Rwanda

Rwanda is a landlocked country in East Africa's Great Rift Valley, a few degrees south of the equator, bordered by Uganda to the north, Tanzania to the east, Burundi to the south and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, covering 26,338 square kilometers, the 144th-largest country in the world and the fourth-smallest on mainland Africa. Kigali, at the country's center and 1,567 meters in elevation, is its capital and largest city; with roughly 14 million people concentrated across a landscape of rolling highlands, mountains and numerous lakes under a tropical highland climate, Rwanda is the 21st most densely populated country in the world, at about 578 people per square kilometer. German colonization from 1897 to 1916 gave way to Belgian rule, and Rwanda gained independence on 1 July 1962; the country endured a genocide in 1994 that killed between 500,000 and one million people before the Rwandan Patriotic Front's military victory ended the killing. Rwanda is today a semi-presidential republic governed as a de facto one-party state by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with Paul Kagame as president; the economy centers on services, agricultural exports led by coffee and tea, and manufacturing, and Kinyarwanda is the principal language alongside official English, French and Swahili, with Christianity the dominant religion.