Kinshasa, Congo

Kinshasa (; ; ln, Kinsásá), formerly Léopoldville ( nl, Leopoldstad), is the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Once a site of fishing and trading villages situated along the Congo River, Kinshasa is now one of the world's fastest growing megacities.

The city of Kinshasa is also one of the DRC's 26 provinces. Because the administrative boundaries of the city-province cover a vast area, over 90 percent of the city-province's land is rural in nature, and the urban area occupies a small but expanding section on the western side.

Kinshasa is Africa's third-largest metropolitan area after Cairo and Lagos. It is also the world's largest nominally Francophone urban area, with French being the language of government, education, media, public services and high-end commerce in the city, while Lingala is used as a ''lingua franca'' in the street. Kinshasa hosted the 14th Francophonie Summit in October 2012.

Residents of Kinshasa are known as ''Kinois'' (in French and sometimes in English) or Kinshasans (English). The indigenous people of the area include the and Teke.
The city faces Brazzaville, the capital of the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. Although the river span is 7 km wide at this point, the two cities are the world's second-closest pair of capital cities (after Vatican City and Rome).

History

The city was established as a trading post by Henry Morton Stanley in 1881. It was named Léopoldville in honour of King Leopold II of the Belgians, who controlled the Congo Free State, the vast territory that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, not as a colony but as a private property. The post flourished as the first navigable port on the Congo River above Livingstone Falls, a series of rapids over below Leopoldville. At first, all goods arriving by sea or being sent by sea had to be carried by porters between Léopoldville and Matadi, the port below the rapids and from the coast. The completion of the Matadi-Kinshasa portage railway, in 1898, provided an alternative route around the rapids and sparked the rapid development of Léopoldville. In 1914, a pipeline was installed so that crude oil could be transported from Matadi to the upriver steamers in Leopoldville. By 1923, the city was elevated to capital of the Belgian Congo, replacing the town of Boma in the Congo estuary. The town, nicknamed "Léo" or "Leopold", became a commercial centre and grew rapidly during the colonial period.

After gaining its independence on 30 June 1960, following riots in 1959, the Republic of the Congo elected its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba's perceived pro-Soviet leanings were viewed as a threat by Western interests. This being the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and Belgium did not want to lose control of the strategic wealth of the Congo, in particular its uranium. Less than a year after Lumumba's election, the Belgians and the U.S. bought the support of his Congolese rivals and set in motion the events that culminated in Lumumba's assassination. In 1964, Moïse Tshombe decreed the expulsion of all nationals of Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Mali, as well as all political refugees from Rwanda. In 1965, with the help of the U.S. and Belgium, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seized power in the Congo. He initiated a policy of " Authenticity," attempting to renativize the names of people and places in the country. In 1966, Léopoldville was renamed ''Kinshasa'', for a village named Kinshasa that once stood near the site, today Kinshasa (commune). The city grew rapidly under Mobutu, drawing people from across the country who came in search of their fortunes or to escape ethnic strife elsewhere, thus adding to the many ethnicities and languages already found there.

In 1991 the city had to fend off rioting soldiers, who were protesting the government's failure to pay them. Subsequently a rebel uprising began, which by 1997 had brought down the regime of Mobutu. Kinshasa suffered greatly from Mobutu's excesses, mass corruption, nepotism and the civil war that led to his downfall. Nevertheless, it is still a major cultural and intellectual center for Central Africa, with a flourishing community of musicians and artists. It is also the country's major industrial centre, processing many of the natural products brought from the interior.

Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2001 to 2019, was not overly popular in Kinshasa. Violence broke out following the announcement of Kabila's victory in the contested election of 2006; the European Union deployed troops ( EUFOR RD Congo) to join the UN force in the city. The announcement in 2016 that a new election would be delayed two years led to large protests in September and December which involved barricades in the streets and left dozens of people dead. Schools and businesses were closed down.

Geography

Kinshasa is a city of sharp contrasts, with affluent residential and commercial areas and three universities alongside sprawling slums. It is located along the south bank of the Congo River, downstream on the Pool MaleboJean Flouriot,
Kinshasa 2005. Trente ans après la publication de l’Atlas de Kinshasa
", ''Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer'' 261, January–March 2013; doi:10.4000/com.6770. and directly opposite the city of Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo. The Congo River is the second longest river in Africa after the Nile and has the continent's greatest discharge. As a waterway it provides a means of transport for much of the Congo Basin; it is navigable for river barges between Kinshasa and Kisangani; many of its tributaries are also navigable. The river is an important source of hydroelectric power, and downstream from Kinshasa it has the potential to generate power equivalent to the usage of roughly half of Africa's population.

