Great Lakes Twa in the context of Twa peoples

Burundi, officially the Republic of Burundi, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is located in the Great Rift Valley at the junction between the African Great Lakes region and Southeast Africa, with a population of over 14 million people. It is bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and southeast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west; Lake Tanganyika lies along its southwestern border. The political capital city is Gitega and the economic capital and largest city is Bujumbura.

The Twa, Hutu and Tutsi peoples have lived in Burundi for at least 500 years. For more than 200 of those years, Burundi was an independent kingdom. In 1885, it became part of the German colony of German East Africa. After the First World War and Germany's defeat, the League of Nations mandated the territories of Burundi and neighboring Rwanda to Belgium in a combined territory called Rwanda-Urundi. After the Second World War, this transformed into a United Nations Trust Territory. Burundi gained independence in 1962 and initially retained the monarchy. However, a coup d'état in 1966 replaced the monarchy with a one-party republic, and for the next 27 years, Burundi was ruled by a series of ethnic Tutsi dictators and notably experienced a genocide of its Hutu population in 1972. In July 1993, Melchior Ndadaye became Burundi's first Hutu president following the country's first multi-party presidential election. His assassination three months later during a coup attempt provoked the 12-year Burundian Civil War. In 2000, the Arusha Agreement was adopted, which was largely integrated in a new constitution in 2005. Since the 2005 post-war elections, the country's dominant party has been the Hutu-led National Council for the Defense of Democracy – Forces for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD–FDD), widely accused of authoritarian governance and perpetuating the country's poor human rights record.

The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi or the Tutsi genocide, occurred from 7 April to 19 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. Over a span of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were systematically killed by Hutu militias. While the Rwandan Constitution states that over 1 million people were killed, most scholarly estimates suggest between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi died, mostly men. The genocide was marked by extreme violence, with victims often murdered by neighbours, and widespread sexual violence, with between 250,000 and 500,000 women raped.

The genocide was rooted in long-standing ethnic tensions, most recently from the Rwandan Hutu Revolution from 1959 to 1962, which resulted in Rwandan Tutsi fleeing to Uganda due to the ethnic violence that had occurred. Hostilities were then exacerbated further due to the Rwandan Civil War, which began in 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a predominantly Tutsi rebel group, invaded Rwanda from Uganda. The war reached a tentative peace with the Arusha Accords in 1993. However, the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on 6 April 1994 ignited the genocide, as Hutu extremists used the power vacuum to target Tutsi and moderate Hutu leaders.

The Hutu (/ˈhuːtuː/), also known as the Abahutu, are a Bantu ethnic group native to the African Great Lakes region. They mainly live in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda where they form one of the principal ethnic groups alongside the Tutsi and the Great Lakes Twa.

The largest ethnic groups in Rwanda are the Hutus, which make up about 85% of Rwanda's population; the Tutsis, which are 14%; and the Twa, which are around 1%. Starting with the Tutsi feudal monarchy rule of the 10th century, the Hutus were a subjugated social group. Belgian colonization also contributed to the tensions between the Hutus and Tutsis. Hutu Power ideology propagated the myth that Hutus were the superior ethnicity. The resulting tensions would eventually foster the slaughtering of Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide. Since then, policy has changed to recognize one main ethnicity: "Rwandan".

In comparison to the Hutu (4.3% B), the Tutsi have three times as much haplogroup B (14.9% B), a haplogroup found at the highest rate in different African pygmies populations.