Matthew Lavoie’s Africa Music Treasures Archive Blog

The Africa Music Treasures Archive Blog was founded by Matthew Lavoie who spent a year going through a lot of African music blogs and discovered a lot of forgotten African music. This prompted him to come up with a collective effort of dozens of netizens which inspired me to share his large collection with other music lovers. After going through hundreds of recordings he decided to start with one of his favorite artists, Bizimungu Dieudonne.

Matthew went through a crate of assorted cassettes and was excited to find a dozen Rwandan recordings; among them was one by Bizimungu Dieudonne. He immediately loved everything about his music. From Matthew’s collection of tapes is a song by Dieudonne called ‘Tabara Ryangombe’. The song was recorded in the late 1980′s.

Dieudonne had been largely forgotten, his music was no longer played on Rwandan radio and he had faded from popular memory. Dieudonne was a Rwandan civil servant who loved music, a passion he inherited from his father (who may have performed religious music). Bizimungu usually performed, throughout Kigali, with his wife Agnes Uwimbabazi. In 1994, they were both killed (along with many of Bizimungu Dieudonne’s family members) by Hutu militias during the Rwandan genocide.

The collection is also characterized by Rwanda’s greatest dance bands of the 1980s. The first track is from a reel and recordings made by Rwandan national radio in the early 1980s. One recording on this reel is called ‘Umuco Nyarwanda’ by the Orchestre Umulili of Kigali.

Apart from recorded music archives, the blog feature music groups from African countries whose music remains internationally unheard and unknown.