1961 — The Assassination of Prince Louis Rwagasore

On October 13, 1961, Prince Louis Rwagasore, the 30-year-old hero of Burundi's independence movement, sat down to dinner with friends at the Hotel Tanganyika in Bujumbura. A gunman fired from the bushes, and the prince was dead within minutes. Just weeks earlier, his party had won a landslide election victory, and he had united Hutu and Tutsi behind a dream of a free Burundi, shared across the country's deepest divide.

His assassins feared exactly that dream. His murder shattered the hope of unity and lit the fuse of ethnic violence that would haunt the country for decades. Burundi still honours him every October 13 as the father of the nation, remembering the leader whose promise was cut short.