The history of the Republic of the Congo has been marked by diverse civilisations: Indigenous, French and post-independence.
Bantus and Forest Peoples
The earliest inhabitants of the region comprising present-day Congo were the Forest peoples whose Stone Age culture was slowly replaced by Bantu tribes. The main Bantu tribe living in the region were the Kongo, also known as Bakongo, who established mostly unstable kingdoms along the mouth, north and south, of the Congo River. The capital of this Kongolese kingdom, Mbanza Kongo, later baptized as São Salvador by the Portuguese, is a town in northern Angola near the border with the DRC.
From the capital they ruled over an empire encompassing large parts of present-day Angola, the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They ruled over nearby tributary states, often by appointing sons of the Kongo kings to head these states. It had six 'so-called' provinces called Mpemba, Soyo, Mbamba, Mbata, Nsundi and Mpangu. With the Kingdom of Loango in the north and the Kingdom of Mbundu in the south being tributary states. In the East it bordered on the Kwango river, a tributary of the Congo River. In total the kingdom is said to have had 3 to 4 million inhabitants and a surface of about 300,000 km2. According to oral traditions it was established in around 1400 when King Lukeni lua Nimi conquered the kingdom of Kabunga and established Mbanza Kongo as its capital.
Portuguese exploration
This African Iron Age culture came under great pressure with the arrival of the first Europeans, in this case Portuguese explorers. King John II of Portugal sought, in order to break Venetian and Ottoman control over trade with the East, to organize a series of expeditions south along the African coast with the goal of establishing direct contact with Asia. In 1482–1483, Captain Diogo Cão, sailing southwards on the uncharted Congo River, discovered the mouth of the river, and became the first European to encounter the Kingdom of Kongo...
Initially relations were limited and considered beneficial to both sides. With Christianity easily accepted by the local nobility, leading on 3 May 1491 to the baptism of king Nzinga a Nkuwu as the first Christian Kongolese king João I. He was succeeded after his death in 1506 by his son Nzinga Mbemba, who ruled as King Afonso I until 1543. Under his reign Christianity gained a strong foothold in the country. Many churches were built in Mbanza, of which the Kulumbimbi Cathedral (erected between 1491 and 1534) was the most impressive. In theory the kings of Portugal and Kongo were equals and they exchanged letters as such. Kongo at some point even established diplomatic relations with the Vatican, and the Pope appointed a local priest as bishop for the region.
Revolts The result was a series of revolts against Portuguese rule of which the battle of Mbwila and the revolt led by Kimpa Vita (Tchimpa Vita) were the most important. The battle of Mbwila (or battle of Ambouilla or battle of Ulanga) was the result of a conflict between the Portuguese, led by governor André Vidal de Negreiros, and the Kongolese king António I concerning mining rights. The Kongolese refused to give the Portuguese extra territorial rights and the Portuguese were angry because of Kongolese support for previous Dutch invasions of the region. During a battle on 25 October 1665 an estimated 20,000 Kongolese fought against the Portuguese, who won the battle thanks to the early death in battle of Kongolese King Afonso I of Kongo.
The revolt of Kimpa Vita was another attempt to regain independence from the Portuguese. Baptised around 1684 as Dona Béatrice, Kimpa Vita was raised Catholic and being very pious she became a nun seeing visions of St. Anthony of Padua ordering her to restore the kingdom of Kongo to its former glory. Creating the Anthonian prophetic movement she interfered directly in the then civil war between the three members of the local nobility claiming the Kongolese throne, João II, Pedro IV and Pedro Kibenga. In it she took sides against Pedro IV, considered the favorite of the Portuguese. Her revolt, during which she captured the capital Mbanza Kongo, was short lived. She was captured by the forces of Pedro IV and under orders of Portuguese Capuchin Friars condemned for being a witch and a heretic and consequently burned to death. For many, she is the African version of Joan of Arc and an early symbol of African resistance against colonialism because, for her outspokenness, she was burned alive on a pyre.Thornton, John K. The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Congo's disintegration
As a result of all these wars the kingdom of the Loango in the north gained independence from Kongo. Also new kingdoms came to existence of which the Téké was the most important, ruling over a large area encompassing present-day Brazzaville and Kinshasa. Portugal's position in Europe suffered a major change in 1580 when the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were united by a personal union under King Philip, creating the Iberian Union which lasted until 1640. This resulted in a diminished role for Portugal in African affairs, including the area around the mouth of the Congo River. The Kingdom of Kongo was reduced to a small enclave in the north of Angola with King Pedro V in 1888 finally accepting to become a vassal of the Portuguese. The Portuguese abolished the kingdom after the revolt of the Kongolese in 1914.
