Rwanda–Tanzania border

Gisaka

Until World War I, Rwanda and Tanganyika were both part of German East Africa. After the war Belgium took Ruanda-Urundi as a League of Nations mandate and Britain took Tanganyika. Under the Milner–Orts agreement of 1919, Belgium let Britain have Gisaka, about 2,100 square miles of Ruanda west of the Kagera, for an all-British railway route between Uganda and Tanganyika, and handed it over on 21 March 1921.^[1]

By 1923 both governments agreed that splitting Ruanda this way had harmed the people living there, and that the railway was no longer essential. The League approved moving the border east to the Kagera, and Belgium took back Gisaka on 1 January 1924.^[1]

Fixing the river line

An Anglo-Belgian protocol signed at Kigoma on 5 August 1924 made the middle of the Kagera the border, but the river’s swamps and meanders made that imprecise. A 1934 treaty fixed the line with pillars and made the deepest channel, not the middle, the border where it follows the river. Rwanda became independent on 1 July 1962 and Tanganyika on 9 December 1961.^[1]

Rusumo, 1994

On 28 April 1994 some 250,000 Rwandans poured into Tanzania near the town of Ngara in a single wave. UNHCR’s coordinator described the Rusumo road as “one compact mass of people, like a flow of lava”. Benaco camp, set up almost overnight, became what was then the world’s biggest refugee camp.^[2]