Democratic Republic of the Congo

Discover Democratic Republic of the Congo

Fun Foods

Fufu, Moambe Chicken, Fried Plantains, Liboke, Rice and Beans, Mikate, Tropical Fruit

Imagine an animal with the body of a horse, the striped legs of a zebra, and a tongue so long it can lick its own ears. It's called an okapi, and it's real.

It lives in just one country on Earth: the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The okapi is so shy, and so well hidden in the rainforest, that the outside world didn't even know it existed until 1901. Today it's a national symbol, printed on Congolese money.

The okapi has the perfect hiding place. The Congo is mostly covered by the second-largest rainforest in the world, so important to the planet's air that it's nicknamed the "lungs of Africa."

Winding through it is the Congo River, the deepest river anywhere on Earth.

Long ago, powerful African kingdoms ruled here, including the Kingdom of Kongo. Then came one of the darkest stories in all of history.

In the 1880s, a Belgian king named Leopold II claimed this entire huge land as his own personal property. He forced the Congolese people to collect rubber from the forest and treated them with shocking cruelty.

Millions died. When the rest of the world finally learned the truth, Leopold was forced to give up the colony in 1908.

The Congo became independent in 1960, but calm did not follow. Its first elected leader was soon killed, and a dictator named Mobutu seized power for more than 30 years, even renaming the country Zaire.

After he was overthrown, it took its current name in 1997.

Here is the great puzzle of the Congo. It's one of the richest countries on Earth in buried treasure, with diamonds, gold, and huge amounts of cobalt, a metal used in the batteries inside phones and electric cars.

Yet many of its people are very poor, and parts of the country have suffered years of war over that very wealth.

Through all of it, the Congo's wild beauty endures. In Virunga, Africa's oldest national park, you can hike to see rare mountain gorillas up close in the forest.

Nearby, the volcano Mount Nyiragongo glows with a bubbling lake of orange lava at its summit.

For food, the staple is fufu, a soft dough you pull apart and dip into stews. The national dish is moambe chicken, cooked in a rich, nutty sauce made from palm fruit.