Tag: family

Chapter Three: The Mabama – Tabora Hiatus

On By Shaaban Fundi, Ph.D.In EducationLeave a comment

Chapter Three: The Mabama Hiatus

After spending two years in Turiani, our lives shifted once again. In early January of 1977, my mother, my younger brother, and I were sent back to Mabama. We left Turiani quietly, before Chama Cha Mapinduzi was formally born, before politics settled into a single name but long after its effects were already shaping our lives.

For me, the return felt like a breath held too long and finally released.

Mabama was familiar ground. The paths knew my feet. Faces remembered my name. I met old friends whose laughter slipped easily back into place, and I made new ones without effort. The schoolyard sounds returned. The rhythm of the village felt steady, predictable. What was meant to be a short stay became something longer—three full years suspended between what had been and what was still coming.

Those years felt like a pause, a holding pattern in the middle of constant movement.

Our time in Turiani itself had been brief, but it lingered in my memory with a bittersweet clarity. What I remember most was not hardship, but proximity to something joyful. We lived opposite a famous soccer player at the time—Hussein Ngurungu.
He was a young man then, kind and unassuming despite his fame. When he returned from Dar es Salaam, where he played for the national team, he never came back empty-handed. He brought soccer balls. Real ones. New ones. To a child, that mattered.
Those balls carried more than leather and air. They carried stories from faraway stadiums, from crowds and cheers we could only imagine.

Word traveled fast whenever Hussein Ngurungu returned home. Children appeared from every direction—barefoot, dusty, shouting names before they even reached the road. We gathered in loose clusters, pretending not to stare too hard, though our eyes followed the bulge of a new ball tucked under his arm.

He never made a ceremony of it. He would greet the elders first, respectfully, then turn to us with an easy smile. When the ball finally dropped to the ground, time seemed to pause. The leather was clean. Unscarred. It smelled different—new, unfamiliar.

The first kick always mattered.
Someone would step forward cautiously, toeing the ball as if it might disappear. Then another kick, stronger this time. Soon dust rose, feet moved faster, laughter broke loose. Teams formed without argument. Shirts came off to mark sides. The field did not need lines. The rules did not need explaining.

For those moments, Turiani felt whole. The worries of adults faded to the edges. Politics, money, uncertainty—all of it retreated before the simple joy of a ball rolling freely across open ground. Childhood claimed its space.

In those scenes, brief as they were, Turiani felt connected to a larger world again. And for me, those moments softened the memory of a place that would soon let us go. We lived without fully unpacking our futures, always aware that this was temporary, though no one said so aloud. My mother carried that knowledge quietly. She never explained much, but her silences were careful, deliberate.

While we were in Mabama, my stepfather made the decision that would finally uproot all of us. Life in Turiani had become increasingly difficult. Every business he ventured into failed to take hold. Effort no longer translated into reward. Stability slipped further out of reach.

Back then, decisions belonged to men. Women followed.

When things became completely unsustainable, my stepfather sold the very house we had lived in at Turiani. The sale marked more than financial loss—it was a closing. An admission that the experiment had failed. He took the money and carried it forward, not toward repair, but toward reinvention.

That money became the seed for a new gamble.

He chose to leave Turiani behind and move deeper into his ancestral land—to Kibogoji. There, he believed, land was still honest. Rain still answered effort. A man could start again with his hands, his memory, and his will.

We did not yet know when we would join him. Only that another move was forming, slowly but inevitably.
Mabama, once the place I came from, became a place I was waiting in.

The pause would not last forever.

The return to Mabama was joyous, but it carried uncertainty beneath its warmth. What we believed would be a brief stay stretched into a long wait—a waiting without dates, without promises, without answers. We waited for fare that never came.

When we first left Mabama years earlier, we left with a man who was exuberant, confident, still carrying himself like someone whose future was intact. Even after politics and economics stripped much from him, my stepfather still had a little money left—enough hope to imagine recovery. But when we returned, that version of life was gone.

We came back to my grandmother’s humble home. The bigger houses we once lived in had all been sold and were now occupied by other families. The familiarity remained, but ownership did not. We were no longer the family people remembered as comfortable or secure. Wealth had thinned into memory.

My mother and my grandmother struggled quietly to keep us afloat. Food had to stretch. Favors had to be asked. Pride was swallowed carefully, one day at a time. My mother waited for money to return her to her husband, believing the separation was temporary. Each week, each month, she expected word.

The fare never arrived.

Slowly, she began to understand that waiting itself had become the condition of our lives. And so she adjusted. She learned how to live inside uncertainty, how to raise children without guarantees. We moved from place to place—staying with uncles in Tabora, in Urambo, in Ulyankulu—never fully settling, never fully unpacking.

Then, in October of 1978, the Uganda–Tanzania war broke out. The country shifted again. Fear thickened. Movement became harder. Hope narrowed. My mother lost much of what little certainty she had left, but she did not stop fighting. Somehow, she kept us fed. Somehow, she kept us housed.

In early 1979, when endurance had almost worn thin, the fare finally came.
It was enough.

