A brilliant young chap in the USA—let’s call him Thomson Kamara, the son of a dear friend—is off to university later this year to study African history. He wrote to me with a challenge:
“Give me an Idiot’s Guide to the DRC war. Explain the crisis as if I’m a 14-year-old in rural America—curious but clueless beyond finding the country on a map. Why are minerals such a big deal? Tell me something fresh, and please spare me the tangled colonial history.”
Here’s my reply:
Yes, minerals fuel the conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—but it’s not just about everyone grabbing them. Sometimes, it’s about some people not wanting them, though not for the reasons you’d first expect.
The DRC is often called the world’s most mineral-rich nation (and, tragically, its poorest), thanks to its staggering untapped wealth—estimated at $24 trillion. It is packed with resources the modern world craves: over 70% of global cobalt (essential for electric car batteries and gadgets), 30% of the planet’s diamonds, plus vast reserves of copper, gold, coltan (used in smartphones), lithium, tin, tantalum, uranium, and more. Many of these treasures lie in eastern DRC, where the fighting rages, and in central zones rich in gold and diamonds.
Look beyond the chaos, and you’ll spot a pattern among the 100+ militias battling in eastern DRC. They have four things in common:
- They hustle to protect big mining companies and earn a living.
- They act as violent Robin Hoods, skimming mineral profits for themselves.
- They function as ethnic cleansing squads, driving farmers and cattle herders (pastoralists) —mostly Congolese Kinyarwanda speakers—off their land to clear it for mining, often for provincial or Kinshasa officials, or foreign firms with licences but no functioning state to enforce them.
These evictions are brutal. Most people in these areas speak Kinyarwanda, a language shared with neighbouring Rwanda. Here’s your one colonial nugget: between 1884 and 1885 (the Berlin Conference), and then with adjustments in the early 20th century, European powers drew borders, incorporating Kinyarwanda-speaking regions of the old Kingdom of Rwanda into the Congo Free State (later Belgian Congo, then independent Congo). These communities—Hutu, Tutsi, Batwa etc., collectively Banyarwanda—ended up forming a majority in North and South Kivu.
To justify expelling these Congolese Kinyarwanda speakers from their land for mining, DRC’s ruling elite—and, oddly, former colonial powers like Belgium—have long peddled the lie that they are not “real” Congolese, stripping them of their rights. They want the people gone but their fertile, mineral-rich land kept—land these communities came with when they were forced into present-day Congo by a colonial deal they never agreed to.
Over decades, Congolese Banyarwanda—especially Tutsi—have formed groups to resist, from land rights movements to political campaigns against evictions and ethnic cleansing. M23 is the latest of these. You could say Congolese Tutsi don’t want the minerals because they are pastoralists, while Congolese Hutu don’t want them because they are farmers.
Then came a 20th-century bombshell that still fuels the fire. In 1994, during Rwanda’s war, Hutu hardliners in the government and military, along with the Interahamwe militia, slaughtered over a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu in the Genocide against the Tutsi. Why? Partly to cripple the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group of refugees fighting to return after nearly 35 years. The Hutu extremists believed that wiping out the Tutsi would deny the RPF a foothold and social base.
The RPF won anyway and has ruled Rwanda for 30 years. But the defeated Hutu regime fled to eastern DRC, setting up a mini-state-in-exile—complete with the central bank’s mint. They found an ally in Congo’s corrupt president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who allowed them to launch attacks on Rwanda. By 1996, Rwanda—and allies like Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Ethiopia—had had enough. They backed eastern Congolese rebels (many of them Kinyarwanda speakers) to march 2,500 kilometres to Kinshasa and topple Mobutu.
Post-Mobutu governments have wavered between hostility and uneasy alliances with their eastern Kinyarwanda-speaking citizens and Rwanda. M23 emerged from a 2009 peace deal with the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), which had been promised rights and government roles. In 2012, claiming Kinshasa had broken the pact and was targeting Tutsi, M23 rebelled, briefly seizing Goma—eastern DRC’s largest city—before being forced back and defeated. It returned in 2021, having learnt lessons from its first failure, and stronger, now controlling most of the Kivus, including Goma and Bukavu cities.
There are many threads, but so that this doesn’t go on too long, two major threads will be canvassed: Rwanda’s role and the Tutsi pastoralist factor. After the genocide, Rwanda’s old Hutu forces morphed into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) based in DRC, vowing to topple the RPF government in Kigali and eliminate Tutsi. They launched attacks on Rwanda from across the border, thus less frequently in recent years, prompting Kigali to respond with a muscular defensive posture at their common border. Though it denies backing M23 with troops (some claim up to 4,000), given the threat (with DRC President Felix Tshisekedi threatening to match on Kigali and effect regime change), it’s not unreasonable to think Rwanda is tipping the scales in the background.
Inside DRC, the FDLR became Kinshasa’s hired muscle, helping purge Tutsi pastoralists and Hutu farmers to clear land for mining—sometimes acting alone, sometimes alongside the DRC army or allied militias. They have slaughtered cattle, felled trees, and torched farms in a grim, underreported saga.
This has played out in a specific way with the pastoralists in the fully tropical part of Africa. First of all, pastoralists have a very different relationship with their cattle, than farmers have with their crops.
A cow’s gestation period is nine months; in that time, a bean farmer gets five harvests. Burn a farmer’s field, and he can replant tomorrow. Burn a pastoralist’s kraal and kill his herd, and he is ruined—perhaps for three years. Farmers flee with seeds and plant maize anywhere; pastoralists do not have that option.
Pastoralists invest daily effort into their cattle, forming bonds that farmers do not share with crops. In East Africa, they name their cows—think “Nyamurunga” (the beautiful one)—while farmers do not name banana trees. Historically, pastoralists have lost fertile land to farmers (a story for another day), so outside the full African tropics—like the Fulani in West Africa, the Borana Oromo in Ethiopia and Darod (Ogaden) Somalis – they roam mainly semi-arid, arid, and the less fertile lands to raise their cattle.
But in eastern DRC’s volcanic jackpot—fertile, cattle-friendly, and mineral-rich—pastoralists won the ecological lottery thrice.
If a Somali Darod fights tooth and nail for his herd and scrubby pasture, a militant strike among the Congolese Tutsi pastoralist fights three times as hard for this green paradise. Strip away all the distractions, and the war in eastern DRC boils down to a battle between cows and minerals. It might sound simplistic, but nothing sums it up more neatly.
