1959 Institut Geographique du Congo Plan of Leopoldville (Kinshasa)

An impressive 1959 large-format folding map of Léopoldville, now Kinshasa, produced by the Institut Géographique du Congo. It presents the city in the last days of Belgian rule, as anti-colonial tensions were building, resulting in the country's independence the following year.

A Closer Look

The map presents the entirety of contemporary Léopoldville, the capital of the Belgian Congo, which around this time had some 300,000 residents, making it one of the largest cities in Sub-Saharan Africa. A grid surrounds the map, and areas are color-shaded to reflect their use - yellow for residential, green for parks, and white for government offices, hospitals, schools, and the like, which are labeled. Streets are named throughout, and administrative divisions (city limits and limits of its constituent quarters), rail lines, and police stations are indicated according to a brief legend below the title. The N'Dolo Airport, the city's first airport, can be seen at the center towards top-right, while the N'Djili Airport, now Kinshasa's main international airport, opened the same year this map was published, just beyond the map's scope to the east.

Colonial and Anti-Colonial Capital

Léopoldville grew near several pre-existing settlements when explorer Henry Morton Stanley founded a trading post there in 1881, naming it after his employer, King Léopold II of Belgium. The city grew quickly as it was the first navigable port on the Congo River above Livingstone Falls (also known as the Congo Rapids), offering a transit point between the coast and the interior of the continent. Still, goods had to be carried to Matadi, near the Atlantic coast, an arduous journey of over 150 miles, until a railway was completed between Léopoldville and Matadi in 1898, enhancing the former's importance as a trading center. In 1926, the city was made the capital of the Belgian Congo, leading to a population boom as both Belgians and Congolese moved there to work for the government in various capacities.

The original late 19th-century urban plan of Léopoldville inscribed racial segregation on the landscape, though this proved difficult to fully maintain in practice. A new urban plan in the 1930s tried to reassert segregation, again to limited effect. Nevertheless, a clear distinction can be seen here between the White colonial neighborhoods with ample space, parks, and gardens and the much more cramped and haphazardly constructed 'indigenous' neighborhoods, some of which replaced earlier villages. These inequalities were a significant catalyst of anti-colonial sentiment in the years before this map's publication.

Publication History and Census

This map was prepared in 1959 by the Institut géographique du Congo with the assistance of the city's service du Cadastre. It is noted among the holdings of five institutions in the OCLC: the University of California Berkeley, Brigham Young University, Texas A and M University, the Library of Congress, and Princeton University.