The DRC is an illustration of why the catchall term developing world is far too broad-brush a way to describe countries that are not part of the modern industrialized world, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):
The DRC is not developing, nor does it show any signs of doing so. The DRC should never have been put together; it has fallen apart and is the most underreported war zone in the world, despite the fact that six million people have died there during wars that have been fought since the late 1990s.
The DRC is neither democratic nor a republic. It is the second-largest country in Africa with a population of approximately 75 million, although due to the situation there it is difficult to find accurate figures. It is bigger than Germany, France, and Spain combined and contains the Congo Rainforest, second only to the Amazon as the largest in the world.
The people are divided into more than two hundred ethnic groups, of which the largest is the Bantu. There are several hundred languages, but the widespread use of French bridges that gap to a degree.
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When the Belgians left in 1960 they left behind little chance of the country holding together.
The civil wars began immediately and were later intensified by a blood-soaked walk-on role in the global Cold War. The government in the capital, Kinshasa, backed the rebel side in Angola’s war, thus bringing itself to the attention of the United States, which was also supporting the rebel movement against the Soviet-backed Angolan government. Each side poured in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of arms.
When the Cold War ended, both great powers had less interest in what by then was called Zaire, and the country staggered on, kept afloat by its natural resources.
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In 2014, the United Nations’ Human Development Index placed the DRC at number 186 out of 187 countries it measured. The bottom eighteen countries in that list are all in Africa.
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The region is also bordered by nine countries. They have all played a role in the DRC’s agony, which is one reason why the Congo wars are also known as “Africa’s world war.”
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The wars have killed, at a low estimate, tens of thousands of people and have resulted in the deaths of another six million due to disease and malnutrition. The UN estimates that almost 50 percent of the victims have been children under the age of five.
In recent years, the fighting has died down, but the DRC is home to the world’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War and still requires the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission to prevent full-scale war from breaking out again. Now the job is not to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because the DRC was never whole. It is simply to keep the pieces apart until a way can be found to join them sensibly and peacefully.
My favorite niche conspiracy theory is that the DRC’s population numbers are totally fraudulent. The country is said to have a population of >100M. But look at it via satellite imaging — even with Google Maps — and it very quickly becomes apparent that there’s no possible way this can be the case.
Kinshasa alone is said to have 17M people, but this is completely impossible. It’s low-rise sprawl, and there’s not really that much of it. A satellite imaging estimate gives 1.3M people, with an absolute max (unlikely) at 3M. Realistically, it has 10x fewer people than they claim it has.
There’s also not much evidence of farming in the DRC. Very small-scale subsistence stuff, solely. And, again, not that much of it. If there’s a large rural population, they’re living under tree cover like Ewoks.
And, basically, the population figures are a foreign aid grift. Same goes for Nigeria, BTW, though it’s not quite as extreme.
“Now the job is not to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, because the DRC was never whole. It is simply to keep the pieces apart until a way can be found to join them sensibly and peacefully.”
Thoughtless conformity to lines arbitrarily drawn on a map do not lead to peace. Diversity + proximity = war.
Why should Africa not have their own version of the Westphalian doctrine of a country for every nation?