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 it remained a relatively small city until the 1970s due to government policies restricting rural-to-urban migration. The population reached 115,000 by 1978, and 235,000 by 1991. The city lost a large fraction of its population during the 1994 genocide, including those killed and those who fled to neighbouring countries. From 1995, however, the economy began to recover and large numbers of long-term Tutsi refugees returned from Uganda. Many of these refugees settled in Kigali and other urban areas, due to difficulty in obtaining land in other parts of the country. This phenomenon, coupled with a high birth rate and increased