Miracle in Burundi: From Subsistence Farmers to Google Engineers

How Etienne Mashuli is helping the world's poorest children attend the Ivy League and preventing genocide in the process

Mar 27, 2025

Following up on our piece on the humanitarian crisis in Congo, we feature today the work of Etienne Mashuli and his remarkable Tujenge Africa Foundation, a school that has sent some of the world’s poorest children from Burundi to the Ivy League. Himself a Yale graduate and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Mashuli has returned to the African Great Lakes to address the ethnic violence that has plagued the world’s poorest and youngest nation and to offer an education to its young people to allow for a brighter future.

In this interview, Mashuli speaks about his project and also candidly about the hidden history of Burundi’s ethnic violence, the legacies of colonialism, and the ongoing dangers of regional instability. He also explains how education—especially when grounded in coexistence and integrity—can serve as a powerful form of genocide prevention.

With U.S. government aid—including all USAID funding—recently suspended in Burundi, the work of Tujenge is even more important. With this interview, we are launching an effort to highlight extraordinary NGOs doing extraordinary work and we are very proud to first feature Mashuli and Tujenge. The news cycle is hard to keep up with, making places like Burundi even more overlooked, so we hope that you will take the time to read about this wonderful success story and its vital and inspiring work.

The students of Tujenge Africa Foundation

Octavian Report: Your school is based in Burundi, where there has been terrible bloodshed between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes like in Rwanda. Can you talk a bit about this background that underpins your efforts with Tujenge?

Etienne Mashuli: The genocide in Rwanda attracted a lot of attention. But little known is the violence that happened in Burundi. Burundi is a small landlocked country in Central Africa of around 14 million people. Seventy percent of the people in Burundi are under the age of 30 and fifty percent are under the age of 18.

Coming into independence, Burundi was run by a Tutsi monarch. The challenge for independence was the question of who takes over after colonial rule was gone. These contestations of power, beginning in 1960, took an ethnic and violent form. Hutus started asking for more representation in Burundi. This inevitably led to a split along ethnic lines.

Octavian Report: Can you explain the tension between the Tutsis and the Hutus?

Etienne Mashuli: No one really knows for sure whether the Hutus or the Tutsis are different ethnic groups. But essentially, one could consider them to be a caste system whereby the Tutsis formed the aristocracy and the Hutus formed the working class. There is also a small group that is not very well known, the Batwa, who are the indigenous land owners of both Burundi and Rwanda.

“We've had tremendous results. Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern. It shows that even the poorest kids in the world can succeed at the highest levels.”

The history is very contentious nowadays. The three ethnic groups speak the same language and more or less have the same culture. But they physically look different, so you can identify them roughly by looks.

Octavian Report: How did the Belgian colonization effect the tribal issues?

Etienne Mashuli: In the pre-colonial times, Burundi was largely led by Tutsi monarchs and aristocrats. When the Belgians came in, they collaborated with the monarchy in what they called indirect rule, to essentially rule Greater Rwanda through the monarchy.

By the 1950s, the colonial authorities had solidified these groups into different ethnicities. There was a lot of research, in some ways motivated by the global eugenics movement, to identify the groups as differentiated. The Tutsis were seen as more euro-centric, having “European-like features.” Longer noses, thinner lips. The Hutus were seen as negroid. And the Batwa did not really get any serious consideration, which remains the case to this day.

I would argue that colonial authorities exacerbated and, scientifically, if you will -- it's pseudoscience, of course -- strengthened these divisions by favoring the Tutsi aristocrats that they thought were more European-like.

Octavian Report: What happened that led to the violence?

Etienne Mashuli: Rwanda and Burundi took different trajectories. In Rwanda, there was a coup that put Hutus in power which led to widespread violence and a huge number of Tutsi people fled. In Burundi, the Tutsi monarch remained in power and actually seemed more conciliatory. He selected a cabinet that included Hutu people.

But then displeased Tutsi extremists killed the monarch, which started a major Hutu-Tutsi division in Burundi. In 1972, the Tutsi government in Burundi, after a coup d'etat, decided to eliminate all Hutu people who could read and write, essentially the entire intellectual class of Hutus, so as to rule in perpetuity without having to face the majority in the event of an election.

The Burundian Hutus started a rebel group in exile in the 1970s to retaliate against the government. And the the Rwandan Tutsis, who were now based in Uganda, started a rebel group to take over Rwanda and restore their rights. There were a massive number of Hutu refugees in Burundi. And there were a massive number of Tutsi refugees in Rwanda.

One of the things that you have to realize is that every time violence happens in Burundi against Hutus, the Rwandans retaliate by killing Tutsis in Rwanda. It’s back and forth in some ways almost like a gangster war. One group gets killed in one country, the other group retaliates in the other country.

