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.