence, with little widespread development.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is named after the Congo River , which flows through the country. The Congo River is the world's deepest river and the world's third-largest river by discharge.
