Congo River Congo River The great Congo River (also spelled Kongo River and known as the Zaire River; ; ; ) is the second longest river in Africa, shorter only than the Nile, as well as the second largest river in the world by discharge volume, following only the Amazon. It is also the world's deepest recorded river, with measured depths in excess of . The Congo-Lualaba-Chambeshi River system has an overall length of , which makes it the world's ninth-longest river. The Chambeshi is a tributary of the Lualaba River, and "Lualaba" is the name of the Congo River upstream of
White Nile Lake Kyoga to Lake Albert), the "Albert Nile" (to the South Sudan border) and then the "Mountain Nile" or "Bahr-al-Jabal" (down to Lake No). "White Nile" may sometimes include the headwaters of Lake Victoria, the most remote of which being from the Blue Nile. The 19th-century search by Europeans for the source of the Nile was mainly focused on the White Nile, which disappeared into the depths of what was then known as "Darkest Africa". The White Nile's true source was not discovered until 1937, when the German explorer Burkhart Waldecker traced it to a stream in Rutovu, at the