Flag: Congo - Brazzaville Emoji

The flag of the Republic of the Congo, often called Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from its much larger eastern neighbor 🇨🇩 Congo-Kinshasa. A diagonal tricolor: green upper-hoist triangle, yellow diagonal band running lower-hoist to upper-fly, red lower-fly triangle. Ratio 2:3. Adopted on September 18, 1959, a year before independence from France, and restored on June 10, 1991 after a quarter-century under a socialist red flag.

The diagonal layout is rare among national flags; only Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, the DRC, and a handful of others use a similar design logic. Congo-Brazzaville's version combines this unusual geometry with the pan-African palette: green for the country's forests and farmland, yellow for friendship and Congolese nobility, red for the blood shed in the struggle for independence.

The Republic of the Congo is the smaller Congo. Around 6.1 million people, capital Brazzaville on the north bank of the Congo River, directly opposite Kinshasa (Africa's largest French-speaking city) on the south bank. It is the only pair of national capitals in the world facing each other across a river. The shared Congo River, a shared Lingala-and-French tongue, a shared rumba tradition, and a shared SAPE fashion subculture bind the two Congos culturally, even though they are different countries with different colonial heritages (French vs Belgian) and very different scales (6M vs 105M people).

🇨🇬 sits in the middle of the African flag-emoji ranking. The biggest social driver is the cross-river cultural continuity with Congo-Kinshasa: rumba, soukous, La SAPE, football rivalries. The emoji is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1E8U+1F1E8 (C) + U+1F1ECU+1F1EC (G). Added in Emoji 2.0 (2015). Platforms without flag support fall back to the letters CGCG.

Rumba Congolaise and soukous. Congolese rumba, the UNESCO Intangible Heritage music tradition inscribed in 2021, was jointly nominated by Congo-Brazzaville and the DRC. Brazzaville was the birthplace of many of the genre's founding figures alongside Kinshasa. Franco Luambo's OK Jazz, Papa Wemba, Youlou Mabiala, and many others moved fluidly between the two capitals. On social, 🇨🇬 shows up around classic-rumba mixes, new soukous releases, and tribute posts for figures like Tabu Ley Rochereau.

La SAPE. The Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes is as much a Brazzaville tradition as a Kinshasa one. Brazzaville sapeurs, often from Bacongo and Poto-Poto neighborhoods, dress in the sharpest Yamamoto, Louboutin, and Dior they can afford and promenade through the streets in choreographed elegance. Photographer Daniele Tamagni's 2009 book Gentlemen of Bacongo is one of the canonical visual documents. 🇨🇬 shows up regularly on fashion-adjacent Instagram.

Football: the 1972 AFCON. Congo-Brazzaville won the 1972 Africa Cup of Nations as hosts, beating Mali 3 to 2 in the final. The Red Devils (Les Diables Rouges) have never added to that trophy but remain a culturally significant team.

Diaspora. Roughly 300,000 to 400,000 Congo-Brazzavillois live abroad, concentrated in France (Paris's Château-Rouge, northern suburbs, and Marseille), Belgium, and secondary clusters in Italy and Canada. 🇨🇬 peaks around August 15 Independence Day, the June 10 Reconciliation Day (restoration of the flag and multi-party politics), and during major news cycles.

News-cycle weight. President Denis Sassou Nguesso has ruled Congo-Brazzaville for much of its post-1979 history (1979 to 1992, and 1997 to present), making him one of the longest-serving leaders in the world. Coverage of oil politics (Congo is Sub-Saharan Africa's 4th-largest oil producer) and the 1990s civil wars regularly feature the flag.

Free French history. Brazzaville served as the capital of Free France from 1940 to 1944 during World War II after the fall of Paris, a point of pride regularly surfaced in French-speaking African media.

• 🏙️
  Capital: Brazzaville (4.26°S, 15.24°E); faces Kinshasa, DRC directly across the Congo River
• 👥
  Population: ~6.1 million (2025)
• 🗺️
  Area: 342,000 km²; roughly the size of Germany
• 💵
  Currency: Central African CFA franc (XAF, FCFA); pegged 655.957 to 1 EUR
• 🗣️
  Languages: French (official); Lingala (Brazzaville) and Kituba (south and Pointe-Noire) as national languages
• 📞
  Calling code: +242
• ⏰
  Time zone: WAT (UTC+1), no DST
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .cg

Foods that show up next to 🇨🇬

Landmarks and cultural sites

From French Equatorial Africa to independence. The Republic of the Congo was part of French Equatorial Africa from 1910, with Brazzaville as the federal capital. During World War II, Brazzaville served as the capital of Free France from 1940 to 1944 after de Gaulle rallied the colonial administration against the Vichy regime. The famous 1944 Brazzaville Conference, chaired by de Gaulle, set the first post-war reforms for French Africa. Radio Brazzaville broadcast Free French speeches across Europe.

