Tshikapa is the capital of Kasai, a province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and, a favorite city in Democratic Republic of Congo. The city is located about 190 km west of province capital Kananga and 64 km north of the Angolan border and at the confluence of the Tshikapa and Kasai rivers. The population of the city has grown from 38,900 in 1970 to 180,900 in 1994, according to records published by the Utrecht University Library. Tn the early 20th century, Tshikapa has been a site of diamond mining. The city was founded by Forminière, an American/Belgian mining consortium that discovered diamonds near this location in the early 1900s. Tshikapa has the densest source of satellite phone communications in the world due to the exploitation of the diamond mines, outside post-war Iraq.