The sky over Minembwe opens like a book. The stars inscribe promises of eternity upon it. Night dissolves into the ashes of darkness and dawn, like a phoenix, rises again in a blaze of glory.
The tears recede like dried-up rivers. The cannons fall silent, swallowed by the silence of the valleys. In people’s hearts, hope blossoms anew and faces light up with a rediscovered smile.
The war, that long winter which began in April 2017, finally seems to be breaking beneath the breath of spring. Makanika’s dream rises like a mountain that refuses to be forgotten.
Bullets are now no more than ghostly echoes, lost beyond the ridges, replaced by the glorious songs of redemption sung by a wounded people.
The forces of evil return to the abyss. Tshilombo and Neva fade like shadows in the sunlight. The mercenaries, their accomplices and the Wazalendo are now, in this poetic vision, merely the remnants of a shattered dream, buried beneath the dust of lost ambitions.
The Eternal has heard the cries of the innocent. He has covered the enemy with shame and bestowed upon the blessed mountains the breath of sacred hymns.
“Behold the coming of the time of symphonies, the time of songs that set the hills ablaze, the time when every stone and every tree become instruments of a victory one would wish to last for ever.”
The dream of the Burundians to ‘purify’ our mountains and banish from the hills an ethnic group they would rather not see on these lands has dissipated like morning dew, confronted by the spontaneous resilience of the young mountain shepherds.
“They believed they were seeing offshoots condemned to oblivion, unaware that North and South share the same blood, the same history and the same struggle for justice, and that no wound can, by itself, divide their destinies.”
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