Tshikapa is a city in Kasaï District

Kasaï District

Kasai District is a district located in the Kasai-Occidental province, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo....

 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a state located in Central Africa. It is the second largest country in Africa by area and the eleventh largest in the world...

. The city is located about 40 miles north of the Angola

Angola

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

n border and 120 miles west of province capital Kananga

Kananga

Kananga, formerly known as Luluabourg or Luluaburg, is the capital of Lulua District in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has a population of 1,130,100 ....

 at the confluence of the Tshikapa and Kasai rivers. According to records published by the Utrecht University library, the population of the city has grown from 38,900 in 1970 to 180,900 in 1994. However the two recent Congo wars

First Congo War

The First Congo War was a revolution in Zaire that replaced President Mobutu Sésé Seko, a decades-long dictator, with rebel leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Destabilization in eastern Zaire that resulted from the Rwandan genocide was the final factor that caused numerous internal and external actors...

have caused great flux in population rendering current figures unreliable. Tshikapa has been a site of diamond mining since its founding in the early twentieth century. The city was founded by Forminere, an American/Belgian mining consortium which discovered diamonds near this location in the early 1900's¹ Outside post-war Iraq Tshikapa has the densest source of satellite phone communications in the world due to the exploitation of the diamond mines.