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The Kingdom of Burundi. The kingdom of Burundi (c. 1680-1966) was, with Rwanda, one of the two great monarchies of the African Great Lakes region. Tradition traces its foundation to a king named Ntare, founder of the dynasty whose kings, the mwami, bore a cycle of four names: Ntare, Mwezi, Mutaga, and Mwambutsa. Over two centuries the kingdom grew from a small hill state in the east of the country to rule most of modern Burundi, expanding under kings such as Ntare Rushatsi and Mwezi Gisabo.
Burundi's monarchy rested on a distinctive balance of power. The mwami was a sacred figure, associated with the fertility of the land and guarded by ritual, but real power was contested among the royal princes, the ganwa, who governed the provinces and often fought one another and the king for control. Below them, chiefs and sub-chiefs collected tribute from a farming people of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa, bound to their lords by clientship and by the sacred royal drums, especially the great drum Karyenda, the emblem of the kingdom.
Colonial rule came late and ruled lightly through the throne. Germany took Burundi in the 1890s, and after the First World War Belgium governed it as part of Ruanda-Urundi, working through the mwami and the ganwa. Unlike in Rwanda, the monarchy survived into independence: Burundi became independent in 1962 as a kingdom under Mwambutsa IV. But rivalry between the palace and the politicians, and growing Hutu-Tutsi violence, brought coups and counter-coups, and in 1966 the young Ntare V was overthrown and the monarchy abolished by Michel Micombero.
The kingdom's end opened decades of military rule and ethnic bloodshed. Yet Burundi's monarchy left the country a strong sense of its own nationhood, and the royal drummers of Burundi, heirs of the court tradition, still perform today as a living symbol of the kingdom and its culture.
Wikipedia: Kingdom of Burundi
Consulate of Burundi: History of Burundi
Wiley Encyclopedia of Empire: Burundi, Kingdom of
Net Press: Fondation de la Monarchie