The older and wealthier part of the city (''ville basse'') is located on a flat area of alluvial sand and clay near the river, while many newer areas are found on the eroding red soil of surrounding hills.Matthieu Kayembe Wa Kayembe, Mathieu De Maeyer et Eléonore Wolff,
Cartographie de la croissance urbaine de Kinshasa (R.D. Congo) entre 1995 et 2005 par télédétection satellitaire à haute résolution
", ''Belgeo'' 3–4, 2009 ; doi:10.4000/belgeo.7349.Joe Trapido,
Kinshasa's Theater of Power
", '' New Left Review'' 98, March/April 2016. Older parts of the city were laid out on a geometric pattern, with ''de facto'' racial segregation becoming ''de jure'' in 1929 as the European and African neighborhoods grew closer together. City plans of the 1920s–1950s featured a '' cordon sanitaire'' or buffer between the white and black neighborhoods, which included the central market as well as parks and gardens for Europeans.Luce Beeckmans & Liora Bigon, "The making of the central markets of Dakar and Kinshasa: from colonial origins to the post-colonial period”; ''Urban History'' 43(3), 2016; doi:10.1017/S0963926815000188.

Urban planning in post-independence Kinshasa has been limited. The ''Mission Française d'Urbanisme'' drew up some plans in the 1960s which envisioned a greater role for automobile transportation but did not predict the city's significant population growth. Thus much of the urban structure has developed without guidance from a master plan. According to UN-Habitat, the city is expanding by eight square kilometers per year. It describes many of the new neighborhoods as slums, built in unsafe conditions with inadequate infrastructure. Nevertheless, spontaneously developed areas have in many cases extended the grid street plan of the original city.

Administrative divisions

Kinshasa is both a city (''ville'' in French) and a province, one of the 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nevertheless, it has city subdivisions and is divided into 24 communes (municipalities), which in turn are divided into 369 quarters and 21 embedded groupings. Maluku, the rural commune to the east of the urban area, accounts for 79% of the total land area of the city-province, with a population of 200,000–300,000. The communes are grouped into four districts which are not in themselves administrative divisions.

* Funa District
** Bandalungwa
** Bumbu
** Kalamu
** Kasa-Vubu
** Makala
** Ngiri-Ngiri
** Selembao

* Lukunga District
** Barumbu
** Gombe
** Kinshasa
** Kintambo
** Lingwala
** Mont Ngafula
** Ngaliema

* Mont Amba District
** Kisenso
** Lemba
** Limete
** Matete
** Ngaba

* Tshangu District
** Kimbanseke
** Maluku
** Masina
** Ndjili (N'Djili)
** Nsele (N'Sele)

Climate

Under the Köppen climate classification, Kinshasa has a tropical wet and dry climate (''Aw''). Its lengthy rainy season spans from October through May, with a relatively short dry season, between June and September. Kinshasa lies south of the equator, so its dry season begins around its winter solstice, which is in June. This is in contrast to African cities further north featuring this climate where the dry season typically begins around December. Kinshasa's dry season is slightly cooler than its wet season, though temperatures remain relatively constant throughout the year.

Demographics

An official census conducted in 1984 counted 2.6 million residents. Since then, all estimates are extrapolations. The estimates for 2005 fell in a range between 5.3 million and 7.3 million. In 2017, the most recent population estimate for the city, it has a population of 11,855,000.

According to UN-Habitat, 390,000 people immigrate to Kinshasa annually, fleeing warfare and seeking economic opportunity.Gianluca Iazzolino,
Kinshasa, megalopolis of 12 million souls, expanding furiously on super-charged growth
"; ''Mail & Guardian Africa'', 2 April 2016.

According to a projection (2016) the population of metropolitan Kinshasa will increase significantly, to 35 million by 2050, 58 million by 2075 and 83 million by 2100, making it one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Language

The official language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, of which Kinshasa is the capital, is French (See: Kinshasa French vocabulary). Kinshasa is the largest officially Francophone city in the world, albeit that the vast majority of people either cannot speak French, or struggle in speaking it.
A third factor is simply a demographic one. At least one in ten Congolese live in Kinshasa. With its population exceeding eleven million, it is the second-largest city in sub-Saharan Africa (after Lagos). It is also the second-largest French-speaking city in the world, according to Paris (even though only a small percentage of Kinois speak French correctly), although Lingala is widely used as a spoken language. French is the language of street signs, posters, newspapers, government documents, schools; it dominates plays, television, and the press, and it is used in vertical relationships among people of different social classes. People of the same class, however, speak the Congolese languages ( Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba or Swahili) among themselves.

