Burundi Emoji & Symbols

The Burundi flag emoji 🇧🇮 shows a white saltire, a diagonal cross ☓, that splits the flag into red triangles at the top and bottom and green ones at the sides. In the middle sits a white disc with three red six-pointed stars ✶ outlined in green. The usual reading of the colours is red for the suffering of the struggle for independence, green for hope and white for peace. The three stars stand for the national motto, Ubumwe, Ibikorwa, Amajambere in Kirundi, Unité, Travail, Progrès in French: unity, work, progress. They are also commonly read as Burundi's three peoples, the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa.

The design is older than the stars. When Burundi became independent as a kingdom in 1962, the white disc held a karyenda, the sacred royal drum, and a sorghum plant; that is the "Burundi flag 1962" people search for. The monarchy ended in 1966; by late that year the royal drum had been removed, leaving the sorghum plant, and three stars replaced the sorghum in 1967.

Behind the scenes 🇧🇮 is not a picture but two regional indicator letters, 🇧 and 🇮, spelling the country code BI. Phones and Macs draw the pair as the flag; Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters BI instead, though a friend on a phone still sees the flag. To spell the flag out in plain colours, people write 🟥🟩⬜ or ❤️💚🤍.

The royal drums of Burundi 🥁

If Burundi is known for one thing around the world, it is its drummers. Groups of men carry big wooden drums on their heads to the performance ground, set them in an arc around the central drum, and play in thundering waves while one drummer after another leaps forward to dance. In the kingdom the drum was a sacred symbol of the king's power, and the karyenda was the drum of the monarchy itself. In 2014 UNESCO added the ritual dance of the royal drum to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Recordings of Burundian drummers made in the late 1960s travelled far: the "Burundi beat" turned up in Western pop of the 1970s and early 80s, most famously in the drumming sound of Adam and the Ants. At home the drum sanctuary at Gishora, near Gitega, still keeps the tradition with its own drummers. In emoji, 🥁 and the long hand drum 🪘 both stand for it, with 🎶 and 💃 for the dance, 👑 for the royal history and 🛖 for the traditional round houses of the royal courts.

Coffee, tea and Burundi food emoji

Asked what Burundi is known for producing, the answer is coffee ☕: for decades it has been the country's main export crop, grown by small farmers on the steep green hills, mostly as high-quality Arabica. Tea 🍵 from the highland estates comes second.

On the plate, beans 🫘 are the everyday staple, cooked with bananas and plantains 🍌, sweet potatoes 🍠, maize 🌽 and cassava, often in a peanut sauce 🥜. Cassava has no emoji; 🍲 covers the stews and the stiff porridge eaten with them. In Bujumbura the favourite night out is brochettes, skewers of goat meat 🐐🍖, with a cold beer 🍺, usually Primus. Older drinks are home-brewed: banana beer, urwarwa, and sorghum beer, impeke, which is where 🌾 fits. Milk 🥛 carries special weight because cattle 🐄 do: long-horned cattle were a measure of wealth, and Gira inka, "may you have cows", is a traditional good wish.

Burundi emoji for Lake Tanganyika, hills and wildlife

Burundi's western edge is Lake Tanganyika 🌊, the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest, shared with Tanzania, DR Congo and Zambia. Bujumbura lies on its shore, with sandy beaches 🏖️, palms 🌴 and sunsets over the mountains of Congo 🌅. At night fishermen go out in boats 🛶 with lamps to catch ndagala, small silver fish 🐟 sold dried in every market, and the lake's colourful cichlids 🐠 are known to aquarium keepers worldwide.

Where the Rusizi river runs into the lake, Rusizi National Park has hippos 🦛 and Nile crocodiles 🐊; the most famous, a giant male called Gustave, became a legend and inspired a horror film. Inland the country is hills ⛰️ and mountain mornings 🌄, and the Kibira rainforest 🌳 on the Congo-Nile ridge is home to chimpanzees and other primates 🐒. In the south a small stone pyramid near Rutovu marks a spring often called the southernmost source of the Nile.

Burundi's outline is often said to look like a heart, and with its place in the middle of the continent it is nicknamed the heart of Africa, so 🇧🇮❤️🌍 is a natural combo.

Independence Day, football and running

Burundi became independent on 1 July 1962, after decades under German and then Belgian rule, so 1 July is Independence Day: 🇧🇮🎆🎉. Other national days are Unity Day on 5 February and Rwagasore Day on 13 October, which remembers Prince Louis Rwagasore, the independence leader assassinated in 1961; 🕊️ and 🤝 fit both. Most Burundians are Christian, the majority Catholic ⛪✝️, with a Muslim minority 🕌.

Football ⚽ is the most popular sport, and the national team, Intamba mu Rugamba, played its first Africa Cup of Nations in 2019, so 🇧🇮⚽🔥 is the match-day message. Running 🏃 brought the country's proudest sporting moment: Vénuste Niyongabo won the 5000 metres at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Burundi's first Olympic gold 🥇, and Francine Niyonsaba took 800 m silver in Rio in 2016.

Burundi languages, letters and currency

Kirundi, the national language, is spoken by almost everyone in Burundi; CLDR estimates around 8.6 million literate, functional users of Kirundi (about 63% of the population). It is written in plain Latin letters, so you need no special characters for it: everyday spelling does not mark its tones. The country's own name in Kirundi is Uburundi, its people are Abarundi, and the greeting Amahoro means peace. Kirundi is very close to Kinyarwanda, the language of neighbouring Rwanda 🇷🇼, and the Rundi collection has the whole alphabet.

French and English are official languages too, and French is the language of much of the press and government. French needs à â ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û and their capitals, and its quotation marks « ». On Windows hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0233 é, 0232 è, 0234 ê, 0224 à, 0231 ç, 0156 œ. On a Mac, Option + E then a letter gives é, Option + ` then a letter gives è or à, Option + I gives a circumflex, Option + C gives ç and Option + Q gives œ. On a phone, press and hold the plain letter. Swahili is heard in Bujumbura's markets, and the French and Swahili collections cover those languages in full.

The currency is the Burundian franc, code BIF. It has no Unicode sign of its own; prices are written with the abbreviation FBu, as in 5 000 FBu. Since 2019 Gitega has been the political capital, while Bujumbura remains the largest city and the centre of business.