Kingdom of Burundi

The Kingdom of Burundi, Ubwami bw'Urundi, was a Bantu kingdom of the African Great Lakes whose rulers, the Ganwa monarchs holding the title of mwami, governed both Hutus and Tutsis. Its origin is lost in oral history: Twa foragers lived there first, Bantu farmers came from about the eleventh century, and cattle pastoralists that tradition names as the ancestors of the Tutsi, while the farmers became the Hutus. Many small dynasties coalesced around two centres, one in the north and one in the south, until the first mwami Ntare I, who is said to have brought rain and ended a famine, unified them around 1680, the commonly accepted founding date. The kingdom survived European occupation almost intact: Germany folded it into Ruanda-Urundi in 1916 after taking Gitega, and in 1922 the League of Nations assigned it to Belgium, whose administration kept the throne while imposing forced labour and taxes. Independence returned in 1962 as a constitutional monarchy, but an attempted Hutu coup in 1965, Mwambutsa IV's flight, the July 1966 coup of his son Ntare V and the November 1966 coup of Prime Minister Michel Micombero ended the throne after less than an independent decade.