While the culture is dominated by the Francophonie, a complex multilingualism is present in Kinshasa. Many in the francophonie of the 1980s labelled Zaïre as the second-largest francophone country, and Kinshasa as the second-largest francophone city. Yet Zaïre seemed unlikely to escape a complex multilingualism. Lingala was the language of music, of presidential addresses, of daily life in government and in Kinshasa. But if Lingala was the spoken language of Kinshasa, it made little progress as a written language. French was the written language of the city, as seen in street signs, posters, newspapers and in government documents. French dominated plays and television as well as the press; French was the language of the national anthem and even for the doctrine of authenticity. Zairian researchers found French to be used in vertical relationships among people of uneven rank; people of equal rank, no matter how high, tended to speak Zairian languages among themselves. Given these limits, French might have lost its place to another of the leading languages of Zaïre – Lingala, Tshiluba, or Swahili – except that teaching of these languages also suffered from limitations on its growth.

Government and politics

The head of Kinshasa ''ville-province'' has the title of Gouverneur. Gentiny Ngobila has been governor since 2019. Each commune has its own Bourgmestre.

Although political power in the DRC is fragmented, Kinshasa as the national capital represents the official center of sovereignty, and thus of access to international organizations and financing, and of political powers such as the right to issue passports. Kinshasa is also the primate city of the DRC with a population several times larger than the next-largest city, Lubumbashi.

The United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known by its French acronym MONUSCO (formerly MONUC) has its headquarters in Kinshasa. In 2016, the UN placed more peacekeepers on active duty in Kinshasa in response to the unrest directed against Kabila, at that time. Critics, including recently the US ambassador to the UN, have accused the peacekeeping mission of supporting a corrupt government.

Other non-governmental organizations play significant roles in local governance. The Belgian development agency (''Coopération technique belge''; CTB) since 2006 sponsors the ''Programme d’Appui aux Initiatives de Développement Communautaire'' (Paideco), a 6-million-euro program aimed at economic development. It began work in Kimbanseke, a hill commune with population verging on one million.

Economy

Big manufacturing companies such as Marsavco S.A., All Pack Industries and Angel Cosmetics are located in the centre of town (Gombe) in Kinshasa.

There are many other industries, such as Trust Merchant Bank, located in the heart of the city. Food processing is a major industry, and construction and other service industries also play a significant role in the economy.

Although home to only 13% of the DRC's population, Kinshasa accounts for 85% of the Congolese economy as measured by gross domestic product.Innocent Chirisa, Abraham Rajab Matamanda, & Liaison Mukarwi, "Desired and Achieved Urbanisation in Africa: In Search of Appropriate Tooling for a Sustainable Transformation”; in Umar Benna & Indo Benna, eds., ''Urbanization and Its Impact on Socio-Economic Growth in Developing Regions''; IGI Global, 2017, ; pp
101
��102. A 2004 investigation found 70% of inhabitants employed informally, 17% in the public sector, 9% in the formal private sector, and 3% other, of a total 976,000 workers. Most new jobs are classified as informal.

The People's Republic of China has been heavily involved in the Congo since the 1970s, when they financed the construction of the Palais du Peuple and backed the government against rebels in the Shaba war. In 2007–2008 China and Congo signed an agreement for an $8.5 billion loan for infrastructure development. Chinese entrepreneurs are gaining an increasing share of local marketplaces in Kinshasa, displacing in the process formerly successful Congolese, West African, Indian, and Lebanese merchants.

Mean household spending in 2005 was the equivalent of US$2,150, amounting to $1 per day per person. The median household spending was $1,555, 66 cents per person per day. Among the poor, more than half of this spending goes to food, especially bread and cereal.

Education

Kinshasa is home to several higher-level education institutes, covering a wide range of specialities, from civil engineering to nursing and journalism. The city is also home to three large universities and an arts school:
* Académie de Design (AD)
* Institut Supérieur d'Architecture et Urbanisme
* Université Panafricaine du Congo (UPC)
* University of Kinshasa
* Université Libre de Kinshasa

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