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Christianity is the largest religion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and is professed by a majority of the population. According to the 2020 Report on International Religious Freedom, an estimated 48.1% of the population are Protestant (including evangelical Christians and the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth) and 47.3% are Catholic ...
The Kingdom of Congo. The Catholic Church arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo shortly after the first Portuguese explorers reached its shores in 1483. The Portuguese left several of their own number and kidnapped a group of Kongo including at least one nobleman, Kala ka Mfusu, taking them to Portugal where they stayed a year, learned Portuguese and were converted to Christianity.
For earlier history see Catholic Church in Kongo.. The church's penetration of the country at large is a product of the colonial era. [4] The Belgian colonial state authorized and subsidized the predominantly Belgian Catholic missions to establish schools and hospitals throughout the colony; the church's function from the perspective of the state was to accomplish Belgium's "civilizing mission ...
The ancient history of the Kongo people has been difficult to ascertain. The region is close to East Africa, considered to be a key to the prehistoric human migrations. This geographical proximity, states Jan Vansina, suggests that the Congo River region, home of the Kongo people, was populated thousands of years ago. [19]
The Land beyond the Mists: Essays on Identity and Authority in Precolonial Congo and Rwanda. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 978-0-8214-1875-8. Harms, Robert (1981). River of Wealth, River of Sorrow: The Central Zaire Basin in the Era of the Slave and Ivory Trade, 1500-1891. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300026160.
Zaire, [c] officially the Republic of Zaire, [d] was the name of the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1971 to 18 May 1997. Located in Central Africa, it was, by area, the third-largest country in Africa after Sudan and Algeria, and the 11th-largest country in the world from 1965 to 1997.
Free people within the country were obliged to pay taxes on their persons, the extent of land they cultivated, the number of slaves they possessed and the livestock they owned. Royally appointed officials governed at the provincial and village level; they collected taxes and carried out judicial tasks in the king's name.
However many people in the country many of whom are Muslim are not native-born and not included in government statistics. [2] According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2007 the people of the Republic of the Congo were largely a mix of Catholics (33.1%), Awakening/Revival churches (22.3%), Protestants (19.9%), and none (11.3%).