Gitega

Gitega is Burundi's political capital — since 2019, when the government moved up from Bujumbura to the hills where the kings had always sat — and its second city: a town of a hundred and thirty thousand at seventeen hundred metres in the centre of the country, cool, green and slow, where the mwami held court until 1966, the Germans built a boma in 1912 and the Belgians a residency, and where the National Museum, the country's largest, keeps the royal drums, the spears and the memory of the court in a low colonial building from 1955. The drums are the reason to come: seven kilometres north, on the hill of Gishora, the sanctuary of the royal drummers keeps the sacred drums and the families who beat them, and the ritual dance of the royal drum — the drummers carrying the drums on their heads, then leaping before them — has been on UNESCO's list since 2014. Beyond the town the country's few sights spread out: the Ruvubu national park an hour to the north-east, the Karera waterfalls at Rutana to the south-east, and at Rutovu, to the south, the small pyramid raised in 1934 over the southernmost source of the Nile.

The traveller who has cause to be there comes up from Bujumbura in two hours on the RN2 — the road climbs out of the Tanganyika heat into the hills, and the tea and banana slopes are the journey — and gives Gitega a day and a night: the museum in the morning, with its keeper; the cathedral, the boma and the market on foot; Gishora in the afternoon, where the drummers, arranged ahead, will play — an hour of thunder on the hilltop that is the sound of the country —; a plate of beans, plantain and grilled goat with a Primus at a bar on the main street; and, with a second day, the Karera falls or the source of the Nile, both a morning's drive over red roads.

The Guide's honesty, gently: Burundi's weather has been political for years and the winds shift — the prudent traveller checks conditions with their chancellery, keeps papers at hand at the checkpoints, and does not photograph anything official; the country is among the poorest on Earth, cash is the economy, and the electricity comes and goes; the visa is arranged ahead or at the airport in Bujumbura; and the drums, the hills and the kindness of a town that sees a few hundred visitors a year are the reward, which is why the Guide sails this page informed and keeps it warm.