The history of Burundi

Burundi, a small, densely populated highland country between Lake Tanganyika and the Nile-Congo watershed, was for more than two centuries a kingdom ruled by a sacred monarch, the mwami, and a princely aristocracy. Unlike most African states, its modern borders closely follow those of the pre-colonial kingdom. Germany and then Belgium ruled it from the 1890s to 1962, and colonial policies hardened the distinction between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa into fixed ethnic categories. Independent Burundi suffered repeated cycles of political violence, above all the mass killings of 1972 and 1993 and a civil war that lasted until the early 2000s, before a power-sharing settlement and, since 2005, the long dominance of one ruling party.

The forests and hills of the region were first inhabited by the Twa, a hunting and gathering people related to the forest peoples of Central Africa, whose descendants today form a small and marginalised minority. Bantu-speaking farmers arrived as part of the Bantu expansion, bringing iron tools and the cultivation of sorghum, finger millet and beans; ironworking sites in the wider Great Lakes region date back more than two thousand years, and farming populations grew steadily in the fertile, well-watered highlands from around the 11th century. Cattle-keeping communities also settled in waves. Over centuries these groups intermarried and came to share a single language, Kirundi, a single religion centred on the god Imana, and the same hills.

The terms Hutu and Tutsi already existed in the pre-colonial period, but their meaning was fluid. They were associated with occupation, wealth and status as much as descent: Tutsi were linked with cattle and power, Hutu with farming, and a prosperous Hutu could rise into Tutsi status, while a Tutsi who lost his herds could slip into the Hutu category. Historians still debate how far the groups had different origins. What is clear is that they were not separate nations living in separate territories, and that the sharpest division in the kingdom ran between the royal princes and everyone else.

A Burundian state seems to have taken shape in the 16th or 17th century on the eastern foothills of the mountains above the Rift Valley, and then expanded by absorbing smaller neighbouring chiefdoms. Its founding is clouded in tradition. The founder is remembered as Ntare Rushatsi, "the hairy lion", sometimes also called Cambarantama. One cycle of stories links him to Rwanda to the north; another, which many scholars find more convincing, brings the founders from Buha in what is now Tanzania. The date most often given for his unification of the northern and southern centres of the kingdom is about 1680.

The kings took regnal names in a repeating cycle: Ntare, Mwezi, Mutaga and Mwambutsa. The mwami was a sacred figure whose health was bound up with the fertility of the land, and the annual umuganuro festival of the sorghum harvest renewed that bond. Royal drums, kept in sanctuaries by hereditary guardians, were the emblems of kingship; the great drum Karyenda stood for the monarchy itself, and the drumming and dance performed at royal ceremonies survive today as one of the country's best-known traditions. In practice the mwami's power was shared with the ganwa, princes of royal blood who governed provinces almost as independent lords. Successive reigns produced new branches of ganwa, and the rivalry between them, particularly between the Batare and the Bezi, was a constant source of conflict. Below the ganwa were chiefs and notables, then ordinary Hutu and Tutsi households linked to patrons by cattle contracts and tribute, with the Twa at the bottom. Local disputes were settled by the bashingantahe, councils of respected elders whose authority rested on reputation for integrity.

The kingdom reached its height in the 19th century. Ntare IV Rutaganzwa Rugamba, who reigned from about 1795 to the early 1850s, waged wars of expansion that roughly doubled its size, pushing into lands now in Rwanda and Tanzania, and by 1850 the realm largely matched the borders of modern Burundi. His son Mwezi IV Gisabo, who reigned from 1852 to 1908, held the throne for more than half a century. He faced rebellions from his own brothers and from rival princes, and for much of his reign controlled directly only part of the kingdom, governing the rest through ganwa of uncertain loyalty.

Mwezi's reign coincided with the spread of the East African ivory and slave trade. Caravans financed from Zanzibar and led by Swahili and Arab traders established bases along Lake Tanganyika, and in the 1880s raiders loyal to the trader Rumaliza attacked Burundian territory. The mwami's armies repelled them, and Burundi, like Rwanda, was one of the few societies of the region that kept the slave caravans largely out of its interior. European explorers also passed through: Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke reached the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1858, and Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone explored it in 1871.

In the Scramble for Africa the kingdom was assigned to the German Empire as part of German East Africa in 1890, although no German official had yet arrived. The Germans set up a military post at Usumbura, the future Bujumbura, on the lake shore in the 1890s. Mwezi IV refused to submit, and the Germans backed a rival, Kilima, who set himself up as a counter-king. In 1902 and 1903 German troops attacked the mwami, and under the Treaty of Kiganda in 1903 Mwezi accepted German overlordship in return for recognition as the rightful king. Germany thereafter ruled indirectly through the monarchy, with very few officials on the ground. Catholic White Fathers missionaries, who had first attempted a mission in 1879 and lost three priests to a killing in 1881, built a network of missions from the late 1890s. Famines and epidemics struck repeatedly in the early colonial decades, and the western plains suffered particularly heavy losses.

During World War I Belgian troops from the Belgian Congo invaded and occupied Gitega in 1916. After the war the League of Nations placed Burundi and Rwanda together under Belgium as the mandate of Ruanda-Urundi, formalised in 1923; after World War II it became a United Nations trust territory under Belgian administration. The young mwami Mwambutsa IV had come to the throne as a child in 1915, and a regency governed in his name.

