Long before any European arrived, the area around Matadi was part of the state of Vungu, first mentioned in records from 1535 and reportedly destroyed by 1624. The Portuguese knew these reaches of the Congo well enough to carve inscriptions at the nearby Yellala rapids, but the falls and cataracts above Matadi formed a wall that kept outsiders from penetrating deeper into the continent for centuries. Henry Morton Stanley, who founded Matadi in 1879, recognized its strategic value immediately: it was the last point where ocean-going vessels could dock. Everything bound for the interior had to be offloaded here and carried overland past the rapids. That geographic bottleneck made Matadi the gateway to the Congo Free State and, eventually, one of central Africa's most important trading centers.

Between 1890 and 1898, the Matadi-Kinshasa Railway was built to bypass the 366 kilometers of unnavigable rapids between the port and the capital. The railway transformed Matadi from a transshipment point into a true commercial hub, connecting the deep interior to the sea. Coffee and timber flowed downriver and onto ships; manufactured goods traveled the reverse path. Portuguese and French West African commercial interests shaped the city's architecture, borrowing styles from neighboring Angola and Congo-Brazzaville. A monument to the builders of the railway stands on a nearby hill -- a reminder that the line's construction came at enormous human cost, with workers enduring brutal conditions to lay track through difficult terrain. Today the railway still operates, though the monument's silent presence speaks to a chapter of colonial history that no triumphal engineering narrative should be allowed to erase.

In 1983, a suspension bridge 722 meters long, with a main span of 520 meters, was completed just south of the city. Matadi Bridge carries the main road linking Kinshasa to the coast, and it holds a distinction that is difficult to grasp until you consider the scale of the Congo River: it is the only bridge over the main stem of the entire river. From Matadi, the road continues to Boma, Muanda, and the port at Banana on the Atlantic coast. Although the bridge was originally designed for both rail and road traffic, no rail line currently operates across it. The bridge is best appreciated from altitude, where its long cables arc over the brown water of a river that drains one-eighth of the African continent.

Matadi's port handles the bulk of the DRC's imports and exports, but nature imposes strict limits. The maximum draft is only 8.2 meters, meaning larger vessels must transfer their cargo to smaller ships at Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo before proceeding upriver. This constraint has long frustrated the country's trade ambitions, and in 2022, construction began on a deep-sea port at Banana, near the river's mouth, to bypass the limitation entirely. Until that project is complete, Matadi remains the nation's primary gateway -- a city of roughly 245,000 people whose power comes from a hydroelectric station on the M'pozo River, whose navy maintains an operational command in the harbor, and whose newspaper, La Cite africaine de Matadi, is published in French. Even in Belgium, a small garden city in the Leuven suburb of Heverlee was named after Matadi in the 1920s -- a quiet colonial echo, half a world away.