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Geography
The Republic of Burundi (formerly Urundi) is a small nation in the Great Lakes region of Africa. It is bordered by Rwanda on the north, Tanzania on the south and east, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the west. Although the country is landlocked, much of its western border is adjacent to Lake Tanganyika. The country's name derives from its Bantu language, Kirundi.
History
Burundi existed as an independent kingdom from the 16th century. In 1903, it became a German colony and passed to Belgium in World War I. It was part of the Belgian League of Nations mandate of Ruanda-Urundi in 1923, later a United Nations Trust Territory under Belgian administrative authority following World War II. The origins of Burundi monarchy are veiled in myth. According to some legends, Ntare Rushatsi, founder of the original dynasty, came to Burundi from Rwanda in 17th century; other, more reliable sources, suggest that Ntare came from Buha, in the south-east, and laid the foundation for his kingdom in the Nkoma region.
Until the downfall of the monarchy in 1966, kingship remained one of last links that bound Burundi with its past. From independence in 1962, until the elections of 1993, Burundi was controlled by a series of military dictators, all from the Tutsi minority. These years saw extensive ethnic violence including major incidents in 1964, 1972 and the late 1980s. In 1993, Burundi held its first democratic elections, which were won by the Hutu-dominated Front for Democracy in Burundi (FRODEBU). FRODEBU leader Melchior Ndadaye became Burundi's first Hutu President, but a few months later he was assassinated by a group of Tutsi army officers. The killing plunged Burundi into a vicious civil war.
In retaliation for Ndadaye's killing, Hutu extremists massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsi civilians. The Tutsi-dominated army responded by massacring thousands of Hutus. Years of instability followed until 1996, when former president Pierre Buyoya took power in a coup. In August 2000, a peace-deal agreed by all but two of Burundi's political groups laid out a timetable for the restoration of democracy. After several more years of violence, a cease-fire was signed in 2003 between Buyoya's government and the largest Hutu rebel group, CNDD-FDD. Later that year, FRODEBU leader Domitien Ndayizeye replaced Buyoya as President. Yet the most extreme Hutu group, Palipehutu-FNL (commonly known as "FNL"), continued to refuse negotiations. In August 2004, the group massacred 152 Congolese Tutsi refugees at the Gatumba refugee camp in western Burundi. In response to the attack, the Burundian government issued arrest warrants for the FNL leaders Agathon Rwasa and Pasteur Habimana, and declared the group a terrorist organisation.
In May 2005 a cease-fire was finally agreed between the FNL and the Burundian government, but fighting continued. Renewed negotiations are now under way, amid fears that the FNL will demand a blanket amnesty in exchange for laying down their arms. A series of elections, held in mid-2005 were won by the former Hutu rebel National Council for the Defense of Democracy-Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD-FDD).
Geographically isolated, facing population pressures and having sparse resources, Burundi is one of the poorest and most conflict-ridden countries in Africa and in the world. Its small size belies the magnitude of the problems it faces in reconciling the claims of the Tutsi minority with the Hutu majority.
Peoples
As of July 2004, Burundi had an estimated population of 6,231,221, approximately half of whom are aged 14 or less. This estimate explicitly takes into account the effects of AIDS, which has a significant effect on the demographics of the country. Roughly 85% of the population are of Hutu ethnic origin; most of the remaining population are Tutsi, with a minority of Twa (Pygmy), and a few thousand Europeans and South Asians. The population density of around 206 persons per km² is the second highest in Sub-Saharan Africa, behind only Rwanda. The Twa are thought to be the original inhabitants of the area, with Hutu and then Tutsi settlers arriving in the 1300s and 1400s respectively.
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Geography
The Republic of Kenya, or Kenya, is a country in East Africa. It borders Ethiopia on the north, Somalia on the north-east, Tanzania on the south, Uganda on the west, and Sudan on the northwest, with the Indian Ocean on the southeast.
History
Fossils found in East Africa suggest that human like peoples roamed the area more than 20 million years ago. Recent finds near Kenya's Lake Turkana indicate that hominids such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus lived in Kenya from 2.6 million years ago.
The colonial history of Kenya dates from the establishment of a German protectorate over the Sultan of Zanzibar's coastal possessions in 1885, followed by the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. Incipient imperial rivalry was forestalled when Germany handed its coastal holdings to Britain in 1890. This followed the building of the Kenya-Uganda railway passing through the country. Although this was also resisted by some tribes, notably the Nandi led by Orkoiyot Koitalel arap Samoei for ten years between 1895 to 1905, these did not stop the British building the railway. It is believed that the Nandi were the first tribe to be put in a native reserve to stop them from disrupting the building of the railway.
During the early part of the 20th century the interior central highlands were settled by British and other European farmers, who became wealthy farming coffee. By the 1930s approximately 30,000 settlers lived in the area and were offered undue political powers because of their effects on the economy. The area was already home to over a million members of the Kikuyu tribe, most of whom had no land claims in European terms (but the land belonged to the ethnic group), and lived as itinerant farmers. To protect their interests, the settlers banned the growing of coffee, introduced a hut tax, and the landless were granted less and less land in exchange for their labour. A massive exodus to the cities ensued as their ability to provide a living from the land dwindled.
From October 1952 to December 1959, Kenya was under a state of emergency arising from the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. The governor requested and obtained British and African troops, including the King's African Rifles. In January 1953, Major General Hinde was appointed as director of counter-insurgency operations. The situation did not improve for lack of intelligence, so General Sir George Erskine was appointed commander-in-chief of the colony's armed forces in May 1953, with the personal backing of Winston Churchill. The capture of Waruhiu Itote (General China) on 15 January 1954 and the subsequent interrogation led to a better understanding of the Mau Mau command structure. Operation Anvil opened on 24 April 1954 after weeks of planning by the army with the approval of the War Council. The operation effectively placed Nairobi under military siege, and the occupants were screened and the Mau Mau supporters moved to detention camps. May 1953 also saw the Home Guard officially recognized as a branch of the Security Forces. The Home Guard formed the core of the Government's anti-Mau Mau strategy as it was composed of loyalist Africans, not foreign forces like the British Army and King's African Rifles. By the end of the emergency the Home Guard had killed no fewer than 4,686 Mau Mau, amounting to 42% of the total insurgents. The capture of Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 in Nyeri signified the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau and essentially ended the military offensive.
The first direct elections for Africans to the Legislative Council took place in 1957. Despite British hopes of handing power to "moderate" African rivals, it was the Kenya African National Union (KANU) of Jomo Kenyatta, that formed a government shortly before Kenya became independent on 12th December 1963. A year later, Kenyatta became Kenya's first president. At Kenyatta's death in 1978, Daniel arap Moi became President, and in democratic but flawed multiparty elections in 1992 and 1997, won re-election. In 2002, Moi was constitutionally barred from running, and Mwai Kibaki, running for the opposition coalition "National Rainbow Coalition" - NARC, was elected President. The elections, judged free and fair by local and international observers, marked a turning point in Kenya's democratic evolution.
Peoples
Kenya is a country of great ethnic diversity. Tension between the various groups accounts for many of Kenya's problems. During the early 1990s, clashes killed thousands and left tens of thousands homeless. Ethnically split opposition groups allowed the regime of Daniel arap Moi, in power from 1978 until 2002, to be re-elected for four terms, with the election in 1997 being marred by violence and fraud.
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Geography
Rwanda is a small landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of central Africa. It is bordered by Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania. Its fertile and hilly terrain, which gives it the title "Land of a Thousand Hills" (French: Pays des Mille Collines), supports one of the densest populations in Africa.
History
Prior to European colonization, Rwanda is the site of one of the region's most complex monarchical systems. The earliest known inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda were the Pygmy and Twa. Later, groups known as Hutus and Tutsis also settled in the same region.
In 1895 Rwanda, like Burundi, became a German province. The Germans, however, were at first completely dependent on the existing government. The German authority kept the indigenous administration system by applying the same type of indirect rule established by the British Empire in the Ugandan kingdoms. After Germany's loss in World War I, the protectorate was taken over by Belgium with a League of Nations mandate. Belgian rule in the region was far more direct and harsh than that of the Germans. Belgian colonizers, backed by Christian churches, mainly Catholics, used the Tutsi upper class over lower classes of Tutsis and Hutus, creating a wider social gap between social entities than had existed before. Belgian-forced labor policies and stringent taxes were mainly enforced by the Tutsi upper class, which the Belgians used as buffers against people's anger, thus further polarizing the Hutu and the Tutsi. Many young peasants, in order to escape tax harassment and hunger, migrated to neighboring countries. They moved mainly to Congo but also to Ugandan plantations, looking for work.
After World War II Rwanda became a UN trust territory with Belgium as the administrative authority. Through a series of processes, including several reforms, the assassination of King Mutara III Charles in 1959 and the fleeing of the last Nyiginya clan monarch, King Kigeri V, to Uganda, the Hutu gradually gained more and more power until, upon Rwanda's independence in 1962, the Hutu held virtually all power.
In 1990, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) invaded Rwanda from Uganda. During the course of the fighting, top Rwandese government officials, mainly Hutu, began secretly training young men into informal armed bands called interehamwe ("coming together"). Government officials also launched a radio station that began anti-Tutsi propaganda. The military government of Juvénal Habyarimana responded to the RPF invasion with pogroms against Tutsis, whom it claimed were trying to re-enslave the Hutus. In 1992 the government and the RPF signed a cease-fire agreement known as the Arusha accords in Arusha, Tanzania to form a power sharing government, but fighting between the two sides continued. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force named the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), under the leadership of General Dallaire. UNAMIR was vastly under funded and under-staffed.
During the armed conflict, the RPF was blamed for the bombing of Kigali. These attacks were in reality done by the Hutu army as part of a campaign to create a reason for the genocide that was about to ensue. On April 6 1994, President Habyarimana was assassinated when his Falcon 50 trijet was shot down while landing in Kigali. It remains unclear who was responsible for the assassination – most credible sources point to the presidential guard, spurred by Hutu nationalists fearful of losing power, although others believe that Tutsi rebels were responsible, possibly with the help of Belgian mercenaries. Over the next three months, the military and interehamwe militia groups killed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the Rwandan Genocide. The RPF continued to advance on the capital, and occupied the northern, the east and the southern parts of the country by June. U.N. member states refused to answer UNAMIR's requests for increased troops and money. Meanwhile, French troops were dispatched to stabilize the situation under Opération Turquoise, but resulted in exacerbating the situation and evacuating only foreign nationals.
On July 4th, 1994, the war ended as the RPF entered the capital Kigali. In the resulting Great Lakes refugee crisis over 2 million Hutus fled the country after the war, fearing Tutsi retribution. Most have since returned, although some militias remained in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and became involved in the First Congo War and Second Congo War. In 1996, Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern Congo in an effort to eliminate the interahamwe groups operating there and to gain influence in the region, sparking the First Congo War.
Today, Rwandans continue to struggle with the legacy of genocide. 2004 marked the ten year anniversary with a ceremony in Kigali. Rwandan genocidal leaders are on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in the Rwandan National Court system, and, most recently, through the informal Gacaca village justice program. The current Rwandan government, led by Paul Kagame has become increasingly militant and opposed to dissent.
Peoples
The population consists of three ethnic groups. The Hutus, who represent the main part of the population, are mostly cultivators raising goats or sheep, while a few are ceramists like the Twa. The Tutsis are a pastoral people dedicated to cattle and sheep raising. Until 1959, they formed the dominant caste under a feudal system based on cattleholding. The Twa are thought to be the remnants of the earliest settlers of the region. However, the whole population shares a genuine common Bantu culture. Rwanda's population density, even after the 1994 genocide, is among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nearly every family in this country with few villages lives in a self-contained compound on a hillside. The urban concentrations are grouped around administrative centers. |
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Geography
The United Republic of Tanzania (Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania in Swahili), or Tanzania, is a country on the east coast of East Africa. It is bordered by Kenya and Uganda on the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique on the south. To the east it borders the Indian Ocean. The country is named after Lake Tanganyika, which forms its western border.
History
A German colony from the 1880s until 1919, the area subsequently became a British trust territory from 1919 to 1961. Julius Nyerere became Minister of British-administered Tanganyika in 1960, and continued as Prime Minister when Tanganyika became independent in 1961. Tanganyika and the neighboring Zanzibar — which had become independent in 1963 — merged to form the nation of Tanzania on 26 April 1964. Nyerere introduced African socialism, or Ujamaa, which emphasized justice and equality, but proved economically disastrous, leading to food shortages as collective farms failed.
In 1979, Tanzania declared war on Uganda after Uganda invaded and tried to annex Tanzanian territory in the north of the country. Tanzania not only expelled Ugandan forces, but also invaded Uganda itself, forcing the ousting of Idi Amin.
Nyerere handed over power to Ali Hassan Mwinyi in 1985, but retained control of the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), as Chairman until 1990, when he handed that responsibility to Mwinyi. In October 1995, one-party rule came to an end when Tanzania held its first ever multi-party election. However, CCM comfortably won the elections and its candidate Benjamin Mkapa was subsequently sworn in as the new president of the United Republic of Tanzania on 23 November 1995.
