Congo 🇨🇬

Congo is a country in Middle Africa, one of the 10 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Republic of the Congo. Its seat of government is Brazzaville.

The population is about 6.3 million, placing it 112th of 249 by population — between El Salvador above it and Singapore below. Among the 10 entries in Middle Africa it ranks 7th by area and 6th by population.

The land area is 342,000 km², which ranks it 66th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind the Philippines and just ahead of Finland. For scale, it is almost exactly the same size as the Philippines.

Its reference point sits at 1.0° south and 15.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 111 km from the equator, in what geographers would call the equatorial belt.

The equator runs through or very close to it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Nauru.

It borders 5 neighbours: Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, DR Congo and Gabon. The largest of them by area is DR Congo, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 184.2 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Population divided by land area gives roughly 19 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

People from Congo are called Congolese.

3 languages carry official status: French, Kikongo and Lingala. French, the first listed, is shared with 45 other entries worldwide.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 36th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 2.8% of everyone living in Middle Africa.

Zoom in from the world to Middle Africa and Congo sits 6th of 10 by population and 7th by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is South Sudan just above and Central African Republic just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

DR Congo is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Middle Africa has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇸🇸 South Sudan
• 🇨🇫 Central African Republic
• 🇨🇩 DR Congo

Congo does not have the Central African CFA franc to itself. It is one of 6 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is XAF, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in XAF travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. French is listed for 46 entries here, Congo among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Congo ranks 66th of 249 by area and 112th by population. That works out at 0.23% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.078% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Congo in the size ordering are Philippines at 342,353 km² and Finland at 338,424 km², against Congo's 342,000 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Congo averages 19 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 209th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Money there is the Central African CFA franc (Fr, XAF). It shares that currency with Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Websites there use the .cg domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +242. Its ISO codes are cg and COG, which is what most databases and flag files use.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Congo, the answer is Brazzaville.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.