French rule
Scramble for raw materials The period leading up to the Berlin Conference on Africa saw a rush by the major European powers to increase their control of the African continent. The rise in Western Europe of capitalism and the consequent industrialization led to a fast-growing demand for African raw materials like rubber, palm oil and cotton. Those who had these raw materials could have their economy grow strong. Others would lose out. This resulted in a new and more intensified scramble for Africa.
The Congo River hereby was a prime target for this new conquest by the European nations. Here the French, the Belgian King Leopold II and the Portuguese, in close cooperation with the British, fought for control of this area. Resulting in the division of the mouth of the Congo River between Portugal, who obtained Cabinda, an enclave north of the Congo River situated on the Atlantic Coast, the French who seized the large area north of the River, and king Leopold II gaining only a small foothold at the mouth of the Congo River but obtaining the huge hinterland, the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaïre). Hereby Leopold II obtained control via his International African Society and later the International Congolese Society, so-called philanthropic organizations who hired the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish its authority. This resulted in the creation of the Congo Free State, the private empire of Leopold II. On November 15, 1908, the Belgian parliament annexed the colony, the reign of Leopold II over the Congo being discredited.
Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza On the north bank of the river arrived the French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, born in the Italian city of Rome in 1852. As a French naval officer he refused to work for the International African Society and instead helped the French in their conquest of the area north of the Congo River. Traveling from the Atlantic Ocean coast in present-day Gabon via the rivers Ogooué and Lefini he arrived in 1880 in the kingdom of the Téké where on 10 September 1880 he signed the treaty with King Makoko establishing French control over the region and making his capital soon afterwards at the small village named Mfoa later to be called Brazzaville.
Establishing control Establishing French control was difficult. Belgian King Leopold II also tried to gain a foothold on the northern bank of the Congo River and sent Stanley to the area around Brazzaville. Following this was a series of revolts against the French of which the Bahangala Revolt led by Mabiala Ma Nganga was the first important one. It started in 1892 with the murder of the French administrator Laval and ended with the killing by the French of its leader in 1896. Many of the revolts were the result of French policy of maltreating the local population through the use of harsh forced labor. The locals were governed through the use of the repressive Code de l'indigénat Act. A law, which introduced forced labor, made it illegal for the local population to publicly air its grievances and excluded them from all the important jobs.The French government allowed for the establishment of the so-called Concessionary Companies in 1889 so as to circumvent the economic non-discrimination provisions of the Treaty of Berlin and maximize the revenue drawn from underpopulated and undeveloped regions under their control. Roughly forty companies with a capital of roughly 59.5 million francs were given a free hand to exploit the colony's resources under virtual monopoly conditions. 650,000 square miles of land, except for a few strategic locations mainly around the Congo River, were leased as concessions for a thirty-year period. Cost-benefit considerations reigned supreme as often undercapitalized companies employed unqualified personnel and/or adventurers who lived off the land while stripping their concessions of all possible riches. Ivory and rubber virtually disappeared from the concessionary areas; indigenous populations were decimated by brutal forced labor, disease, and maladministration, and some fled to neighboring colonies.
French rule was brutal and led to many thousands of deaths. The construction between 1921 and 1934 of the 511 km long railway, the Chemin de Fer Congo-Océan between Brazzaville and Pointe-Noire is for example said to have cost the lives of around 23,000 locals and a few hundred Europeans. Any resistance against French colonial rule, however small, was brutally repressed. Ultimately the French government lost more money than it gained in rents and taxes from the Concessionary system upon which the colony had become reliant, and French public opinion was shocked by reports of the wide-scale brutalities which the system had given rise to. By 1930 most of the Concessionary companies had gone bankrupt and the practice had largely ceased.
In 1911 parts of the colony (the so-called New Cameroon territories) were ceded to the German Empire in exchange for German recognition of France's rights to Morocco. German rule in these regions lasted only five years, and ultimately the New Cameroon territories were seized back by France in 1916, after the fall of German forces in Kamerun.
French administration The first name given officially on 1 August 1886 for the new colony was Colony of Gabon and Congo. On 30 April 1891 this was renamed Colony of French Congo, consisting of Gabon and Middle Congo, the name the French gave to Congo-Brazzaville at that time. On 15 January 1910 the colony again was renamed to French Equatorial Africa (Afrique Equatoriale Française or AEF), this time it also included Chad and Oubangui-Chari, nowadays the Central African Republic. Congo-Brazzaville gained autonomy on the November 28, 1958 and independence from France on the August 15, 1960. The capital of the AEF was Brazzaville, for Middle Congo the capital was Pointe Noire.