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.
