African Studies and African Country Resources @ Pitt: Burundi
This guide provides selected high-quality resources on the global, political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the continent of Africa and its countries. It features individual country pages as well as sources searchable by topic or country.
Burundi is Rwanda's twin, a small country in Central Africa with a complex history of ethnic tension between its Hutu and Tutsi populations and a deep familiarity with traumatic events, including the mass killing of over 200,000 people. Burundi was trapped in a state of civil war until 2004, after which Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela mediated a lengthy and eventually successful movement toward peace. Burundi's contemporary era has brought new institutions to the country, including a more open constitution, which led to the election of a majority Hutu government in 2005. Still, apart from ethnic tensions, many problems persist, particularly the entrenched poverty of most Burundians, which has led NGOs to call Burundi one of the most deprived countries on earth.