Enough to end the waiting. Enough to gather what little we had. Enough to take us to where my stepfather had already gone ahead of us.
Kibogoji was no longer a distant idea.
It was calling us home.

Dreams from Kibogoji: Chapter Two

On By Shaaban Fundi, Ph.D.In EducationLeave a comment

Chapter Two: The Journey Begun Before 1979

The journey to Kibogoji did not begin in 1979.

It began earlier.

Long before I understood distance, before I could name places on a map or grasp the weight of decisions made by adults, the path was already being laid. In 1974, my stepfather decided it was time to move back home.

Home.

Morogoro.

Turiani.

The word home sounded simple, almost gentle, but it carried layers I did not yet understand. For him, it meant return—return to land that knew his name, to soil that held memory, to a place that did not require explanation. For my mother, it meant change, uncertainty, and the quiet courage that comes with following someone else’s vision while carrying children along with you. For me, it meant nothing at first. I was too young to recognize how beginnings often disguise themselves as endings.

Leaving Mabama did not happen all at once. It unfolded slowly, in conversations held at night, in decisions whispered rather than announced. Adults spoke in lowered voices, believing children did not listen. But children always listen. We feel shifts before we understand them. We notice when routines loosen, when futures rearrange themselves.

Morogoro was spoken of with familiarity and longing. Turiani even more so. It was described as fertile, green, generous with rain. A place where crops grew willingly and land rewarded effort. It was not the bustling, connected Mabama I knew. It was something older. Something rooted.

When the move finally came, it felt less like traveling forward and more like stepping sideways into another life. The road stretched long and uneven, carrying us away from the known toward something unnamed. With every mile, pieces of my childhood loosened—the schoolyard sounds, the train whistles, the busy marketplace. What replaced them was silence, thick and waiting.

Turiani was closer to Morogoro town, yet it lived by its own rules. Life revolved around land, seasons, and labor. Days were measured by what needed to be planted, weeded, harvested. The rhythm was slower, but heavier. Adults worked with their bodies. Children learned by watching, then doing.

It was there that I first learned that movement is not always about choice. Sometimes it is about obligation. About returning to what claims you, even if it disrupts everything else.

That decision—to go back home—set many others in motion. Paths branched quietly from it, reaching farther than anyone could predict. One of those paths would eventually lead deeper inland, beyond Turiani, beyond familiarity, into the mountains.

Into Kibogoji.

At the time, none of us knew that. We believed the move to Morogoro was the destination. We did not yet understand that it was only a passage.

The real distance was still ahead.

My stepfather was not always a man searching for footing. Before Turiani, before uncertainty settled into our lives, he was an accomplished businessman. He owned buses and lorries that moved people and goods across long distances. He owned houses—several of them—in Kaliua and in Mabama. Brick houses. Standing houses. Houses that signaled arrival, stability, success.

He had married my mother years earlier, in 1972. I was already born then, a quiet witness to a union shaped as much by circumstance as by affection. My mother was a beautiful Nyamwezi woman—tall, slender, with eyes strong enough to stop men mid-sentence. She carried herself with grace, the kind that did not ask for permission. In 1974, they had my younger brother, anchoring the family more firmly together.

Two years later, everything shifted.

By the mid-1970s, Tanzania itself was changing. Ujamaa na Kujitegemea was no longer an idea—it was a movement gathering speed, pressing itself into everyday life. It arrived not with celebration, but with tension. Ujamaa villages were forming. Wealth was no longer admired; it was questioned, even scorned. Private ownership blurred into state control. Businesses that once thrived began to suffocate under new realities. Fear moved quietly through towns like Mabama and Kaliua. Conversations lowered. Names were spoken carefully. People whispered about inspections, about lists, about officials arriving unannounced. One day a man owned buses and lorries; the next day, he was explaining himself.

Confiscations did not always come violently. Sometimes they came politely, wrapped in paperwork and national purpose. A knock on the door. Questions asked. Assets recorded. Ownership blurred. What had been earned over years could be absorbed in a moment, justified by ideology and the promise of equality. Rich individuals were no longer admired—they were suspected. Visibility became dangerous. What my stepfather had built with effort and ambition began to unravel.

He needed a fresh start.

And in times like that, there is no place more tempting than familiar ground. Home. The land that remembers you even when the world turns cold. That land was Turiani, in Morogoro.

We arrived in Turiani in 1975 with all our belongings, carrying both hope and exhaustion. It was meant to be a beginning. A reset. A chance to reinvent a life that no longer fit the times. My stepfather tried. He started new ventures, testing ideas the way a man tests soil before planting. But nothing took hold. Each effort failed quietly, then completely.

When everything collapsed, he turned not outward, but inward—further into his own past. Deeper into his homeland. To a place where land was plentiful, rain was generous, and labor was cheap.

That place was Kibogoji.

He wanted to relive his childhood. To start again from nothing. To build a farm from scratch. Trees would be cut down. Timber burned. Mud houses raised by hand. The land would be claimed the old way—through sweat, persistence, and belief.

What he saw as return, we would come to know as transformation.

And so, once again, the road called us forward—away from what had failed, toward something uncertain, and into the mountains that would shape the rest of my life.