A dense Great Lakes kingdom that outlived German then Belgian rule
Burundi, a landlocked country of over 14 million people in the Great Rift Valley, is one of the few African states that directly continues a precolonial kingdom. Lake Tanganyika forms its south-western edge, Gitega is the political capital and Bujumbura the economic one, and it is the world's poorest nation by nominal income per head.
Its neighbours are Rwanda on the north, Tanzania on the east, and on the west the Democratic Republic of the Congo. About 81 per cent of people are Hutu, 18 per cent Tutsi and under 1 per cent Twa, and in 2019 just 13.4 per cent lived in towns. Kirundi is the sole national language, with French and English also official. By 2005 trees covered less than 6 per cent of the land, more than half of it commercial plantation.
The kingdom took shape on the eastern foothills of the Rift Valley in the late sixteenth century and grew by swallowing neighbours. A king, the mwami, ruled over princes called ganwa, who held most land and took tribute from Hutu farmers and Tutsi herders. The line between Hutu and Tutsi was partly social: a Hutu who gained cattle could rise to Tutsi rank, and a Tutsi who lost his herd could fall.
Germany absorbed the territory into German East Africa, and Belgian forces had occupied it by 17 June 1916. In 1924 it became part of Ruanda-Urundi, a Belgian League of Nations mandate governed from Usumbura, though the monarchy survived. Prince Louis Rwagasore's UPRONA party won over 80 per cent in the first elections in September 1961, but he was murdered weeks later, aged 29. Independence came on 1 July 1962 as a constitutional monarchy under his father, Mwambutsa IV.
Coups in 1966 ended the monarchy, and Michel Micombero's one-party republic began decades of Tutsi-led military rule. Around 250,000 people died in conflicts between 1962 and 1993, including the 1972 killings of Hutus by the army and the 1993 killings of Tutsis, both judged genocides by an international commission. Melchior Ndadaye, the first Hutu president, was assassinated in 1993 three months after taking office, igniting a 12-year civil war.
Source: Burundi
