Kigali capital of the kingdom was at Nyanza, in the south of the country. The city of Kigali was founded in 1907 by German administrator and explorer Richard Kandt. Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi had been assigned to Germany by the Berlin Conference of 1884, and Germany established a presence in the country in 1897 with the formation of an alliance with the king, Yuhi V Musinga. Kandt arrived in 1899, exploring Lake Kivu and searching for the source of the Nile. When Germany decided in 1907 to separate the administration of Rwanda from that of Burundi, Kandt was appointed as the
Kigali down near Kigali Airport. This was the catalyst for the Rwandan genocide, in which 500,000–1,000,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu were killed in well-planned attacks on the orders of the interim government. Opposition politicians based in Kigali were killed on the first day of the genocide, and the city then became the setting for fierce fighting between the army (mostly Hutu) and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). On 8 April, Rwandan government forces attacked the RPF base in the parliament building from several directions, but RPF troops successfully fought back. The RPF then began an attack from the north