Kinshasa city (state capital), history - - Pictures
Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley founded Kinshasa in 1881 as a trading depot on the Congo River. Stanley named the city Léopoldville after his patron, Belgian king Leopold II. The completion of a railroad to Matadi in 1898 initiated a period of rapid development of Léopoldville as a transshipment port for the Congo Free State (later known as the Belgian Congo). In the late 1920s Léopoldville replaced the coastal town of Boma as the capital of the Belgian Congo.
In 1960 the Belgian Congo gained independence as the Republic of the Congo (the country's name was changed to Zaire in 1971). A violent nationalist uprising accompanied independence and led to turmoil in Léopoldville. United Nations peacekeeping forces were stationed in the city to maintain order, and most of the European population left. In 1966 the city's European name was replaced with the African Kinshasa, after a 19th-century village that had stood at the site. Kinshasa hosted the 1967 Organization of African Unity summit and the 1982 Franco-African Summit.
