The kingdom of the drums
Like Rwanda, pre-colonial Burundi was an old, centralised kingdom under a mwami, with Hutu, Tutsi and Twa sharing the Kirundi language and a common culture. Its distinctive institution was the royal drum: the karyenda drums were sacred objects tied to the king's legitimacy, and the ritual drummers of Gishora are now a UNESCO-recognised cultural tradition.
Germany claimed the territory in the 1890s and Belgium took over during the First World War, running Ruanda-Urundi as a single mandate. As next door, the Belgians rigidified ethnic categories and governed through a favoured elite, storing up the divisions that would detonate after independence.
1972: the hidden killing
Burundi became independent on 1 July 1962. Where Rwanda's revolution had put Hutu in charge, Burundi's monarchy and then its republic remained dominated by a Tutsi military elite. In 1972, following a localised Hutu uprising in the south that killed thousands of Tutsi, the Tutsi-led army launched a systematic reprisal against Hutu — targeting the educated in particular, teachers, civil servants, students.
Estimates of the dead range from roughly 100,000 to over 200,000, with hundreds of thousands more fleeing to Tanzania. Scholars have called it a genocide against the Hutu. It was carried out with little international protest and remains far less known than Rwanda's 1994 catastrophe, though it shaped a generation of Burundian politics.
1993 and the long war
A cautious opening led to Burundi's first democratic election in 1993, won by Melchior Ndadaye, the country's first elected Hutu president. Within months, in October 1993, Tutsi soldiers assassinated him. The killing triggered a civil war between Hutu rebel movements and the Tutsi-dominated army that ground on for over a decade and killed an estimated 300,000 people.
The Arusha peace process, mediated in part by Nelson Mandela, eventually brought a power-sharing settlement and a transition. Pierre Nkurunziza, a former rebel leader, became president in 2005. His decision to seek a disputed third term in 2015 set off a fresh crisis: an attempted coup, a crackdown, hundreds killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.
A closed and struggling state
Nkurunziza's government withdrew Burundi from the International Criminal Court in 2017 and squeezed the press and civil society hard. He died suddenly in 2020 — officially of a heart attack, amid the pandemic — and was succeeded by Évariste Ndayishimiye, another figure from the ruling CNDD-FDD.
The Burundi that remains is desperately poor, dependent on subsistence farming and coffee, chronically short of electricity and fuel, and near the bottom of global income tables. Its politics are quieter than in the crisis years but no more open, and much of its recent history is still contested and unmourned.