Belgian administration reshaped the kingdom. In the late 1920s and 1930s it merged the many small chiefdoms into fewer and larger ones, removed most Hutu chiefs and handed power overwhelmingly to ganwa and Tutsi, whom colonial officials and missionaries regarded, under now-discredited racial theories, as a natural ruling caste. Ethnic labels were recorded by the administration and became far more rigid. Forced labour, compulsory crop cultivation, including coffee for export, and head taxes weighed on peasant households, and many Burundians migrated to work in Uganda and Tanganyika. At the same time Catholic missions converted most of the population, and Christianity and mission schooling produced a new educated elite, both Hutu and Tutsi.

As the decolonisation of Africa gathered pace, the nationalist party UPRONA, led by Prince Louis Rwagasore, the mwami's eldest son, built a broad Hutu and Tutsi following. It won about 80 per cent of the vote in elections in September 1961, but on 13 October 1961 Rwagasore was shot dead in Usumbura by a gunman linked to the rival Christian Democratic Party, whose leaders were from the Batare princely branch. His death removed the one figure who might have united the country. Burundi became independent on 1 July 1962 as a constitutional monarchy, separating from Rwanda, where the Hutu revolution of 1959 to 1962 had abolished the Tutsi monarchy and driven tens of thousands of Tutsi into exile. Events in Rwanda deepened fears on both sides in Burundi.

The early years of independence were unstable. In January 1965 the Hutu prime minister Pierre Ngendandumwe was assassinated. After elections that year gave Hutu candidates a majority in the National Assembly, Mwambutsa IV appointed a ganwa prime minister, and in October 1965 Hutu army and gendarmerie officers attempted a coup. It failed, and its suppression was followed by the killing of many Hutu politicians and soldiers. Mwambutsa fled to Europe. In July 1966 his son deposed him and took the throne as Ntare V, but in November 1966 the prime minister, Captain Michel Micombero, overthrew Ntare and abolished the monarchy.

Under Micombero, power concentrated in the hands of a Tutsi-dominated army drawn largely from the Hima of the south. On the night of 29 April 1972 Hutu insurgents launched attacks in the south and around Bujumbura, killing perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 Tutsi and Hutu who refused to join them. The same night the former king Ntare V, who had returned from exile, was killed in Gitega. The government's response, from April to August 1972, was a systematic campaign by the army and the UPRONA youth wing against the Hutu population, and especially against its educated members: teachers, students, priests, civil servants and soldiers were taken from their homes and killed. Estimates of the dead range from about 100,000 to 300,000, and some 300,000 people fled, mostly to Tanzania. The killings are known in Kirundi as the Ikiza, "the great calamity". Scholars describe them variously as genocide or as a "selective genocide" aimed at Hutu elites; in 2025 the Burundian government asked the United Nations to recognise them as genocide.

Colonel Jean-Baptiste Bagaza seized power in 1976 and ruled for eleven years, promoting state-led development but clashing bitterly with the Catholic Church. Major Pierre Buyoya overthrew him in 1987. In 1988 massacres in the northern communes of Ntega and Marangara, first of Tutsi by Hutu and then of Hutu by the army, killed thousands. International pressure pushed Buyoya to include more Hutu in government and to open the political system, and a new constitution in 1992 introduced multiparty elections.

In June 1993 Melchior Ndadaye of the Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU) defeated Buyoya to become the first Hutu president, and Buyoya accepted the result. On 21 October 1993 Tutsi army officers killed Ndadaye in a coup attempt. Hutu peasants and local officials then massacred Tutsi civilians across the country, and the army killed Hutu in reprisal; tens of thousands died within weeks. A United Nations commission later concluded that acts of genocide had been committed against Tutsi in 1993. Ndadaye's successor, Cyprien Ntaryamira, died on 6 April 1994 when the plane carrying him and the Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down over Kigali, the event that began the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

Burundi slid into a civil war between the Tutsi-led army and Hutu rebel movements, chief among them the CNDD-FDD and the FNL. In July 1996 Buyoya returned to power in a second coup, and neighbouring states imposed sanctions. The war killed an estimated 300,000 people. Negotiations in Arusha, mediated first by the former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere and after his death by Nelson Mandela, produced the Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement in August 2000. It provided for a transitional government, ethnic quotas in the government, parliament and army, and the integration of rebel forces. The CNDD-FDD signed a ceasefire in 2003, and the 2005 constitution set out the power-sharing rules, though the FNL kept fighting for several more years.

Elections in 2005 brought the CNDD-FDD to power, and its leader, the former rebel Pierre Nkurunziza, became president. He was re-elected in 2010 after the opposition boycotted the vote. In 2015 his decision to seek a third term, which opponents said breached the Arusha accords and the constitution, set off months of protests in Bujumbura. A group of officers declared a coup in May 2015 while he was abroad, but it collapsed within days. Hundreds were killed in the crackdown that followed, and several hundred thousand people fled to neighbouring countries. A United Nations commission documented serious human rights abuses, and in 2017 Burundi became the first country to leave the International Criminal Court.

A 2018 referendum lengthened the presidential term, and the political capital was moved from Bujumbura to Gitega, the old royal centre, in 2019. Nkurunziza did not stand in 2020; his chosen successor, Évariste Ndayishimiye, won the election in May, and Nkurunziza died in June 2020. Burundi remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Relations with Rwanda have been tense. When the M23 rebels captured Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in January 2025, escalating the war close to Burundi's border, thousands of Burundian soldiers were fighting alongside the Congolese army in South Kivu. In parliamentary elections in June 2025 the CNDD-FDD took about 97 per cent of the vote and every elected seat; the opposition rejected the results as fraudulent.