In October 1993, there was the first democratic election in Burundi where a Hutu was elected to power, Melchior Ndadaye, who before that was in exile in Rwanda. In the early 1970s, he had started an underground exile party at the University of Burundi.

The Burundian Tutsi dictatorship had been convinced by the international community to have elections. The leader in power, Major Pierre Buyoya, was probably confident that after many years of Tutsi rule, he would automatically win. So he allowed elections. Melchior Ndadaye returned to Burundi to campaign and won by a landslide.

“The best way to counter genocide in the African Great Lakes is to invest massively in human capital development and the education of our people.”

The regime went into panic mode, even though Melchior Ndadaye started a cabinet by appointing a Tutsi woman as Prime Minister and tried to strike a conciliatory tone by accommodating the Tutsi military and elites into his new government. Unfortunately, he was assassinated three months later in a brutal killing that left almost half of his cabinet dead.

The Hutu masses then retaliated by attacking Tutsi civilians in the villages, and the military, which was mostly Tutsi, retaliated in kind, and a lot of Hutus fled to to Rwanda. The problem was that Rwanda was also a powder keg. A lot of Burundians were coming to Rwanda, telling Hutus that the killing of Melchior Ndadaye was a clear sign that the Tutsis would never accept democracy. You have to understand that Tutsis are around 15% of the population and the Hutus are almost 85%. So in a majoritarian sense, democracy means the power of the majority. In many African countries, especially among uneducated people, this almost automatically means nativism and electing someone of your own.

At the same time, a new president of Burundi was put in after international pressure, another Hutu from the same party as Melchior Ndadaye. The regional community organized peace talks between the various parties to create some sort of accommodation.

On April 6, 1994, the Rwandan President was leaving Tanzania from one of these peace meetings on Burundi. Along with him was the new president of Burundi, who had apparently taken a lift from him, for whatever reason. Also, on the plane was pretty much the entire Hutu governing elite. The head of the army was there. The President's brother-in-law was there who was his personal doctor and a member of the cabinet. Almost everybody consequential was in the plane. And the plane was shot down.

Now the Hutu masses and the Hutu elites immediately pointed the blame on the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Paul Kagame’s party, for having downed this plane, and they started rampages killing thousands and thousands of people.

This is the official beginning of the Rwandan genocide. They targeted all Tutsis. And what we call Hutu moderates, any Hutu person who really did not subscribe to Hutu rule and was sympathetic to sharing power with the RPF. About a million people were killed in three months.

“The question for me was and remains, how can we all coexist together?”

So my idea was to select the smartest 10, 20 or 30 young people out of the three ethnic groups, bring them together, have them confront history together, and then have them develop relationships. Lifelong relationships between each other. We hope that these relationships then can help create stability in the country.

We include the Batwa as well. They are the marginalized of the marginalized. They are one percent of the population and Hutus and Tutsis really do not consider them to be human beings. It is very common to have utensils that are only for Batwa people. If the Batwa come to your house asking for water, then there will be a special cup for them So it's really revolutionary in my mind to actually bring Batwa people to the table in conversation about the future of Burundi. In past negotiations, both on Rwanda and Burundi, the Batwa people have been completely missing. I think that if you have a very strong, empowered Batwa group it could actually create a bridge between Hutu and Tutsi people.

Octavian Report: What happens in the program?

Etienne Mashuli: We run an 18-month program that focuses on peace-building, conflict resolution, and entrepreneurship. And then we have a concentration of mathematics and English. English is important, because Burundi is isolated. Most of the countries in the region speak English, and so without it, Burundians are removed from all opportunities for trade, education, and research.

Octavian Report: What language do they speak?

Etienne Mashuli: Five percent of Burundians probably speak French—mostly the elites. The majority only speak Kinyarwanda and Kirundi, which are mutually intelligible languages.

We take these kids, most of them have probably never spoken English before, and we drill them by bombarding them with a new language for 18 months. And then we focus on mathematics and SAT preparation as well.

Octavian Report: Your college placement is pretty amazing.

Etienne Mashuli: It’s quite incredible to think about it. You have a kid whose family income is about 50 kg of beans and potatoes per year. Most of these kids come to our school with only one pair of pants, one shirt, and one pair of underwear. Some of these kids are some of the most impoverished people on earth.

These kids are very, very bright. This goes back to Nicholas Kristof, who said that talent is universal, but opportunities are not. And so we pick these kids and we take them through this educational incubator. And after 18 months, some speak English well enough to take the SAT and actually score quite highly on the SAT.

