It is a city in Northwestern DRC 🇨🇩, situated near the Congo River, and they have an entire market that sells all sorts of dried fish and other meat products.
They are among the world’s experts at drying and smoking fish.
Mbandaka was founded in 1883 by British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who named it “Équateurville”. (At the time the territory was under the personal rule of King Leopold II, king of the Belgians and the official language was French.)
The town hall is about 4 km (2.5 miles) north of the equator. Mbandaka is one of the closest to the equator of any substantial city in the world. Stanley placed a large “Equator Stone” near the riverbank south of the city to mark the point where he believed the equator crossed the river. It remains there till now. Due to its symbolic location close to the equator and the Congo River, there were early plans to locate the capital of the Congo Free State in Coquilhatville, as the city was then called, but they never came off the drawing board. These plans included infrastructure for an estimated population of a hundred thousand people, a train station, a Catholic cathedral, a governor’s residence, and a palace for future visits of King Leopold II of the Belgians.
In 1886, at the beginning of colonial rule, the Belgians changed the city’s name to “Coquilhatville” naming it after Camille-Aimé Coquilhat.
