The Democratic Republic of the Congo DRC, situated at the very heart of the continent, is one of the most extraordinary countries of the world. It is also one of the least understood. This vast country of around 115m people, sprawling into the lush Congo River Basin and beyond and extending from the Atlantic Ocean where the mighty River Congo disgorges into the sea to Kalemie on the shores of Lake Tanganyika deep in Eastern Africa, continues to push ahead and to defy the odds.
Consider those odds. The DRC, with an area of 2,345,410 square kilometres, is the second largest country in Africa and the 11th largest in the world.
In terms of comparative scale: you could fit into its territory France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain, with room to spare for one or two more Western European nations. You have only to look at daily headlines to see that each of these countries have more than their fair share of ethnic, race, language, religion, economic and governance issues to deal with. But while they do this as individual nation states, the DRC does it as a unitary state. While each of the European countries has at most a handful of languages, the DRC has some 242. While French is the official language a legacy of its Belgian colonial history, four other languages - Kikongo, Lingala, Kiswahili and Tshiluba are national languages.
