Institut National des Archives du Congo (INACO)

Overview

The Institut National des Archives du Congo (INACO) is the national archives of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, headquartered in Kinshasa. It is one of thirteen cultural and scientific institutions under the supervision of the country's Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage.

History

Congolese archival law traces to Law No. 78-013 of July 11, 1978, which established the Archives Nationales du Congo (ARNACO) and required all public institutions to transfer records older than thirty years to the national archive. The archive was reorganized by ordinance n° 89/027 of January 26, 1989 as the Archives Nationales du Zaïre (ARNAZA), later renamed Archives Nationales de la République démocratique du Congo (ARNACO) following the country's 1997 renaming. Decree n° 15/022 of December 9, 2015 restructured the institution into its current form as INACO. The archive's central repository has occupied a Kinshasa site designated by the colonial administration for archival use as early as 1958. In 2019 the U.S. Department of State financed a renovation of the INACO facility, and the institution has since partnered with Belgium's State Archives on digitizing shared colonial-era records.

Collections, Holdings, and Publications

INACO holds a collection of roughly 3,000 volumes classified according to the principle of provenance (respect des fonds) in chronological order, gathering written and audiovisual documents of historical, scientific, and cultural interest from public institutions and private individuals. Its holdings include colonial-era military court records, such as files relating to the Force Publique, which have been preserved at the archive's central repository since 1981 and are the subject of ongoing joint digitization projects with Belgian archival institutions.

Access and Usage

INACO's mission is to gather, preserve, classify, inventory, and communicate documentation on the Democratic Republic of the Congo in accordance with prevailing archival standards, serving researchers studying the country's colonial and post-independence history.