I Believe in the Power of Collective Consciousness

As I grew up, I came to accept the fact that people in Burundi and Rwanda died like flies. What I never accepted was WHY, because I knew in my heart that the Hutu/Tutsi mumble jumble was not the real cause. The second thing I never got was WHY God would not listen to children’s prayers. In May 1972, during the Burundi civil war, I was seven and prayed for my dad’s safety. I needed him. He was my world, my life. Alas, dad was killed.

For many years, I wondered about those two WHYs, because I knew that on their answers I would build the meaning of my life. As years passed and I did not get any answer, I tried to rationalize: people are born and die, and nobody knows exactly why. I still wanted to do something meaningful though: honoring dad by writing a story about him, and a CD song to go with it. It is by collecting the Christian songs for the CD that I found the answers to my two WHYs.

I was shocked when I found out that about 90% of the Christian songs in vogue before the 1972 events were about one topic only: the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus. I then spent the next day writing down Rwandese and Burundian Christian songs I could remember with the same topic in fashion before the 1993-1994 crises. In no time, I was able to collect more than 50 of them. A particular lyric about the end of the world I used to listen to every Saturday via the radio Rwanda came in my mind and shed so much light on how the catastrophe had been “wanted’ and “prepared”.

I finally got it. We Burundians and Rwandans had “prayed” and “wished” for our countries’ destruction without knowing it, through our everyday messages christian songs. Children and grownups alike memorized the songs and kept singing them everywhere. They spread like fire in the whole community. The universe kept listening and recording day after day, year after year. Slowly but surely, we got the “end of the world” we had been “praying” for: Unknown number of people perished in Burundi in 1993-1996 and more than 800,000 perished during the 1994 Rwandese genocide.

For this I believe that we have created our own disaster by not paying attention to which kind of message we were delivering and were being exposed to. And for this I believe that all communities have a collective consciousness that can be a precursor of war or peace. Not only do people reap what they sow, but also what most of the members of their community sow, which explains why my prayers for dad were not answered. I finally dare to believe it won’t happen again, as I am ready to tell the world.