https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BurundiCaught up with the history of its neighbour, Rwanda, Burundi has an unusually long history for an African state. This is as it was a precolonial kingdom dating from the 17th Century before being subsumed (but kept separate) into the structure of German colonialism in Africa, and then into Belgium's once Germany had been expelled from the continent after WWI. This is also true of Rwanda and like Rwanda, its modern history has been dominated by the division of the country, which is otherwise linguistically and religious homogeneous, between two ethnic groups: The Hutu and the Tutsi. This is a division upon which so much dubious anthropology and other 'theorizing' both popular and academic has been based: the Tutsis are natural aristocrats with long noses and more refined posture, Hutus are shorter and stockier like peasants, the Tutsis are originally descendants of Northern Semites (and thus 'whiter') who migrated southwards degenerating themselves by miscegenation with the locals, the Hutus are the 'real' people of Africa. All believed by some at various points, all rubbish. Since independence from Belgium the country has been, to put it mildly, unstable and group relations fractious (putting it really mildly). There have been at least two recognized Genocides in the country since 1960, the first in the 1970s by Tutsi army officers determined not to let the country fall into 'Hutu Power' like Rwanda and the second in the 1990s by Hutu mobs against Tutsis after the country's first fairly democratically elected President (a Hutu) was assassinated by Tutsi extremists soon after his election. In between there were dictatorships, alliances with Maoist China, various forms of ethnic supremacy and a couple of coups. Yet that murder in 1993 sparked the worst of it, a 13 year civil war (which got caught up in the various wars going on in Africa at the time, including the largest and most famous of all these Hutu-Tutsi genocides, in Rwanda) which eventually saw a unity government formed in 2005. This has mostly been led by the Hutus (who are the majority at about 85% of the population and so would dominate any election) but has been conciliatory, the whole political system now designed to avoid a return to the fighting (so ethnic quotas, rotation in ministries, and so on). Whether they will be successful for long remains to be seen, there has already been unrest this year (caused, in the best autocratic tradition, by the current President announcing he will seek a third term of suspect constitutionality). Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world.
Below is a map of Africa at the end of the 18th Century, as you can see Burundi and Rwanda are on it, while very few of the other African states are still featured
