The Kingdom of Rwanda was a Bantu kingdom in the African Great Lakes region, in the territory of what is now the Republic of Rwanda, that developed under a Tutsi royal dynasty into one of the most centralized precolonial states in Central and East Africa. Its king, the mwami, ruled through an elaborate hierarchy of court officials and cattle-based patron-client relationships that bound Hutu and Tutsi subjects into a single administrative order. The kingdom came under German colonial oversight in the late nineteenth century and passed to Belgian control after the First World War, retaining a measure of internal autonomy under both administrations. Rising ethnic tension between Hutu and Tutsi culminated in the Rwandan Revolution beginning in 1959, and the monarchy was formally abolished in 1961 after a referendum that established Rwanda as a Hutu-led republic ahead of full independence from Belgium in 1962.
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