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Zaire GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENT
The Republic of Zaire is the second largest country of
subSaharan Africa, occupying some 2,344,885 square
kilometers. It is
roughly the size of the United States east of the
Mississippi
River.
Most of the country lies within the vast hollow of the
Congo
River basin. The basin has the shape of an amphitheater,
open to
the north and northwest and closed in the south and east
by high
plateaus and mountains. The edges of the basin are
breached in the
west by the passage of the Congo River to the Atlantic
Ocean; they
are broken and raised in the east by an upheaval of the
Great Rift
Valley (where lakes Mweru, Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward, and
Albert are
found) and by overflow from volcanos in the Virunga
Mountains.
Data as of December 1993
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