A great woman died yesterday. She was, at a guess, as old as eighty, with her brown-skinned face so wrinkled and brown eyes turned blue with cataracts: she was a striking woman. She was the first woman from Arusha region to earn a degree, following Julius Nyerere to Uganda’s great Makerere University. She returned to Tanzania, a social-studies graduate, and became the first female appointed to a government position in the same region. Friends with Nyerere’s sister, she was recruited to the Independence party – TANU at the time – and fought for the freedom of her country.
Years, marriage and six children later, she fell in love with the words of Jesus and, walking hundreds of miles through the Maasai steppe, stopped to meet women and talk to them about Jesus’ take on gender equality, on love, on forgiveness and honour, on the difference between hope and despair and the power that knowing someone loves you can bring to your life.
She had an impact on hundreds of people’s lives. She had an impact on me: welcoming me into her home, offering beans and maize when 8 grandchildren also needed to eat; telling me with all the graciousness of a queen how she still remembered areas of Arusha town reserved for Whites Only, where dogs were trained to chase off anyone else and white farmers tied Maasai braids to the tailgates of their landrovers and dragged them out of town. She had the dignity to ask after me: what was I studying, did I plan to return to Tanzania, how was my mother, who she loved so much, and told me so.
Death is so final that, with its appearance, it is often a string of disappointed if-only’s that hold hands with our grief.
Years, marriage and six children later, she fell in love with the words of Jesus and, walking hundreds of miles through the Maasai steppe, stopped to meet women and talk to them about Jesus’ take on gender equality, on love, on forgiveness and honour, on the difference between hope and despair and the power that knowing someone loves you can bring to your life.
She had an impact on hundreds of people’s lives. She had an impact on me: welcoming me into her home, offering beans and maize when 8 grandchildren also needed to eat; telling me with all the graciousness of a queen how she still remembered areas of Arusha town reserved for Whites Only, where dogs were trained to chase off anyone else and white farmers tied Maasai braids to the tailgates of their landrovers and dragged them out of town. She had the dignity to ask after me: what was I studying, did I plan to return to Tanzania, how was my mother, who she loved so much, and told me so.
Death is so final that, with its appearance, it is often a string of disappointed if-only’s that hold hands with our grief.
