History Of The Congo

Some of the country we now call the Democratic Republic of Congo used to be called the Kingdom of Kongo. The Kingdom of Kongo was ruled by African kings or chiefs for a long period of time. Explorers from Portugal landed in the west of this region just before AD 1500 and started to trade with the Africans for ivory and slaves. Slaves were mostly captured by other Africans and by Arab traders, who then sold them to whoever wanted cheap workers.

Ivory Tusks

In the late 1800’s the King of Belgium decided that he wanted to control this area for himself. He sent people in to explore and to set up trading stations. He employed a man called Henry Stanley, a famous explorer, to negotiate treaties with local African chiefs and to further map the inland areas of the country. To do this, Mr Stanley mostly travelled up and down the Congo River, and other rivers that joined up with it, in an iron boat.

Mr Stanley and his "gun boy"

The Congo River is just under 5000km long (that’s real long!) and it puts out the 2nd biggest amount of river water in the whole world (an average of 41,000 cubic metres of water each second)! I wonder how many swimming pools that would fill up each second?

In 1890 the King of Belgium decided to make as much money as he could exporting rubber from the Congo. Rubber is made from the sap of rubber vines and trees. Though he called his country the “Free State Of Congo” it was not really very free at all. In fact very large numbers of people died because many workers he employed to gather the rubber from the villages were very cruel. People had to work so hard to collect enough rubber to pay the King that they were not able to provide food for their families.

Villagers collecting rubber sap

Villagers captured and forced to collect rubber sap