In North Kivu and Ituri, the Congolese intelligence services, army and Wazalendo militias have been carrying out raids on Maasai itinerant vendors. One vendor was burned alive in public on 2 September.
“We had become accustomed to being insulted all the time. We were called snakes and things like that. Until then, we didn’t realise that these insults were actually serious and could lead to such things”, says Ole, a Tanzanian itinerant salesman who was recently expelled from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Uganda after being arrested, detained and mistreated for several weeks. “We wonder why no one around us or in the rest of the world is concerned about what is happening to us”, he asks. Hailing from a region straddling the border between Tanzania and Kenya, the Maasai are recognisable by their traditional shúkà — a large piece of cloth, usually red, which they wrap around themselves. Many Maasai men travel throughout East Africa selling sandals and small leather goods.
Around 20 August 2025, the ANR (Congolese National Intelligence Agency) and the Congolese armed forces, supported by the Wazalendo militias (“the patriots” in Kiswahili), launched operations to hunt down the Maasai in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri in eastern DRC. These operations resulted in mass arrests. On 2 September 2025, a young Kenyan street vendor was lynched and burned alive in public. The events most likely took place in Mambasa, Ituri. African Facts went to meet these Maasai people and investigate this escalation of racism.
From roundups to lynching
Isaya is a Maasai street vendor from Tanzania. “In August, they started arresting us wherever we were and taking us to the ANR offices. The Wazalendo were involved in these operations. We were arrested and locked up indiscriminately, whether we were Kenyan or Tanzanian, simply because we were Maasai”, he says to African Facts. Since a presidential decree in November 2023, the name Wazalendo has referred to a myriad of armed groups whose members are now officially recognised as “reservists”. “There is no peace in this country. We can be arrested at any time without investigation or regard for our real activities”, Isaya regrets.
A video filmed in Butembo during the raids is circulating rapidly on WhatsApp groups. It shows seven Maasai sitting squeezed together in the back of a pick-up truck, flanked by two standing soldiers while four others surround the truck bed. “They’re going to be too crowded in there”, observes a man speaking in Kiswahili. “They all have to get in! Let them get in! If they don’t understand, we’ll beat these Maasai!” shouts an officer in Lingala, the official language widely spoken in the west of the country and commonly used in the regular army.
On the same day, a participant in a WhatsApp group for Congolese soldiers, to which African Facts had access, informed his colleagues in Lingala: “Many people working with the M23 walk around pretending to sell sandals, but they’re actually gathering information. They go into Butembo and Beni, and then report back to their leaders. They are even in restaurants. We must be careful”.
The unfortunate are taken to the premises of the intelligence services. “At the ANR, we were mistreated. They did awful things to us. They hurt us. They told us, ‘We’re going to burn you because you’re bringing war here'”, one of them recalls with horror. “I was lucky enough to be helped by immigration officials in Butembo, who took me to Uganda. But another group of about seventeen Maasai were arrested after me and imprisoned by the ANR”, Isaya explains.
Following strong pressure from the Tanzanian embassy, the Congolese authorities finally deported some of these Maasai to Uganda. African Facts spoke with some of them. “We were arrested in Butembo. The Wazalendo accompanied the soldiers. They work so closely together that it’s not always easy to tell them apart. We were taken to a military camp in Beni, where we were locked up for three weeks. Sometimes the Wazalendo came to the camp to register us. When we left, they took us to prison again. They separated us. Some of us went with the ANR for three days before being deported to Uganda. The rest of us stayed with the soldiers”, says Ole, who acts as spokesperson for his companions. He recounts their ordeal with some embarrassment. “I don’t know how to put it. We were really mistreated there; I even wondered if I would ever see my country again. The ANR was there too when the soldiers started hurting us. We were treated this way for about a month. I don’t feel very comfortable talking about it. Fortunately, we got out alive, but what we went through was really horrible”.
African Facts attempted to contact the authorities in Butembo, but they did not respond to our requests.
Some Maasai are even less fortunate. They are forced to take alternative routes and venture deep into the hinterland. Some end up in Mambasa, a town in the Ituri province located almost 200 km north of Butembo on the edge of the Okapi Wildlife Reserve — the last refuge of the eponymous mammal.
However, Mambasa is plagued by other Wazalendo militias. On 2 September 2025, the remote town is hit by the surge of racist violence, and events take a dramatic turn.
A local resident films the scene. In the middle of a dirt road junction, white smoke rises from a fire fuelled by a small pile of green wood, from which two legs protrude. The legs are moving. The man buried in this makeshift pyre is still alive. “He can’t stand up. He can’t get up”, one of his tormentors rejoices. “He’s still breathing!” exclaim the mothers and children gathered around the pile of branches that is stirring. The unfortunate man tries to free himself and sit up, prompting squeals of excitement, laughter, and applause from the children and onlookers. His face, which emerges with difficulty, is swollen and covered in blood. Immediately, one of his torturers covers him with more branches. “Don’t put out the fire! Don’t put out the fire!” another urges. The victim died in this manner, burned alive in front of an audience that was either laughing or indifferent.
In a WhatsApp group of local residents consulted by African Facts, a woman addresses one of her friends on the same day. “Hi there! How are you? Fine? The event is still going on in Mambasa. We’re catching people who are walking around selling shoes, even though they’re with the M23. We’re burning one of them”, she explains calmly.
