Free France’s African capital still carries Brazza’s name
Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of the Congo, faces Kinshasa across the Congo River and holds more than 2.1 million residents—over a third of the nation. In World War II it served as Free France’s de facto capital; UNESCO named it a City of Music in 2013.
Before the French, two trading towns, Mfwa and Mpila, stood here within the Tio kingdom of the Eastern Teke. Brazza, an Italian-born explorer who had become a French citizen in 1874, founded the post on 10 September 1880 on a Bateke settlement called Ncuna, after the Tio king Iloo I signed a protection treaty. A small squad under Senegalese sergeant Malamine Camara then held the site until 1882 to keep it from King Leopold’s men across the river.
The town became capital of the French Congo in 1904 and of French Equatorial Africa in 1910, which also took in Gabon, Chad, and the Central African Republic. The Congo–Ocean Railway to Pointe-Noire, opened in 1934 to bypass the river’s rapids, cost more than 17,000 African lives. Refusing Vichy rule, the city became the seat of Free France from 1940, with a house built for de Gaulle, and in 1944 it hosted the conference behind the Brazzaville Declaration on France’s ties with its colonies.
Brazzaville lies 506 km inland at 317 metres, just below the Pool Malebo, and the Livingstone Falls downstream block navigation to the sea. It is the only place where two national capitals grew up facing each other across a river; Kinshasa is more than five times its size, and the flight between them takes five minutes. A bridge project was agreed in 2018.
Wars in the 1990s killed thousands and drove hundreds of thousands from the city. The 2023 census counted 2.15 million people. It hosts the World Health Organization’s Africa office, the 26,000-student Marien Ngouabi University, and the Poto-Poto School of Painting.
Source: Brazzaville
