2. Why is French spoken there?
The official language of the DRC is French because the country was brutally colonised by Belgium in 1885, after King Leopold II persuaded the government to do so. They exploited the country's rich natural resources (such as minerals, ivory, coffee, tea, cotton), and enforced the French language on the indigenous populations as the lingua franca due to the high number of local languages present (many are still spoken today, but French is the language that connects them).