Community conflict creeps close to DRC

TENSIONS over land between two communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is gradually morphing into an armed conflict that has reached the outskirts of the capital, Kinshasa.

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WOMEN wait with their children for the distribution of school supplies provided by the women-led NGO Woman Power DRC.

(AFP)

It started with a dispute between tenant farmers and landowners, spread to involve spiritual rituals and then led to actual fightinlg with guns and machetes.

The conflict in the fertile Bateke plateau region, about 70km northeast of the DRC capital has been smouldering for nearly four years and has already claimed several thousand lives.

Little about it reaches the outside world, overshadowed as it is by the violence raging in the east of the vast central African country since the resurgence in late 2021 of anti-government armed group M23.

On one side are the Teke, whose members consider themselves to be the original inhabitants and owners of the villages located along a 200km stretch of the Congo river.