Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Miserable Story of The Congo" video.

@Ben-ev5se Congo as a single country dates to just 1960. Without Belgian colonization (or some other European colonizer doing the same) it never would've been a single country. You'd probably have a country roughly matching the borders of the old Kingdom of Kongo in the southwest, another around the old Kingdom of Lunda in the southeast (ie the Katanga region, more or less), and probably two or more smaller countries to the north. Rulers (and the outside world supporting them) stubbornly trying to maintain the colonial borders is a big part of why Africa has struggled so much to recover from colonialism. Remember, the colonizers did not draw these borders to viable nations. Quite the opposite, they specifically drew them to not be viable nations.
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10:00 Ironically, this "change from French names to African names" largely resulted in names that were less authentically African. Including the name "Zaire" itself, which was actually a Portuguese corruption of "nzere" (the Kikongo word for "river").
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