Honouring an African Country: Democratic Republic of Congo

The African Cultural and Development Association (ACDA) honours an African country annually in celebration of Emancipation Day. This is done because most Guyanese of African descent cannot trace their ancestral roots to a particular African nation.
In choosing a particular African country to highlight every year, ACDA seeks to educate young and old about African countries and to remind them that Africa has 54 countries and is not a single country like China or India or the United States.

Traditionally, ACDA honours an African country every Emancipation Festival by building an educational booth for that country. This year, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) was chosen as it is the second largest country in Africa with a very rich history and culture, something ACDA will proudly showcase during the observance of this year’s Emancipation Day.
DR Congo is a vast country with immense economic resources. It is for this fundamental reason that the African Cultural and Development Association has selected DR Congo as the country of focus. This country, which is located in Central Africa, shares many parallels with Guyana; it has a vast natural resource wealth which enables most of the world’s technology to exist. In addition, the Congolese people that reside in Guyana are direct descendants of settlers who came to Guyana as indentured labourers after slavery. DR Congo and Guyana share a common past. Due to their similarities, their futures may as well be aligned.
With one of the largest populations in Africa, spread across a huge area, the people of DR Congo are made up of many hundreds of different groups, speaking a variety of Bantu languages. It is the second largest country on the continent.
With over 215 different mother tongues, the DR Congo is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. More than 250 ethnic groups have been identified and named, of which the majority are Bantu. The four largest groups – Mongo, Luba, Kongo (all Bantu) – and the Mangbetu-Azande make up about 45 per cent of the population.

Although 700 local languages and dialects are spoken, the linguistic variety is bridged both by the use of French and the intermediary languages, such as Kongo, Luba-Kasai, Swahili, and Lingala.
The capital, Kinshasa, is located on the Congo River about 320 miles (515km) from its mouth. The largest city in central Africa, Kinshasa serves as the country’s official administrative, economic, and cultural centre. The country is often referred to by its acronym DRC or called Congo (Kinshasa) with the capital added parenthetically to distinguish it from the other Congo republic, which is officially called the Republic of the Congo and is often referred to as Congo (Brazzaville).
Most of Congo lies within the inner humid tropical, or equatorial, climatic region extending five degrees north and south of the Equator. Southern Congo and the far north have somewhat drier subequatorial climates. The seasonally mobile inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) is a major determinant of the climate. Along this zone, the trade winds originating in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres meet, forcing unstable tropical air aloft. The air that is forced upward is cooled, and the resulting condensation produces prolonged and heavy precipitation.
At independence in 1960, the formal economy of Congo was based almost entirely on the extraction of minerals. The abundance of minerals in Katanga province was among those factors that attracted European powers to Congo in the 19th century. Minerals found in Katanga include copper, cobalt, zinc, cassiterite (the chief source of metallic tin), manganese, coal, silver, cadmium, germanium (a brittle element used as a semiconductor), gold, palladium (a metallic element used as acatalyst and in alloys), uranium, and platinum. The region west of Lake Kivu contains cassiterite, columbotantalite, wolframite (a source of tungsten), beryl, gold, and monazite (a phosphate of the cerium metals and thorium). Lake Kivu also harbours vast reserves of methane, carbonic, and nitrogen natural gases. There are deposits of iron ore and gem-quality diamonds in south-central Congo, while the central regions are rich in industrial diamonds. In the northeast, there are gold, coal, and iron-ore deposits; there are prospective deposits of gold.
For more information on DR Congo, contact ACDA on 225-8420 or visit the Emancipation Festival on Tuesday, August 1, 2017 at the National Park. (Text provided by ACDA)