DR Congo–Zambia border

Leopold’s Congo and the British sphere

The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 recognised King Leopold II of Belgium as head of the International Association of the Congo, renamed the Congo Free State in 1885. A declaration that year set its limits in this area as a straight line from Lake Tanganyika to Lake Mweru and then the watercourse from Lake Mweru to Lake Bangweulu.^[3][2]

In May 1894 Britain and Leopold agreed a new line in the northeast, running straight from Cape Akalunga on Lake Tanganyika, at about 8°15′ south, to the point where the Luapula river leaves Lake Mweru.^[3] Farther south, Britain was to have the land south of the Congo–Zambezi watershed and east of the Luapula, and Leopold’s state the land to the north and west.^[5]

“The frontier between the Independent Congo Free State and the British sphere to the north of the Zambezi shall follow a line running direct from the extremity of Cape Akalunga on Lake Tanganyika, situated at the northernmost point of Cameron Bay at about 8° 15′ south latitude, to the right [east] bank of the River Luapula [Luvua], where this river issues from Lake Moero.”^[3]

The Pedicle

The Luapula and the watershed do not meet, and the gap between them became the Congo Pedicle, a “little foot” of Congolese land reaching into what is now Zambia. Leopold’s agents had hoped to push through it to the fish- and game-rich Lake Bangweulu, but the lake stayed British.^[5]

The Pedicle splits Zambia into two lobes, and going around it is hard because the Bangweulu wetlands are in the way. After World War II Belgium let Britain build an unpaved road across it. When the state in Zaire, as the Congo was then called, began to break down in the 1970s, unpaid Congolese border guards extorted money from Zambian traffic on the road, and by 1975 the corridor was one of Lusaka’s most pressing concerns.^[5] Zambia built a 300 km bypass instead, the Samfya–Serenje road, with nearly 20 km of causeways across the wetlands, finished in 1983.^[5]

Between the lakes

The northern stretch was never settled cleanly. Nobody could agree exactly where Cape Akalunga was, and in 1965 the US Geographer noted Belgian and Northern Rhodesian maps putting the line’s end on Lake Tanganyika about five miles apart. A demarcation attempt in 1913 cut the fishing village of Pweto off from Lake Mweru, so an interim arrangement gave it back access to the lake.^[2]

Kinshasa and Lusaka set up a joint committee of experts in 1982, and a treaty signed in 1989 fixed about 200 km of border between the two lakes. The lake boundaries were not fully settled, and a Congolese government spokesman said in 2020 that the treaty still hadn’t been fully put into effect for lack of means to mark the line.^[6]

The armies clashed in the area in 1996, 2006 and September 2016.^[4] In March 2020 Zambian troops took up positions in villages on the Congolese side near Lake Tanganyika, and fighting killed one soldier on each side.^[6] A team of experts from the Southern African Development Community visited in July, and on 4 August the Congolese government said the Zambian troops had withdrawn and Zambia had recognised that the villages of Kalubamba and Kibanga belonged to the DR Congo.^[4][7]