Gitega

Gitega sits in the heart of the old Kingdom of Burundi, where the mwami, the king, kept his court and the sacred drums that stood for royal authority. The hills around the town were the political centre of the country for centuries before any European arrived, and the drum sanctuaries nearby were part of that system rather than an ornament to it.

The Germans laid out the modern town in 1912 and made it the seat of their administration in place of Usumbura. After the First World War the Belgians, administering Ruanda-Urundi under a League of Nations mandate, governed from Usumbura, but the royal court remained here, which kept the town at the heart of the kingdom until the monarchy was overthrown in 1966.

At independence in 1962 Usumbura, renamed Bujumbura, became the capital, and Gitega became a provincial town with a market, a museum and schools. The last king, Ntare V, was killed in Gitega in 1972, and the violence of that year and of the civil war from 1993 reached the central hills. In January 2019 parliament voted to make Gitega the political capital once more, ministries began moving inland in a transfer still under way, and the town has been growing and building since, though the ministries and offices have arrived faster than the infrastructure to serve them.

Gitega's cultural weight comes from the drums. The ritual dance of the royal drum, which UNESCO added to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014, belongs above all to this area, and the sanctuary at Gishora just outside the town is where the tradition is kept. About a dozen drums are ranged in a semicircle around a central drum, carried on the head in procession, and beaten while some of the drummers take turns dancing. The drums were sacred royal objects, beaten at coronations and funerals, and a decree of 2017 restricted performance to men.

Craft traditions run alongside: tightly woven lidded baskets, pottery, and the inanga, a stringed instrument played to accompany a whispery style of singing and once played for the kings as they rested at night. The national museum in the town holds much of the material record of these traditions.

Otherwise life here is quieter and more conservative than in Bujumbura. Church and chapel shape the week for Catholic and Protestant families, elders are deferred to, greetings are elaborate, and social occasions run on brochettes, Primus beer and banana beer. Football is the common enthusiasm, played on any level ground between the hills.

More than 100,000 people live in Gitega, and the town has grown substantially, particularly since it was made the capital. It remains small and low-rise, a provincial town in appearance even as ministries and their staff have arrived, and the surrounding hills come right up to its edges.

The economy is built on administration, the market and the land. Coffee, the country's main export, is the cash crop of the hills and central to household income; bananas, beans, cassava, sweet potato and maize fill the gardens on every slope. Schools, seminaries, a university presence and the museum give the town a long-standing role in education and culture.

Days start at dawn, with people walking or cycling in from the hills to the market and children in uniform on every road, and the town is quiet again by early evening. Power and fuel shortages are common, water supply is uneven, and the cost of building and renting has risen with the arrival of the capital. Most families still farm, and the rhythm of planting and harvest matters more than the government offices in the centre.

Gitega eats from its hills. Cooking bananas and plantains, beans, cassava, sweet potato and maize are the staples, boiled, mashed or pounded, and are served with a sauce of beans or greens and, when a household can afford it, a little meat or fish. Ugali, a stiff porridge of maize or cassava flour, is eaten with the fingers from a shared dish.

Isombe, a stew of cassava leaves, is eaten across Burundi, and palm oil flavours many of the soups and sauces. Brochettes — goat or beef skewers grilled over charcoal and served with fried plantain — are what the bars in town serve in the evening, and small dried fish from Lake Tanganyika arrive by road from the west and are fried crisp.

Drinks are local. Urwagwa, banana beer, is the traditional social drink, and Primus is the industrial lager found everywhere. Coffee grows in the hills around Gitega, though most of it is exported.