“We know that at least one of us has died, but we haven’t been able to gather all the information yet because we fled in all directions”, Ole laments. “Normally, when we travel, we wear our traditional outfits and move around together. But these events have scattered us, and now we find ourselves dispersed and isolated from each other. Many of us have even taken off our traditional outfits and changed into different clothes, trying to escape all this. Some have even had to flee into the forests…” While most Tanzanian nationals appear to have been released and deported, the fate of the Kenyan Maasai who were in the DRC at the time remains unknown.
“The snakes are infiltrating us”
At first glance, it seems that one man is behind this tragic series of events: Benoit Muhindo Mukumbatiya. He is currently a colonel in the Wazalendo and leads one of its militias, the Rapid Action Force (FAR-W). This armed group is linked to Muhindo Nzangi, the current MP for Goma and Minister of Rural Development of the DRC. Since 2022, Nzangi has led his own party, Action of Volunteers for Patriotic Renewal (AVRP), of which Mukumbatiya was initially in charge of mobilisation. When contacted by African Facts, neither Mukumbatiya nor Nzangi responded.
On 20 August 2025, Colonel Mukumbatiya released a video from Butembo in which he spoke in Kiswahili, the lingua franca of eastern DRC. His message was very clear: “Alert! Alert! Alert! Alert! To the people of Butembo, Beni, Lubero and everywhere else where there is war. The population is in danger because of the Maasai shoe sellers. I am alerting all traders in Butembo and Beni, and all those who rent out hotel rooms to these people: we are warning you in advance so that you cannot claim ignorance. If we find them, we will close all the doors and put padlocks on them”, he threatens. He claims that the trade carried out by the “foreign” Maasai is illegal and detrimental to the “indigenous” population. He also believes that the Maasai lead an overly extravagant lifestyle during their stay, which he feels is unrelated to their work as street vendors. He toughens his tone. “We will inform all neighbourhood chiefs and their subordinates that they must keep track of who is coming in and out. They must monitor everyone who visits and find out who they are and what their motives are. Because snakes are infiltrating us. We are warning you so that the snakes do not bite people. Be careful!”
The broadcast of this filmed statement by Colonel Mukumbatiya is accompanied by an explicit message announcing the imminence of an operation with an eloquent name: “Luka wapi Massai” (Look for the Maasai). It ends with a slogan in Kiswahili: “Hange nyoka isiku lume”. This dehumanising and evocative phrase, which means ‘Kill the snake before it bites you’, has become a rallying cry for xenophobic activists and militiamen in the region for several years now. Initially, it stigmatised people identified by them as Tutsi.
Just three days after Colonel Mukumbatiya’s video was released, on 23 August 2025, the ANR, the military, and the Wazalendo launched their operation to hunt down and arrest Maasai people in Butembo.
While Benoit Mukumbatiya’s responsibility is beyond doubt, the Maasai observed and perceived the origins of their persecution differently. “It started in Butembo. The people from the ANR office were the first to spread the idea that their enemies would infiltrate the place through the Maasai. They formed groups and began to damage our reputation, portraying us as something we are not. They said that we were bad people who brought war and treated us as enemies. We were even accused of wanting to kill the population”, says Isaya, who agrees on this point with the twelve other members of his community who were interviewed by African Facts.
Beneath Benoit Mukumbatiya’s seemingly uncontrolled speeches, Congolese intelligence services may well have been pulling the strings. The collusion between the ANR and the militiamen is corroborated by the accounts provided to African Facts by numerous Maasai who have escaped the country.
Metastasis of tropical Nazism
“I don’t understand how the people of this country see things. We are Maasai. We travel to many different countries to trade. But this country is really in disarray. It’s a problem. We were asked what tribe or ethnicity we belonged to and what we were doing there. We were told that we weren’t wanted. The problem with this country is that people only think through the lens of ethnicity. They reduce you to that and attack you for it. We always respect the culture of the countries we travel through, but we really don’t understand why this country works like that”, regrets Ole. Now, he and some of his fellow travellers have resigned themselves to avoiding the DRC. “Of all the countries we visit, it’s the only one with such problems. We would like this country to be at peace, but if they can’t achieve it, we can just travel elsewhere”.
This racist culture was imported into the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) by Rwandan genocidaires who fled there with their families, weapons and belongings in 1994. It flourished to the point of becoming hegemonic in Congolese culture, representations and discourse. Developed and carefully nurtured by the Rwandan intellectual elite, this ideology caused the deaths of a million people during the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Today, this ideology is supported and even endorsed by the authorities in Kinshasa, who have turned it into a fetish by mobilising the population against a supposed “internal enemy” embodying radical alterity and adversity.
“We don’t blame ourselves for anything. We don’t carry weapons and we don’t hold grudges against anyone. We feel like we’re being manipulated, but without understanding why”, says Isaya, sounding distraught. Through the Maasai, it is the presence, conceived as abstract, elusive, mobile and universal, of those whom this ideology considers a real and immediate danger and designates as “Hamites” that is in fact being targeted. Like the Tutsi of Kivu and the Hema of Ituri, the Maasai embody and crystallise the deep anxieties that these militants have instilled in the Congolese population over the past three decades. In this fetishised form, the Maasai cease to be seen as the modest, peaceful civilians they actually are and can therefore treated as mortal “enemies” who must be eradicated.
The use of the same rhetorical devices and coded language, usually employed against the Tutsi, during recent events shows that their proponents are applying them more broadly, and they are bound to spread to other individuals and regions that have so far been spared. Events such as the lynching in Mambasa are made possible by political and military forces in this region of central Africa that promote a reactionary and deeply racist worldview and have unprecedented resources at their disposal.