- Increasing numbers of Mbororo pastoralists and their cattle have settled in the northernmost provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the past two decades, fleeing conflict and seeking pasture for their livestock.
- In the DRC, like elsewhere, they have found themselves in conflict with local communities who accuse them of damaging farms and protected areas — and also allege the herders have violently attacked them.
- The tri-border area straddling the northern DRC, South Sudan and the Central African Republic has endured waves of armed conflict and banditry that strongly influence hostility toward perceived outsiders.
- Often lacking formal rights as they move and migrate across national boundaries, the Mbororo and other pastoralists across West and Central Africa are often regarded as outlaws by local communities and state authorities alike.
In May 2024, local media in the Democratic Republic of Congo reported that Mbororo herders had moved from the northern province of Bas-Uélé to neighboring Nord-Ubangi, signaling that ongoing tensions between the pastoralists and farming communities in this region continue to simmer.
Throughout 2023, civil society groups in another northern province, Haut-Uélé, told media about clashes with Mbororo herders, culminating in the reported abandonment of three villages in the territory of Dungu by their 2,000 residents in September, after two villagers were shot and killed, allegedly by the Mbororo.
Dungu territory administrator Marcel Abule Kpineliede told news outlet Actualite.cd that he had earlier asked the pastoralists to leave a hunting reserve that forms part of the Garamba National Park complex; he said they had agreed, moving into South Sudan in search of pasture, but then returned to the territory after the South Sudanese army pushed them back.
Léonard Adrupiako, coordinator of Forces-Vives, a civil society group in the Faradje territory, also in Haut-Uélé, said that as the pastoralists and their cattle migrate here, they’ve caused devastating losses to farmers’ fields, sparking conflict that sometimes leads to fatalities. “Cohabitation is really difficult,” he told Mongabay by phone, saying the Mbororo don’t respect the needs or way of life of the farming communities that they move their herds of livestock through.
While the perspectives of Mbororo herders are notably missing from these local media reports, Adrupiako’s sentiments are shared by others in area. In WhatsApp message groups, users exchange stories of conflict and urge each other not buy or eat meat from Mbororo cows. The administrator of Faradje, Emmanuel Madrandele Mandabah, came in for sharp criticism when he bought cattle from the pastoralists.
When he spoke to Mongabay in late May, Madrandele said the Mbororo had been forced out of the district earlier in the month, and had established themselves along the border with South Sudan.
He also said the relationships aren’t all about conflict. Local farmers sell food to the herders, who are able to pay higher prices than others in the area. He said Mbororo pastoralists pay 25,000-30,000 Congolese francs ($9-$11) for a bag of maize meal that would sell for 15,000-20,000 francs ($5-$7) on the local market. “The local population benefits from the presence of the Mbororo,” he said, while conceding that others would like to see them leave the region.
Strained relations
There are twinned stories explaining the patterns of migration by Mbororo groups. Félicien Kabamba Mbambu, a DRC researcher specializing in natural resources and climate, wrote a chapter about Mbororo groups for a 2015 book about inequality and climate change. He said that while changes in temperature and the growing season are affecting farmers across the Sahel, they are also imposing wholesale changes in long-established ways of life for pastoralists.
He said climate change has steadily pushed the Mbororo farther east, into the central part of Africa, first arriving in the DRC in the early 2000s, where they found pasture in the natural mix of savanna and forest that characterizes the provinces of Haut-Uélé, Bas-Uélé and Ituri.
Their arrival in the DRC, he wrote, produced a number of problems: “i) recurring land conflicts between farmers and herders, ii) conflicts between the two highly antagonistic modes of production [livestock herding and farming and], iii) problems of citizenship, given that the Mbororo define themselves neither as Congolese nor as foreigners, but rather as citizens of the world in search of pasture.”
Another perspective on the Mbororo presence in the DRC traces a century-long effort to maintain their way of life independent of external powers. In the 1920s, some groups moved east from what is now northern Nigeria and Cameroon to avoid taxation and incorporation by colonial authorities.
