About Us
We are the Burundi Band and Peace Choir and are very happy to be sharing with you some history about our Group.
Refugees in Tanzania
We started playing our music in 1997 in a Refugee Camp in Tanzania. Many of us had been living there for many years because of the conflict back in our country, Burundi. In the camp, there were people from many different provinces of Burundi. But, all the members of our Group are from the Twa Community.
The Peace Choir and Burundi Band emerged from a thought our band leader Jean Phillippe had one day, that if he could get people singing, dancing and playing music this would help everyone to overcome the trauma that was being caused by the war; it would help create new, happy memories and would help bring the Twa People together with a common goal and vision.
After sharing this thought with others from our community, everyone agreed it was a good idea. But we had no instruments! Luckily, one of the members from our Group had an amazing talent of making guitars. So, we started gathering wood and other materials like string and wire from abandoned bikes that could be used. In the end, people liked the guitars so much that even Tanzanians from outside the camp were coming to buy them! We even made our own amplifier system from clay bowls.
We then started practising in any open space we could find at the camp grounds, and eventually hundreds of people were gathering around to watch us!
From 1998 onwards, as the word started spreading about our band, we began receiving invites to perform at different churches, refugee camps and communities. During this time, we started meeting more and more Twa people from Burundi.
Relocating to Perth
In 2006, the Choir started to disperse as people began to be re-located overseas for refuge and humanitarian purposes. Some went to Australia, whilst others went to America. The majority of the band members arrived in Perth, Australia in 2006.
Then in 2007, Jean Phillippe started to look for people who used to sing in the Group back in Tanzania in attempt to try and re-start the band. After visiting various suburbs in and around Perth, and tracing various leads, we were soon a large enough group to be able to start again. And so the Peace Choir and Burundi Band were born again!
In the same year, we started collecting some money to buy instruments and to look for a place where we could rehearse. We approached the Association for Services to Torture and Trauma Survivors (ASeTTS) who kindly agreed, and since then we have been practising three times a week.
In 2008, as in Tanzania back in 1998, we started receiving new invites to perform at different African Churches in Perth and different communities invited us to sing and perform at their celebrations and festivals. We have also performed at various Music Festivals and Conferences and have even been on TV thanks to Telethon!
Recording our first album
In 2009, we started thinking about making our own album. So we began writing and selecting the songs and we are glad to say our ambition was realised! Thanks to the great support of various Rotary Clubs we were able to go ahead with the recording.
It's been a long and enjoyable journey and it gives us great pride to present to you the Burundi Band and Peace Choir's first album. We hope you will enjoy it as much as we did putting it together!
Plans for the Future
Our dreams are big and we want to strive high! We want to help our people back in Africa through the profits we make from our performances. Our dream is also to be able to perform all over Australia and even overseas.