Stanley founded the settlement in 1883, during the period when the territory was under the personal rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. The city's symbolic location -- straddling the equator on the Congo River -- inspired ambitious plans. Leopold's administration envisioned making Coquilhatville, as the Belgians renamed it in 1886 after the colonial officer Camille-Aime Coquilhat, the capital of the Congo Free State. The blueprints were grand: infrastructure for 100,000 people, a train station, a Catholic cathedral, a governor's residence, and a palace for future royal visits. None of it materialized. The capital went elsewhere, and Coquilhatville settled into a more modest role as a provincial administrative center. But ambition left traces. In 1938, construction began on a bridge over the Congo River to connect with French Congo on the opposite bank. The Second World War halted the project, and only the foundations of the bridge pillars remain -- the stumps of an unrealized connection, visible from the river.

The Belgian colonial government invested in the city during the 1930s, building factories and commissioning a new city hall. Completed in 1947, the hall stood 39 meters tall -- the tallest building in the entire Belgian Congo. A statue of Leopold II was installed on its roof, a colonial statement visible across the city. The building survived independence in 1960, when the new government eventually renamed the city Mbandaka in 1966, honoring a prominent local leader. But the city hall did not survive 1963. A fire destroyed it, and with it went the most imposing piece of colonial architecture in the province. The city that Leopold once imagined as his equatorial showcase had lost its tallest landmark in barely sixteen years of independent existence.

In 1973, an American missionary named Millard Fuller arrived in Mbandaka to serve with the Disciples of Christ Church. What he started there would grow into one of the most recognized humanitarian organizations in the world. Fuller launched a housing project in Mbandaka that became the seed of Habitat for Humanity International. He returned to the United States in 1976 and formally founded the organization, but the model -- simple, decent housing built through community effort -- was born here, on the banks of the Congo, in a city most Americans could not find on a map. That the world's first Habitat for Humanity project began in Mbandaka says something about the city's paradox: extraordinary things can emerge from places the wider world has overlooked.

Mbandaka has not been spared the violence that has consumed the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On 13 May 1997, near the end of the First Congo War, hundreds of people -- mainly Hutu refugees, women, and children -- were massacred in the city. Congolese soldiers later testified that the orders came from Rwandan officers commanding brigades under Laurent-Desire Kabila's forces. The massacre was one of many atrocities documented during that conflict, adding Mbandaka's name to a long and terrible list. Disease has struck as well. In May 2018, an Ebola case was confirmed in the city after the virus spread from a rural outbreak, marking it as an urban case that epidemiologists called a "game changer" in the response. Another outbreak followed in June 2020. Years of war and neglect have degraded the city's infrastructure severely: large areas lack electricity or running water, and most streets are unpaved dirt roads.

Mbandaka endures. The city remains the capital of Equateur Province and home to a population largely drawn from the Mongo ethnic group, though people from many regions live here. Lingala, French, and Mongo are the languages of daily life. A four-to-seven-day river barge journey connects the city to Kinshasa, or you can fly in an hour. Seven kilometers east of the city center lies the Eala Botanical Garden, founded in 1900, which once held between 4,000 and 5,000 plant species across 371 hectares of forest, marsh, and savanna. Warfare and neglect have diminished it, but it remains one of central Africa's finest botanical collections. Ten kilometers east, the Catholic mission station of Bamanya houses a research center for Central African history, established by Fathers Gustaaf Hulstaert and Honore Vinck. Mbandaka is a city of unrealized plans and unexpected legacies, sitting almost exactly on the line that divides the planet in two.