TANZANIA HEROES DAY- MY HERO IS MY GREAT GRANDMOTHER

 

My great grandmother Adelaide  seMkombe, who was known to every one who knew her in her village Msombwe and neighbouring villages including  Lupalama, Kwilangi, Banavanu and others as Bibi Kongo is my special hero this year. Bibi Kongo had a sad but adventurous child hood, if you want to call it that.
She lived up to a very old age, and always had a story to tell. But the story of her early life makes her my hero this year. Bibi Kongo  told us again and again that she was a daughter of a Nyamwezi Chief somewhere in Tabora. She was taken from her father by German soldiers who had been fighting with her tribe, she was taken as guarantee that her father would never challenge the Germans again. The Germans took her with a promise to bring her back if there was peace, she was never returned to her parents. The Germans took her from Tabora to Bagamoyo. It was fascinating hearing her tell of the  journey from Tabora  passing through places like  Kilimatinde on a to Bagamoyo with the German army, a distance of 825 kilometers by foot, and she must have been hardly 10 years old!!. When she arrived in Bagamoyo she was handed over to a woman who immediately turned her into a slave. One day when she was sent to fetch water she escaped to a nearby Catholic church which was run by French priests, who had at the time set up a camp for freed slaves.
For some reason she became part of a caravan of Catholic Benedictine missionaries who were going to the  Catholic mission at Tosamaganga in Iringa. So again she was in a 490 kilometer journey from Bagamoyo to Iringa again on foot.
On the way to Iringa her group met up with a group of soldiers transporting the head of Mutwa Mkwawa from Iringa to Dar es Salaam. So it must have been late 1898 or sometime in 1899 because Mutwa Mukwava killed himself on 19th June 1898.
Bibi Kongo arrived in Tosamaganga, she learned to read and write and while in Tosamaganga met the mason Kavalang’ombe Benedict  Saula and they married and went on to get 4 daughters. One of whom Elizabeth became my grandmother.