According to Lotje de Vries, a sociologist at Wageningen University & Research, in the Netherlands, they found peace and pasture on which to prosper in the relatively open spaces of what is now the Central African Republic, avoiding conflict with traditional authorities at the local level and staying conveniently out of sight of a weaker government of the Oubangi-Chari colonial territory.
But because these landscapes remained largely left to themselves by successive political authorities in Bangui, the CAR capital, the area also attracted increasing numbers of armed groups, bandits known as zaraguina, poachers and — under pressure from successive droughts — seasonal pastoralists from neighboring states.
De Vries, who studies how insecurity and overlapping forms of authority affect people in marginal territories, especially the CAR, the Sahel region and South Sudan, writes that over time the accommodation the Mbororo had found in the CAR broke down in the 1990s. “The Mbororo and their cattle have been a target and a victim of this increased competition [for control of frontier lands in the CAR] for decades. At the same time, increasing insecurity has gradually undermined their position in society. Conflict-mediation mechanisms have changed under the influence of weapons.”
By the time civil war broke out in the CAR in late 2012, many Mbororo groups had relocated to northern Cameroon and Chad; others, hoping to find fresh pasture to maintain their herds and way of life, moved east into the central part of the country.
But so did new and old armed groups, and some Mbororo kept moving — across the border into northern DRC.
Pressure on natural resources
Arriving in another part of the Central African region that has endured extensive conflict, they have not been welcome.
Writing in 2021, researcher Raphaël Tshimanga and his colleagues at the University of Kinshasa’s Congo Basin Water Resources Research Center (CRREBaC), said new patterns of migration have increased over the past 20 years due to climate change and the degradation of natural resources on the one hand, and an escalation of armed conflict on the other — with complicated consequences for the communities encountering each other in northern DRC.
“This trend weakens the balance and cultural exchanges between migrants and resident communities,” Tshimanga wrote. “In this north-eastern part of the DRC, local communities have already been paying a heavy price over the past three decades of armed conflicts and civil wars, internal displacement of populations, illegal exploitation and degradation of natural resources, lack of basic socio-economic structures, and acute poverty.”
CRREBaC conducted surveys and focus groups in the three DRC provinces now hosting Mbororo herders, asking 1,000 people (including herders, rural and urban residents, Indigenous peoples and others) questions about access to and control of resources, and their perceptions of climate change and migration. They heard that the growing and permanent presence of migration of tens of thousands head of cattle into the region https://www.crrebac.org/cemic-fiche-de-transcription-1 has placed significant pressure on water and other natural resources along their routes.
Efforts to chase the Mbororo out have waxed and waned over the past 20 years, echoing the conflict between herders and farmers seen Nigeria, Cameroon and elsewhere. The story of the Mbororo in northern DRC provides a window into the history and drivers of changes across a wide and understudied region at the center of Africa, braiding civil wars and smaller conflicts, poaching and banditry in a frontier zone where law enforcement is weak, and the rippling tensions that are rising as water supplies, forests and fertile land are transformed by climate change.
Some, like Léonard Adrupiako in the Faradje administrative territory, see a conflict that has been brewing for more than two decades threatening to boil over. Others, like Faradje administrator Emmanuel Madrandele Mandabah, acknowledge the tension, but see long-standing trade relationships as one sign that coexistence can continue. And still others, like researcher Raphael Tshimanga, say they hope scientific research will help plot a way forward.
CRREBaC’s 2021 survey was a vital contribution to a policy brief that recommended the creation of formal conflict-resolution committees at the local level; the clarification of the pastoralists’ legal status in all parts of the region, including raising public awareness of the economic role that herders play; and greater investment in basic services including water infrastructure, health care and climate-monitoring mechanisms to address climate impacts on pastoralists and farming communities alike.
To protect the planet’s rangelands, give pastoralists a boost, UN report says
Banner image: Mbororo herder. Image courtesy of Village Aid.
Citation:
De Vries, L. (2020). Navigating violence and exclusion: The Mbororo’s claim to the Central African Republic’s margins. Geoforum, 109, 162-170. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.03.014
A version of this story was originally published on our French website on Jun. 3 as Les éleveurs Mbororo entre hostilité, crise des terres et pression sur les ressources naturelles du bassin du Congo
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