East Africa’s mountain and savanna republic is famously densely peopled
Rwanda is a landlocked East African country of western mountains and southeastern savanna, with major lakes in the west and north and Virunga volcanoes on the borders. About 14 million people share 26,338 square kilometres. The name comes from a word meaning expansion outward from the centre, echoing the old kingdom’s growth.
Kigali, the capital, sits at the country’s centre 1,567 metres above sea level, within East Africa’s Great Rift Valley just below the Equator, and the tropical highland climate brings two rainy and two dry seasons a year. Uganda lies to the north, Tanzania east, Burundi south and the Democratic Republic of the Congo west. Early Iron Age settlers who made dimpled pottery were ancestors of the Twa foragers, and Bantu groups cleared forest for farms between 800 BC and 1500 AD.
King Gihanga’s realm absorbed its neighbours, and under the Nyiginya clan the Kingdom of Rwanda came to dominate from the mid-eighteenth century, reaching its widest extent under Kigeli Rwabugiri. His cattle-clientage system, ubuhake, and forced labour, uburetwa, widened the gap between Hutu and Tutsi. Gustav Adolf von Götzen crossed the territory to Lake Kivu in 1894, Germany allied with the king in 1897, and Belgium took over in 1916, issuing ethnic identity cards in 1935.
The 1959 revolution drove more than 100,000 people abroad, and independence on 1 July 1962 was followed by cycles of violence. After President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on 6 April 1994, between 500,000 and a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed in about 100 days, until the Rwandan Patriotic Front took the country by mid-July. An international tribunal and revived Gacaca village courts followed.
Tourism is now the leading source of foreign exchange, with coffee and tea the main cash-crop exports, and the country joined the Commonwealth despite no historical tie to the British Empire.
Source: Rwanda
