Ruanda-Urundi

Two ancient kingdoms administered as one Belgian mandate, and the place where a colonial theory of race did more damage than a colonial economy. Germany had claimed Rwanda and Burundi in the 1890s and ruled them lightly, through their existing monarchies; Belgium took them during the First World War and held them under League mandate from 1922 and UN trusteeship after 1945, administering them from the Congo next door. Both kingdoms already had a stratified society in which Tutsi, Hutu and Twa named categories that were partly occupational and partly permeable. Belgian administration hardened them into something else. Officials adopted the Hamitic hypothesis, held that the Tutsi were a superior race of foreign origin fit to rule, staffed the chieftaincies almost entirely with them, restricted schooling accordingly, and in the 1930s issued identity cards recording ethnicity - fixing by paperwork a distinction that had previously been able to shift. Then, in the late 1950s, Belgium changed sides, backing the Hutu majority as independence approached. The Rwandan revolution of 1959 to 1961 overthrew the monarchy, killed thousands of Tutsi and drove more than a hundred thousand into exile in Uganda and Burundi. The trusteeship ended on 1 July 1962, with the two kingdoms separating into Rwanda and Burundi. The refugee communities created in 1959 supplied the movement that invaded Rwanda in 1990, and the identity cards were still in use in 1994. Usumbura, now Bujumbura, was the administrative seat. Burundi kept its monarchy until 1966, four years longer than Rwanda. Its own mass killings, in 1972 and 1993, ran in the opposite direction to Rwanda's. The two countries have never been governed together since 1962.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration