LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Burundi: Central Africa
built 657 days ago
The population of Burundi is currently estimated at around 6,9 million in 2001. It has the highest population density of all Africa-150 inhabitants per square kilometer. The population is ... spread very unevenly: the central plateau and the highlands are the most heavily populated and here the density is 295 inhabitants per square kilometer.
Source:
Although European explorers and missionaries made brief visits to the area as early as 1856, it was not until 1899 that Burundi came under German East African administration. In 1916 Belgian troops occupied the area. In 1923, the League of Nations mandated to Belgium the territory of Ruanda-Urundi, encompassing modern-day Rwanda and Burundi. The Belgians administered the territory through indirect rule, building on the Tutsi-dominated aristocratic hierarchy. Following World War II, Ruanda-Urundi became a United Nations Trust Territory under Belgian administrative authority. After 1948, Belgium permitted the emergence of competing political parties.
Source:
Burundi is a rugged land where people live by subsistence farming or by grazing cattle. There are 636.1 persons per square mile (245.6 per square kilometer), making Burundi (like its neighbor Rwanda) one of the most densely populated countries in Africa.
Source:
This week's row is merely the latest manifestation of a long-running personal dispute between President Ndayizeye and the RPA Director Alexis Sinduhije, says journalist Gratien Rukindikiza, writing on the Burundian news website burundi.news.free.fr. Rukindikiza traces the root of the affair to a telephone call last year in which Ndayizeye tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Sinduhije to endorse his campaign, through Radio Publique Africain, to amend Burundi's constitution. The amendment would have allowed Ndayizeye to seek a second term in power, in contravention of a 2003 peace agreement.
Source:
Malaria, which kills 1-2 million people a year, most of them children in Africa, is endemic in Burundi. In an epidemic lasting from late 2000 through summer 2001 over 3 million cases occurred among a total population of 6.5 million. The magnitude of the epidemic was due in part to the ineffectiveness of the first-line drugs (chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, or SP), which became evident in various resistance studies.
Source:
The earliest known people to live in Burundi were the Twa, a short "pygmy" people who remain as a minority group there. The people currently known as Hutu and Tutsi moved into the region several hundred years ago, and dominated it. Like much of Africa, Burundi then went through a period of European colonial rule, ending with its independence from Belgium in 1962. In the decades since then, it has been the scene of recurring brutal mutual bloodlettings between the Hutu and Tutsi populations (much like the better-known genocide in neighboring Rwanda), and a series of political assassinations. Peace and the (re)establishment of civil democracy took place in 2005 with a cease-fire and the election of former Hutu rebel Pierre Nkurunziza as president.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Central Africa