Rwanda and Burundi

Th e present borders of Rwanda closely resemble those of the precolonial kingdom of the mwamis (“kings”), except in the Northwest, where Hutu kingdoms were annexed in the early 20th century. Burundi has never been centralized in the same way as Rwanda, and in the precolonial era, it was made up of many princely kingdoms. Th ey feuded, paid tribute, and rebelled against the Ganwa, a royal caste that oversaw this messy, shifting assemblage. Rwanda, by contrast, was a unitary system of obligation, allegiance, and tribute, with an overarching and complex system of chiefdoms, stratifi ed into regions, localities, and hillsides. Th e Burundian capital, Bujumbura, located on Lake Tanganyika, became the major urban, administrative, and commercial city of Ruanda-Urundi under Belgian Trusteeship from the 1920s onward. Here, the East African trading language, Kiswahili, started to be spoken alongside French and Kirundi, which is the sister language of Kinyarwanda, spoken in Rwanda alongside French and, since 1994, alongside English as well. ...

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