And then we apply. We've had some tremendous results. A couple of dozen students across universities in the U.S. Harvard, MIT, Yale, Brown, Cornell. Northwestern. And a lot of very highly ranked liberal arts schools. We are beginning to see really remarkable success.

“We are creating a safe space where people can actually share their stories openly without fear of retribution.”

We have a student in Tennessee who went to Vanderbilt working for a major tech company. We have a kid who got an offer at Google but couldn't take it because of some visa technicalities. We are beginning to see that although these kids come from one of the poorest countries, if they're well trained and get good educational opportunities, then they can be as competitive as anyone else.

We also have a lot of students who are choosing to come back to Burundi after graduating. Many of them are working, tech remote jobs. Some of them are also founding startups in renewable energy. We have a kid who is making fuel out of biogas.

One of my favorite graduates is a young Batwa man who has started teaching Batwa people farming skills, in particular how to create organic fertilizer. He started an organic fertilizer company, and then also runs a communal farm for the Batwa people. These are people who are very at risk, because traditionally they've had forest rights, but now there's almost no forest because of overpopulation. And the remaining forests are protected by conservationist movements for animals.

It’s been quite an incredible journey. And our students have proven that it's possible to come from the poorest country and actually attend the best universities and work for the best companies around the world, but also offer something back to your country, whether by foreign remittances or actually coming back to start companies and to start social uplift organizations.

Consider Burundi with an average income of maybe $200 or $300 per year. So you get a kid from there and then you move that kid to a place like Google, where they are earning $200,000 or $300,000. It's very difficult to think about any other bigger social uplift story.

This is getting kids not just out of poverty. It's remarkably changing the trajectory of these kids for themselves and for their families and for their country, hopefully.

Octavian Report: What is the coexistence curriculum that you do and has that been successful in getting these three groups to think about each other differently?

Etienne Mashuli: I teach a class every year on political history, African Great Lakes political history. My class is almost like an explosive fire. I joke that I need a fire extinguisher in my class. But the main issue is actually building trust among the groups. Inclusion is one of our core principles. And then integrity and honesty. We are creating a safe space where people can actually share their stories openly without fear of retribution.

Now you will find out that in many of our countries, people cannot freely express themselves and historical violence is still not openly talked about. And in my opinion, this just worsens the wound because it's very difficult for people to heal unless they're having real and genuine conversations.

“With one student, another student, and another, we are creating this unified new generation of Hutus, Tutsis, and Batwas in the region.”

You know, one of the things I really like about the U.S. is that until recently it was very possible for people to have these very difficult and painful conversations on historical memory. Not everybody agrees on the past but that but that's normal. People are going to disagree. But I found the US to be a much more optimistic place when I got there in 2009, because there was willingness, at least on university campuses, to actually confront the past.

So this is the kind of model that I'm trying to bring to Burundi in a nutshell.

Octavian Report: How do you find the kids?

Etienne Mashuli: We advertise nationally. Radio is still king in Burundi. So we have radio adverts. Increasingly, we do social media. Although social media penetration is very low, I think either 7% or 10%. Burundi and Rwanda are the most rural societies in Africa, with maybe 5% to 7% urbanization rates between the two countries. So most people live in the rural villages, removed from the rest of the society and the elites.

So what we try to do is travel to all these high schools, talk about Tujenge, and then issue an open call for applications. Typically we will print out the papers, because many Burundians don't have access to the internet. So it can't be an entirely digital process. And then we will also provide some funding for the schools to mail or bring the applications to us. Because a majority of poor people may ask, will I buy dinner or use money to send an application to Tujenge?

We read through the applications, and then select a finalist group. We have about 1,500 applicants every year. Then we have a finalist round where we select about 100 students to come into Bujumbura. You'll be surprised that at least half of our students, have never been to the capital. Half of our students have never seen Lake Tanganyika, although Burundi is one of the smallest countries on earth.

It just speaks about the isolation which I think frankly is partly responsible for this enormous level of violence. It's just how isolated people are, and the lack of opportunity, the lack of conversation. So some of the kids will be very overwhelmed. It’s their first time in Bujumbura, and we'll have them sleep in Bujumbura and we have a dinner to bring them all together.

Then we have a math exam that we offer. And there’s an oral interview towards the end. And from that we'll pick around 20 to 25 students to be the scholars for that year.

Octavian Report: What do you think Burundi needs from an international development standpoint?

Etienne Mashuli: I would argue for Burundi and Rwanda, certainly, and for the DRC as well, the biggest need is human development. Spending on education. The people that we have are really our investments. We can talk about minerals, but a lot of these minerals have resulted in more chaos and more death than any benefit for our people.

Burundi has rare earth metals and some cobalt and nickel, but I personally don't think that the salvation of Burundi will be found in minerals. The problem with the minerals is they are likely to result in a resource curse where both groups fight to control the state and to exact rents from the state.

