This is the script for my video posted on May 27, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
If you zoom in on a map of east Africa, you might notice two little countries tucked between Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Uganda. Beyond being surrounded by far larger countries, Rwanda and Burundi also look like a single country that’s been split in half. So why are Rwanda and Burundi small, separate, and surrounded?
First let’s look at some geography. Rwanda and Burundi sit within the Albertine Rift, where two tectonic plates are moving away from each other to create a deep valley flanked by mountains. The East African Rift System is why there are so many lakes in the region, and the divide between the Congo and the Nile runs north to south through the highlands of western Rwanda and Burundi.
The combination of fertile volcanic terrain, year-round rainfall, and defensible hill country meant that a relatively small territory could sustain a large population, which is why the kingdoms of Burundi and Rwanda were able to form. Rwanda’s founding period was sometime in the 16th or 17th centuries, during which a highly centralized state formed around Tutsi chiefs and a military system where males were recruited at a young age into organized militias tied to royal patronage.
Burundi’s founding dates have similarly conflicting sources, but the general consensus is that it also emerged sometime in the 16th or 17th centuries as a kingdom, whose descendants became the Ganwa, an aristocracy who constituted a distinct social category from the common Tutsis and Hutus. Four main Ganwa lineages emerged, and their rivalries were Burundi’s main political fault line both before and throughout the colonial period.
You might have noticed that Rwanda and Burundi have some shared social groups like the Hutus and Tutsis. But when it came to actual political power, Rwanda had highly institutionalized authority for the Tutsi monarchical class while Burundi had a far more complex and fluid political environment under the Ganwa, whose identity was separate from either the Hutus or the Tutsis. The kingdoms fought intermittently in the 18th and 19th centuries but neither came out on top, and the geography made any kind of conquest very expensive. There was no easy way to project centralized power across hundreds of fortified ridges in enemy territory, so the kingdoms never joined together.
But at the 1884 Berlin Conference, European powers regulated colonization and trade in Africa, and for the next several decades they claimed nearly every corner of the continent, carving strange new borders and forcing previously disparate peoples into the same political entity. This period was called the Scramble for Africa, and when it eventually came to Rwanda and Burundi, the two countries fell under German East Africa. Rather than completely overhauling the colonies, Germany chose to rule as a suzerain, basically maintaining the existing monarchies and ruling through them.
In 1916, Belgium conquered Rwanda and Burundi and began administering them as a single territory for practical reasons, but they remained internally distinct. Notably, this period saw the Hutu and Tutsi identities, which had always been flexible categories of class and occupation, harden into racial identities instead by mandating identity documents. Until the 1950s, Belgium preferred Tutsis in Rwanda, but an outbreak of Tutsi nationalism aligned with anti-colonial and pro-independence movements led Belgium to favor Hutus in power instead. In Burundi though, it backed the Christian Democratic Party, or PDC, which accepted Belgian tutelage, and this asymmetry baked divergent political trajectories into the two countries long before independence came.
By late 1961, when independence was just on the horizon, the two countries had already gone in opposite political directions. Rwanda had experienced a republican revolution, while in Burundi Crown Prince Louis Rwagasore won a landslide election on a multi-ethnic nationalist platform that might have kept Hutus and Tutsis unified under the monarchy. Two weeks into his term as prime minister, he was assassinated by operatives of the Belgian-backed PDC, derailing the project of multi-ethnic unity and locking Burundi into a fragile monarchical path. A UN commission convened in 1962 in Addis Ababa to try to engineer a single federated state, but Burundi’s monarchy refused to be joined to Rwanda’s anti-monarchical Hutu republic, and Rwanda’s new Hutu government refused to share power with the Tutsi-led monarchy next door.
We all know that most modern African borders are colonial, including those of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was once Belgian Congo, Tanzania, which was a merger of German-ruled Tanganyika and British Zanzibar, and Uganda, which was joined from several kingdoms by the British. Rwanda and Burundi are different. They are genuine pre-colonial polities that have kept roughly the same pre-colonial boundaries through the centuries. Their small size reflects the fact that they are direct continuations of pre-colonial kingdoms whose hill-country geography made expansion very costly. Most modern African borders were drawn by Europeans aggregating many smaller societies into one state. Rwanda and Burundi are unusual in that their borders trace polities that already existed.
Keep reading
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- Why is Spain an African country?
- Why does Uganda’s military decide who rules the country?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.