DR Congo Emoji & Symbols

The flag of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is sky blue with a red diagonal stripe, edged in thin yellow, running from the lower hoist corner to the upper fly, and a yellow five-pointed star in the top left. The presidency describes the meanings this way: blue for peace, red for the blood of the country's martyrs, yellow for its wealth, and the star for a radiant future. This design dates from 2006. Before it, the country flew a blue flag with a large yellow star and six small ones, and in the Zaire years, 1971 to 1997, a green flag with a hand holding a flaming torch.

The DRC flag emoji 🇨🇩 is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇩, spelling CD, the country's ISO code; phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag. Country flags arrived on phones in 2015, so every current phone shows it. Windows is the exception: its own emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC the same character often appears as the letters CD, while the person you send it to on a phone sees the flag.

Watch out for the neighbour: 🇨🇬 (C + G) is the Republic of the Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, whose flag is green, yellow and red. Search "Congo" in a phone's emoji keyboard and both appear, labelled Congo - Kinshasa and Congo - Brazzaville. Where flags do not display, people rebuild the DRC flag from hearts: 🩵❤️💛, with ⭐ for the star. The light blue heart 🩵 only arrived with Emoji 15.0 in 2022, so older phones may not display it.

DR Congo national symbols: the leopard, the okapi and the river

The leopard 🐆 is a national symbol. It sits on the coat of arms, a leopard's head between an elephant tusk and a spear above the motto Justice – Paix – Travail, and it names the national football team, Les Léopards. The okapi, a forest animal with a giraffe's head and zebra-striped legs that lives only in Congo, is often named as the national animal. There is no okapi emoji; its closest relative, the giraffe 🦒, is a natural stand-in, and Radio Okapi, a widely listened-to news station, carries the name.

The Congo River gave the country its name. It is the deepest river in the world, with stretches over 220 metres deep, and the second largest by flow after the Amazon; it crosses the equator twice. People write it with 🌊, and with 🛶 for the dugout pirogues and ⛴️ for the crowded riverboats that still carry people and goods between Kinshasa and Kisangani. ⚡ is the Inga dams on its rapids. Kinshasa 🏙️, "Kin la belle", faces Brazzaville across the river, and with well over 15 million people by most estimates it is among the largest French-speaking cities in the world, bigger than Paris.

🕊️ and 🙏 are the emoji of the long hope for peace in the east of the country. In February 2024, before their Africa Cup of Nations semi-final, the Léopards stood for the anthem with one hand over their mouths and two fingers pointed at their temples, a protest against the violence in North Kivu. No emoji shows that gesture, so people post 🇨🇩🕊️ with #FreeCongo.

Congolese rumba, ndombolo and la Sape in emoji

Congolese rumba is the country's great gift to world music, and in 2021 UNESCO added it to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity, as a joint entry of the two Congos. Its sound is the bright, interlocking electric guitar 🎸, especially the fast sebene section where the dancers take over. From Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau to Papa Wemba, Koffi Olomide and Fally Ipupa, its stars sing mostly in Lingala. Its faster offshoots, soukous and ndombolo, filled dance floors across Africa. The emoji are 🎸🎶💃🕺, with 🎤 for the singer and 🥁🪘 for the drums.

La Sape, the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes, is the art of dressing sharply in Kinshasa and Brazzaville: designer suits in bold colours, a cane, perfect shoes, and a walk to show them off. Papa Wemba was its best-known champion. People caption it 🤵👔🎩🕶️👞.

Congolese food emoji: pondu, fufu and poulet à la moambe

Cassava is the base of the Congolese table. Fufu is a smooth, stiff dough of cassava flour, and chikwangue (kwanga) is fermented cassava wrapped and cooked in leaves. There is no cassava emoji: 🫜 (root vegetable) and 🍠 are the closest. Its leaves become pondu, a slow-cooked stew of pounded cassava leaves, often with dried or smoked fish, which reads as 🥬🐟.

Poulet à la moambe, chicken cooked in a sauce of palm nuts, is often called the national dish: 🍗🌴🍲, served with rice or fufu 🍚 and a little pili-pili, hot pepper 🌶️. Liboke is fish steamed in a parcel of leaves 🐟🍃, and makayabu is salted fish. Plantain 🍌, beans 🫘 and peanuts 🥜 are everyday sides, and in the caterpillar season people in Kinshasa buy mbinzo, fried caterpillars, the one food for which 🐛 is the honest emoji.

☕ stands for the coffee of the Kivu highlands by Lake Kivu, and 🍺🍻 for the big bottles of Primus and Simba shared at a nganda, the open-air bar where music and talk run late.

Football, boxing and basketball: ⚽ 🥊 🏀

Football is the national passion. The Léopards won the Africa Cup of Nations in 1968 and 1974, and as Zaire in 1974 they became the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to play at a World Cup. TP Mazembe of Lubumbashi has won the African Champions League five times and in 2010 became the first African club to reach the final of the Club World Cup. 🇨🇩🐆⚽ is the match-day combo, 🏆 for a win.

🥊 is the Rumble in the Jungle: on 30 October 1974, in Kinshasa, Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman to win back the world heavyweight title, a fight still remembered for the crowd's chant "Ali, boma ye!". 🏀☝️ belongs to Dikembe Mutombo, born in Kinshasa, eight times an NBA All-Star, who became known for wagging his index finger after blocked shots.

Congolese letters: French é è ç and Lingala ɛ ɔ

French is the official language and the language of school, government and newspapers; the DRC is the largest French-speaking country in the world by population, with about 59 million French speakers in CLDR's estimate. To write it you need à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô ù û œ and the quotation marks « ». On Windows, Alt+0233 gives é, Alt+0232 è, Alt+0231 ç, Alt+0171 « and Alt+0187 ». On a Mac, Option+E then E gives é, Option+` then E gives è, Option+C gives ç. On a phone, hold down the plain letter. The full set is on our French collection.

The constitution names four national languages: Lingala, the language of Kinshasa, the army and the music; Kiswahili, spoken across the east, by about 58 million people in CLDR's estimate; Kikongo in the west; and Tshiluba in the Kasai. Swahili, Kikongo and Tshiluba use plain A–Z. Lingala adds two vowels, open e ɛ Ɛ and open o ɔ Ɔ, as in matɔ́ndi, thank you. Tone marks (á, â, ǎ) appear in dictionaries and teaching texts but are usually left out in everyday writing, and many people type plain e and o on phones. Copy ɛ and ɔ from the grid, or use HTML ɛ for ɛ and ɔ for ɔ; the Lingala, Swahili, Kongo and Luba-Lulua collections cover each language in full.

The Congolese franc has no Unicode sign: it is written FC after the amount (5 000 FC), and its code is CDF. US dollars circulate alongside it for larger purchases, so $ and 💵 are everyday money symbols in Kinshasa.