In my opinion, the best way to counter genocide in the African Great Lakes is to invest massively in human capital development and the education of our people. We have a population that is 50% under the age of 18. This is a massive time bomb unless we develop the capacity of these people and put them in charge of their own destiny.

“Consider Burundi with an average income of $200 per year and you move a kid to a Google where they’re earning $200,000. It’s hard to imagine a bigger story of social uplift in development anywhere in the world.”

The other reason why I think education is so crucial is that someone who is not educated is very easy to manipulate with fake news, and so it becomes very difficult to distinguish between what is truth and what is fake. And the consequences for us, and I guess the rest of the world is starting to see as well, are very dire.

Octavian Report: Why do you think the world has not focused on the utter human tragedy that has gone on – and is going on right now – in Central Africa?

Etienne Mashuli: Frankly because the West is almost singularly obsessed with Palestine. I have no idea why. I think there's a a reluctance, particularly among liberal elites, to not confront racism where it extends beyond colonial and indigenous people. So in places where they can't make these binary distinctions, they tend to be very quiet about them. You know, they say “Kagame is controversial,” or “it's messy”— blah blah blah. Even though they know you cannot have genocide, really, unless there is racism. There’s no way anyone could convince me otherwise.

Somehow the West has just forgotten about this and has chosen to see it through a developmental lens. To argue that the reason why we have conflict is purely because we are poor. So they think if you can channel a lot of developmental money, particularly in Rwanda, then you are going to avoid conflict.

But this does not settle these identity questions, especially those that are caused by ethnic-based discrimination. In fact, economic development alone, if not scrutinized, could end up actually creating very authoritarian, fascist regimes that enjoy Western goodwill.

And I think that's what is really going on. Everybody's reluctant to talk about Hutus and Tutsis. But this reluctance, in my opinion, makes the story even more tragic.

Octavian Report: You’re talking about the racism among the tribes, correct?

Etienne Mashuli: Yes. The racism has its roots in Western eugenic ideas. But the idea that you would spend time deconstructing hundreds of years of racism in the Western world and then you have a country like Rwanda where genocide just happened, and no one wants to talk about that racism at all, it's just ridiculous.

Octavian Report: You got your degree from Yale and then decided to go back home, which I guess is a sign of your optimism about Burundi. What do you see as the next phase of Tujenge’s work?

Etienne Mashuli: We are realizing that all our efforts to create opportunities really are slightly limited, particularly because there are some groups of people that need even more focus and more attention. Creating a development template that ignores certain segments of society is, in my opinion, actually a recipe for future disaster.

One of the areas I really want to focus on is creating a boarding school for rural girls in Burundi. The challenges of girls’ education are well known. But they are even more pronounced in the world's poorest country. Often rural girls have no confidence. So we are envisioning a Burundi school for girls in the next few years, if we can raise money for that.

Because I don't think we will have any lasting peace unless we have actual genuine empowerment of women. Because you know most of the conflict, for better or worse, both Hutu and Tutsi, is frankly largely driven by men. We need this rethinking around the gender lens. I think a very top notch school for girls would go a long way in creating a new vibrant group of female leaders in the country.

“I don't think we will have any lasting peace unless we have actual genuine empowerment of women.”

The other thing is, there's almost no national library in Burundi. I think it becomes very difficult to confront history unless people can actually read and unless people have access to information. I want to contribute in some ways in increasing access to information, either through creating a library, particularly a library focused on peace and conflict and the regional issues that have actually been affecting us.

Octavian Report: Are you optimistic about Burundi and Rwanda?

Etienne Mashuli: I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm very hopeful, certainly. But unless these massive problems of reconciliation between Hutus and Tutsis are dealt with, I could very easily predict more genocides in the future in the African Great Lakes region. I don't feel like we've had genuine efforts towards addressing these intractable ethnic problems at a national or regional scale.

But there is a lot of hope, of course, in our young students. Of course, it remains to be seen whether they are going to be different from the rest of the people—from the tragic past. That is our hope.

And so with one student, another student, and another, we are creating this unified new generation of Hutus, Tutsis, and Batwas in the region. A lot of work needs to be done in the realm of genocide, prevention, and reconciliation, and education has to be the main driver for this. Much like the Jewish experience, Burundian and Rwandan history shows that memory and education is the only reliable antidote to repetition.

And if someone believes in investing in the next generation of African leaders, within a post-genocide context, not through just charity but by backing bold, scalable ideas, Tujenge welcomes their partnership.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

If you are interested in learning about the Tujenge Africa Foundation, you can visit its website here.

Know a charity or NGO we should feature? Please let us know in the comments.

Octavian