KINSHASA: 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.
It started with a dispute between tenant farmers and landowners, spread to involve spiritual rituals and then led to actual fightin1g with guns and machetes.
The conflict in the fertile Bateke plateau region, about 70 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of the DRC capital has been smoldering 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 200-kilometer stretch of the Congo river.
On the other side are the members of the Yaka community, farmers who settled there after the Teke.
In 2022, conflict broke out between the two groups when the Yaka rejected an attempt by Teke chiefs to raise the fee they charged for farming the land.
Tensions then escalated into “widespread violence,” according to Human Rights Watch.

- ‘Divine intervention’ -

Several thousand Mobondo militiamen, presented as members of the Yaka community, are thought to be involved in killings that continue in parts of Mai-Ndombe province, just northeast of the capital, despite army deployments in the region.
They take their name from “fetishes that protect against bullets,” engage in spiritual rituals and, according to survivors, believe themselves to be invulnerable.
They have been accused of several attacks in recent months, including one in November where 27 villagers were killed in the Mai-Ndombe village of Nkana, 75 kilometers from Kinshasa.
In early January, a 37-year-old Belgian-Congolese man was hacked to death by machete on his farm in Mbakana, just east of the capital.
His wife and two children escaped the attack, which has been blamed on suspected Mobondo fighters.
Two years earlier, university lecturer Jonathan Kwebe, eluded an attack in Mai-Ndombe. It was thanks to “divine intervention,” he told AFP.
He was on a bus with around 40 other passengers, including women and children, when they were ambushed on the road to the western town of Bandundu by Mobondo militias.
“They were armed with machetes, arrows and hunting rifles. They made us get off the bus and took us to their village. Then they said they’d behead everyone who was Teke,” Kwebe recalled.
Luckily, they were rescued at dawn by Congolese soldiers who had launched a raid against Mobondo fighters in Bandundu.
They fled on another bus along a road “littered with corpses,” the teacher recalled.

- Creeping closer to Kinshasa -

Currently, the Mobondo are active in all three provinces neighboring Kinshasa to the east.
Witnesses say violence has spread from village to village where the Yaka and Teke had previously coexisted peacefully.
The Mobondo have now extended their presence to the outskirts of the capital and even encroached on parts of Central Kongo, on the west side of Kinshasa, according to a report in November by the Danish Institute for International Studies.
The Bateke plateau, northeast of Kinshasa, is one of the capital’s main sources of farm produce — one reason why the Congolese authorities have made several bids to stem the spiral of violence.
But attempts to get the Yaka and Teke to negotiate have failed.
And a government campaign launched in January to encourage the Mobondo to surrender has so far resulted in the demobilization of only around 100 fighters, according to Deputy Defense Minister Eliezer Thambwe.
In February, as the threat drew closer to the capital, former deputy prime minister Peter Kazadi accused certain traditional chiefs of seeking to barter peace for cash.
It is hard to assess the toll from this poorly documented conflict.
In a report published in December, the DRC’s Diocesan Justice and Peace Commission calculated that more than 5,000 people had been killed and more than 280,000 displaced since the conflict began.