Independence and the flag. Congo-Brazzaville became an autonomous republic in the French Community on November 28, 1958, and fully independent on August 15, 1960. The diagonal green-yellow-red flag was formally adopted on September 18, 1959 under first prime minister Fulbert Youlou. The diagonal was unusual enough to give the country a distinctive visual identity immediately.

The Marxist interval, 1970 to 1991. After a 1968 coup, Marien Ngouabi's Congolese Workers' Party proclaimed the People's Republic of the Congo in 1969, one of the few formally Marxist-Leninist states in Africa. In 1970 the diagonal flag was replaced by a red flag with a hammer and hoe inside a yellow star in the upper-hoist. The socialist flag flew for 21 years. In June 1991, after the collapse of the single-party regime under Sovereign National Conference pressure, the original 1959 flag was restored. June 10 is still celebrated as Reconciliation Day.

The Sassou Nguesso era. Denis Sassou Nguesso first became president in 1979. He lost the 1992 multi-party election to Pascal Lissouba but returned to power through the 1997 civil war, backed by Angolan troops. He has ruled continuously since, making him one of the longest-serving heads of state in the world. Constitutional changes in 2015 removed term limits. Oil revenue, particularly from the offshore fields near Pointe-Noire, has underwritten the political system for decades.

The flag has survived. Despite coups, civil wars, a Marxist interval, and constitutional rewrites, the diagonal 1959 design has held the central place in Congolese symbolism. The 1991 restoration is itself one of the most celebrated moments in the country's modern history.

• 🤝
  June 10: Reconciliation Day: Marks the [1991 end of the socialist regime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_the_Congo) and the restoration of the current flag and multi-party politics.
• 🎉
  August 15: Independence Day: The year's biggest civic 🇨🇬 moment. Commemorates independence from France on August 15, 1960. Military parade through Brazzaville.
• 🇨🇬
  November 28: Republic Day: Marks the November 28, 1958 proclamation of the republic within the French Community.
• ✝️
  Good Friday / Easter Monday: Christian majority (~85%) observes. Public holidays.
• 🕯️
  All Saints' Day (November 1): Public holiday. Cemetery visits.

• •Brazzaville and Kinshasa are the only two national capitals in the world facing each other directly across a river, separated by roughly 1.6 km at the narrowest point of the Pool Malebo.
• •Brazzaville was the capital of Free France from 1940 to 1944 during World War II.
• •Congo-Brazzaville won the 1972 AFCON as hosts, beating Mali 3 to 2 in the Stade Omnisport final. It remains the country's only major football title.
• •The Poto-Poto School of Painting, founded in Brazzaville in 1951, shaped modern Congolese visual art and produced artists whose works hang in the Pompidou and MOMA.
• •Congo-Brazzaville's Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, part of the cross-border UNESCO Sangha Trinational, is thought to host the world's largest remaining population of western lowland gorillas.
• •The country was a formal Marxist-Leninist state from 1969 to 1991 under Marien Ngouabi and Denis Sassou Nguesso. The current flag was suspended for 21 years; a red flag with a hammer-and-hoe emblem flew instead.
• •Denis Sassou Nguesso has ruled for most of the post-1979 period (1979 to 1992 and 1997 onwards), one of the world's longest-serving heads of state.
• •The Congo-Ocean Railway, built between 1921 and 1934 at enormous human cost, runs 512 km from Brazzaville to Pointe-Noire and remains the country's main overland route to the Atlantic.

• •🇨🇬 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1E8U+1F1E8 (C) + U+1F1ECU+1F1EC (G). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2: CGCG.
• •Unsupported platforms render it as the letters CGCG.
• •Shortcode: :flag_cg::flag_cg: or :congo_brazzaville::congo_brazzaville: on most messaging platforms.
• •Don't confuse CGCG (Republic of the Congo) with CDCD (Democratic Republic of the Congo) in country-code lookups.

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