Music groups often have peculiar names. I had never heard of Afro Celt Sound System until this morning. A reader told me about them (for good reason). I’m glad to know about them. ACSS is a Euro-Afro group that fuses traditional Gaelic and West African music.
Infinitely various, the artistic world is.
Today, I have written about Paul Rusesabagina, commonly known as “the hotel manager.” His story, or part of it, was told in the 2004 movie Hotel Rwanda. Rusesabagina saved more than 1,200 people in the genocide. In 2005, George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, “Mr. Rusesabagina’s selfless acts have inspired millions, and he represents the best of the human spirit.”
In 2020, Rusesabagina was taken prisoner by the Rwandan dictatorship. He was held for almost three years, and tortured routinely.
I sat down with him at the Oslo Freedom Forum last month. An extraordinary person, though he calls himself “ordinary.” Indeed, my piece today is entitled “An Extraordinary Ordinary Man.” His courage in the face of hell, his gentle spirit, his perseverance, his capacity to forgive — all of it is remarkable.
One sentence in my piece reads, “At home with his parents, he spoke Kinyarwanda, the national language. Before he was out of junior high, he learned French and English.” Our reader has alerted me to a song in Kinyarwanda, a language I had never heard, to my knowledge. The song comes from Afro Celt Sound System. The lead singer is Dorothée Munyaneza, who was twelve at the time of the genocide (1994). She was able to escape to Britain with her family.
The song is “When I Still Needed You.” (Hear it here.) It has a familiar message: “Don’t forget me.” “Don’t forget me / Even though you’re gone / Gone, gone, gone.”
How many songs say this? Countless ones. Sometimes they are lightish — sort of sweet-sad: “Non ti scordar di me,” for example. (A Neapolitan song, by De Curtis.) Often they are weightier. I think of “Dido’s Lament” (the Purcell aria). “Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” Then there is Mahler’s “Abschied” (which concludes The Song of the Earth).
One could do a podcast — a music podcast — on this subject. In any event, I am glad to know about Afro Celt Sound System, Dorothée Munyaneza, and “When I Still Needed You.”