Remembering Rwanda: Afro Celt Sound System and "When I Still Needed You"

It's hard to believe that just over 20 years ago, we all were waking up to the fact that something terrible was happening in Rwanda.

Genocides are probably not exclusively a 20th century phenomenon, but it sure seemed that way.  If you look at a list of recorded genocides in world history, a very disproportionate number happened between 1900 and 1999.  Because I was a young adult, and it was so much in the news, Rwanda was the one that caught my notice.  At the time I was living in Milwaukee, about three months from moving away from that city.  I was working for a religious order of Catholic priests and brothers called The Pallottines, and 20 years later, as I was doing some background for today's randomly selected song, I ran across their name connected with this terrible chapter in Rwandan history.  In Gikondo, Rwanda a mission church run by Polish Pallottines was the scene of a massacre of Tutsi civilians by Hutus.  As two UN observers and two Pallottine priests protested, two Hutu officials told them that cockroaches were infesting the church and when the Hutu militia arrived, they began hacking people to death with machetes and clubs.  UN peacekeepers were called and begged to come to the church, but declined.  Afterward, the Pallottine priests and nuns administered to the wounded and buried the dead in a mass grave because of the swiftness of decomposition in the heat.  A few days later, in a private Pallottine chapel neighboring the church, another 11 Tutsis who had been given refuge and supplies by a Polish Pallottine were burned to death inside the building after militia members learned that some had survived the initial massacre.

Today's song, When I Still Needed You by the Afro Celt Sound System and sung by Rwandan singer Dorothee Munyaneza, references that tragedy.  The Afro Celt Sound System was started in 1991 by British music producer Simon Emmerson and Afro-pop artist Baaba Maal after Emmerson noticed the similarities between an Irish air and an African folk song.  Members of Maal's band came together with a group of Irish musicians to collaborate on the initial project.   The group produced their first album after recording the initial tracks in a week's span, and the resulting sales were so good that they continued to record together.  The group fuses Irish and West African traditional music with elements of techno and electronic dance rhythms.  They have since released seven albums, and are considered something of a world music supergroup as they have often performed and recorded with a number of superstar musicians, including Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Sinead O'Connor, Ayub Ogada, Shooglenifty, and Altan.  In 2010, the band went on hiatus, but to the delight of their fans they recently erected a new web page and announced plans for an upcoming new album called Born.

When I Still Needed You is from their 2005 CD Anatomic.