One of the deadly 1998 U.S. embassy bombings occurred in Dar es Salaam; the other was in Nairobi, Kenya.
In 2004, the undersea earthquake on the other side of the Indian Ocean caused tidal surges along Tanzania's coastline in which 11 people were killed. An oil tanker also temporarily ran aground in the Dar es Salaam harbor, damaging an oil pipeline.
Peoples
Population distribution in Tanzania is extremely uneven. Density varies from 1 person per square kilometer (3/mi²) in arid regions to 51 per square kilometer (133/mi²) in the mainland's well-watered highlands to 134 per square kilometer (347/mi²) on Zanzibar. More than 80% of the population is rural. Dar es Salaam is the capital and largest city; Dodoma, located in the center of Tanzania, has been designated the new capital and the Parliament sits there, although action to move the capital has stalled.
The African population consists of more than 120 ethnic groups, of which the Sukuma, Haya, Nyakyusa, Nyamwezi, and Chaga have more than 1 million members. The majority of Tanzanians, including such large tribes as the Sukuma and the Nyamwezi, are of Bantu stock. Groups of Nilotic or related origin include the nomadic Masai and the Luo, both of which are found in greater numbers in neighboring Kenya. Two small groups speak languages of the Khoisan family peculiar to the Bushman and Hottentot peoples. Cushitic-speaking peoples, originally from the Ethiopian highlands, reside in a few areas of Tanzania.
Although much of Zanzibar's African population came from the mainland, one group known as Shirazis claims its origins to be the supposed island's early Persian settlers. Non-Africans residing on the mainland and Zanzibar account for 1% of the total population. The Asian community, including Hindus, Sikhs, Shi'a and Sunni Muslims, and Goans, has declined by 50% in the past decade to 50,000 on the mainland and 4,000 on Zanzibar. An estimated 70,000 Arabs and 10,000 Europeans reside in Tanzania.
Each ethnic group has its own language, but the national language is Kiswahili, a Bantu-based tongue with strong Arabic borrowings. |
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Geography
The Republic of Uganda, or Uganda, is a country in East Africa, bordered in the east by Kenya, in the north by Sudan, by the Democratic Republic of Congo in the west, Rwanda in the southwest and Tanzania in the south. The southern part of the country includes a substantial portion of Lake Victoria, within which it shares borders with Kenya and Tanzania. Uganda takes its name from the Buganda kingdom, which encompasses a portion of the south of the country, including the capital Kampala.
History
Little is known about the history of the region now covered by Uganda until the arrival of the Arabs and Europeans in the mid 1800s. Humans are known to have lived in the area since at least the first millennium BC.
When Arabs and Europeans arrived in the 19th century, they encountered a number of kingdoms in the area. They included Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, and Toro. The largest of these kingdoms was Buganda, which exists as part of Uganda today. Islam and Christianity were introduced to these kingdoms.
The area was placed under the charter of the British East Africa Company in 1888, and was ruled as a protectorate by the United Kingdom from 1894. As several other territories and chiefdoms were integrated, the final protectorate called Uganda took shape in 1914.
By 1966, the first Prime Minister, Milton Obote, had overthrown the constitution and declared himself president, ushering in an era of coups and counter-coups which would last until the mid-1980s. 1971 saw Idi Amin take power, ruling the country with the military for the coming decade.
Idi Amin's rule cost an estimated 300,000 Ugandans' lives, and he forcibly removed the entrepreneurial East Indian minority from Uganda, decimating the economy. His reign was ended after an invasion by Tanzanian forces aided by Ugandan exiles in 1979. The situation improved little with the return of Milton Obote, who was deposed once more in 1985.
The current president, Yoweri Museveni, has been in power since 1986 and was viewed as being part of a new generation of African leaders. There is controversy, however, about the change to the constitution that allows him to run for a third term. Relative stability has been brought to the country with the exception of the North, which continues to struggle with a rebel insurgency.
Peoples
Uganda is home to many different ethnic groups, none of whom form a majority of the population. Around forty different languages are currently in use in the country. English became the official language of Uganda after independence. The language with the largest number of native speakers is Luganda, spoken in the Buganda region which encompasses Kampala. The Ateso language follows, spoken by about 4.2 million people covering seven Districts in the Eastern part of the country. Kiswahili is widely used as a basic trade language. |
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