Rafiki Ubaldo

Helen Hintjens

There is growing interest among scholars and practitioners in how the arts can help rebuild post-conflict societies. This edited collection explores a range of musical practices for social and political peace. By presenting case studies in each chapter, the aim is to engage with musicality in relation to time, space, peace-building, healing, and reconciliation. Emerging scholars' work on Latin America, especially Colombia, and on the African Great Lakes region, including Zimbabwe, Rwanda and Kenya, is brought together with the purpose of reflecting critically on 'music for peace-building' initiatives. Each author considers how legacies of violence are addressed and sometimes overcome; lyrics are examined as a source of insights. These practical “music for peace-building” initiatives include NGO work with youth hip-hop, music for peace, work in education on memory, as well as popular culture and shared rituals. Special attention is paid to historical and contextual settings, to the temporal and spatial dimension of musicality and to youth and gender in peace-building through music.

African and Latin American Experiences

Music and Peacebuilding

Samuel Totten

During a one-hundred-day period in 1994, Hutus murdered between half a million and a million Tutsi in Rwanda. The numbers are staggering; the methods of killing were unspeakable. Utilizing personal interviews with trauma survivors living in Rwandan cities, towns, and dusty villages, We Cannot Forget relates what happened during this period and what their lives were like both prior to and following the genocide. Through powerful stories that are at once memorable, disturbing, and informative, readers gain a critical sense of the tensions and violence that preceded the genocide, how it erupted and was carried out, and what these people faced in the first sixteen years following the genocide.

Rafiki Ubaldo

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