This project studies the lakeside Imbo region by the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika in the 19th Century. This research is interested in studying how the interaction of communities around lake Tanganyika affected the social, economic and political formation of the kingdom of Burundi. Over a century later, questions about people from the plain and those of the mountain persist in regards to claiming indigeneity: Tutsi, an identity given to all Hutu or Tutsi coming from the mountains, and those in the plain as Hutu. The preoccupation of this research is not to deny the role of environmental and geographical factors but to challenge the essentialization of identity based on geographic settlement. By bringing together the social and cultural interaction, the movement of people in the region, the research will expose how identities in the region were fluid, and dynamic, as well as how relations were multidimensional.