Burundi

Rwanda's twin in structure and its mirror in outcome, with mass killings that ran in the opposite direction. Burundi was a kingdom with the same Tutsi, Hutu and Twa categories and the same Belgian administration, governed jointly with Rwanda as Ruanda-Urundi and separating at independence on 1 July 1962. Where Rwanda's monarchy fell to a Hutu revolution, Burundi's Tutsi minority kept control of the army and the state, and the killings that followed were largely of Hutu by the government - in 1972 the army killed somewhere between one and two hundred thousand Hutu, targeting the educated in particular, in what is widely described as a genocide and which is far less known internationally than Rwanda's. The assassination of the first elected Hutu president in 1993 began a civil war that killed around three hundred thousand over twelve years, ending with the Arusha agreement's ethnic quotas in government and the army. Pierre Nkurunziza's third term in 2015 broke that settlement and drove hundreds of thousands abroad. The country is among the poorest in the world by income per head. Gitega became the political capital in 2019, replacing Bujumbura. Coffee is the main export. The country has about thirteen million people in twenty-seven thousand square kilometres. Kirundi, French and English are official. It is landlocked and sits on the northeastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Drumming at Gishora is recognised by Unesco and was historically a royal preserve. The country shares its language and much of its structure with Rwanda, and the two are mutually intelligible.

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