instructions unclear
animated in the Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo, also known as Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC,[7] or the Congo, and formerly Zaire, is a country in Central Africa. It is, by area, the second largest country in Africa (after Algeria), and the 11th-largest in the world. With a population of around 92 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the most populous officially Francophone country in the world. It is a member of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, African Union, and COMESA. Since 2015, the Eastern DR Congo has been the site of an ongoing military conflict in Kivu. The capital and largest city is Kinshasa, which is also the world's most populous Francophone city. Centered on the Congo Basin, the territory of the DRC was first inhabited by Central African foragers around 90,000 years ago and was reached by the Bantu expansion about 3,000 years ago.[8] In the west, the Kingdom of Kongo ruled around the mouth of the Congo River from the 14th to 19th centuries. In the northeast, center and east, the kingdoms of Azande, Luba and Lunda ruled from the 16th and 17th centuries to the 19th century. In the 1870s, just before the onset of the Scramble for Africa, European exploration of the Congo Basin was carried out, first led by Henry Morton Stanley under the sponsorship of Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold formally acquired rights to the Congo territory at the Berlin Conference in 1885 and declared the land his private property, naming it the Congo Free State. During the Free State, his colonial military unit, the Force Publique, forced the local population to produce rubber. From 1885 to 1908, millions of Congolese people died as a consequence of disease and exploitation. In 1908, Leopold, despite his initial reluctance, ceded to Belgium the so-called Free State, which thus became known as the Belgian Congo. Congo achieved independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960 under the name Republic of the Congo. Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba was elected the first Prime Minister, while Joseph Kasa-Vubu became the first President. During the Congo Crisis, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who later renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko, officially came into power through a coup d'état and renamed the country Zaire in 1971. The country was run as a dictatorial one-party state, with his Popular Movement of the Revolution as the sole legal party. By the early 1990s, Mobutu's government began to weaken. Destabilisation in the east resulting from the 1994 Rwandan genocide led to a 1996 invasion led by Rwanda, which led to Mobutu's ousting in the First Congo War the following year.[2]
