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Chapter Seven: Leaving Kibogoji

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

Chapter Seven: Leaving Kibogoji

Leaving Kibogoji did not happen all at once.

There was no announcement, no ceremony, no clear line drawn in the soil to mark the end. It arrived quietly, the way many endings do—through conversations held in low voices, through pauses that lasted a little too long, through the feeling that something familiar was slowly loosening its grip.

I spent four long years in Kibogoji.

Four years of rain and drought. Four years of hunger and survival. Four years of learning how to live with less and endure more.

It was in Kibogoji that I started primary school.

School was far—very far. Almost fifteen kilometers every day, a long walk there and back. We walked early in the morning, before the sun became cruel, and returned late, tired and dusty. Because the school was so far away, most days I never had lunch. I ate early in the morning before starting the walk, and then again only when I returned home in the evening. My body learned to function on absence. Hunger became part of the routine.

I went to school already knowing how to read and write. I had learned that during my hiatus years in Mabama. Words were familiar to me. Numbers made sense. Books did not intimidate me.

Most of the children at my school did not have that advantage.

They struggled. Kiswahili was difficult for them because Kinguu was the language of their lives—the language of home, play, discipline, and belonging. Kiswahili belonged to school and authority, not comfort. Letters came slowly. Words resisted them.

My first-grade teacher, Mr. Malepela, noticed.

He selected me to help other children learn how to read and write. I sat beside them, pointing at letters, sounding out words, repeating patiently. I became a helper before I ever became a learner.

And so, for the first two to three years of school, I did not really learn anything new.

I read all the books on my own—Kiswahili books, even English books. I knew basic arithmetic. Lessons passed over me without challenge. My days were filled with walking, hunger, and repetition, not growth.

By my fourth year at the school, my mother realized what was happening.

She saw that I was surviving, but not advancing. Enduring, but not learning. Kibogoji had taught me resilience, but it could not offer me the education that would stretch me further.

So she made a decision.

She arranged for me to be moved to a different school, far away in Mkindo. A school with smarter kids. With teachers who would challenge me. A place where learning would demand effort again.

That decision became my opening.

Leaving Kibogoji was no longer just about movement—it was about possibility.

By then, Kibogoji had shaped me. 
It had marked my body and my mind.

I knew its paths without thinking. I could tell time by the sun and seasons by smell. My feet understood the land. My ears understood the forest. Kinguu no longer sounded foreign. It sounded like home.

That was the hardest part.

Leaving meant more than moving away from a place. It meant stepping out of a life that had claimed me fully. A life where survival was shared, where hunger was communal, where belonging was earned not through words but through endurance.

I watched familiar faces become memories. Friends I had grown up running beside, eating beside, fearing beside. We did not say goodbye properly. Children rarely do. We assumed we would meet again, somewhere, somehow.

The morning I left, the valley looked the same. 
The mountains stood where they always had. 
The forest did not shift to acknowledge my departure.

That hurt.

I carried Kibogoji with me—not in possessions, because there were few—but in habits. I walked lightly. I ate carefully. I wasted nothing. Hunger had trained me too well.

Fear traveled with me too—not the fear of lions or drought, but the quieter one: the knowledge that stability is fragile.

But resilience traveled farther.

Kibogoji had not failed me. 
It had prepared me.

Leaving was not abandonment. 
It was graduation.

I did not escape Kibogoji. 
I carried it forward.

And when I stepped toward Mkindo, toward books and classrooms and challenge, I did so with a strength forged by rain and hunger, fear and endurance.

That was my way out. 
And it was the last lesson Kibogoji gave me.

Chapter Six: Learning Fear, Learning Strength

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Chapter Six: Learning Fear, Learning Strength

The cycles of rain and drought did not teach gently. 
They taught early.

The cycles of rain and drought did not teach gently. They taught early. As a child in Kibogoji, fear did not arrive all at once. It grew slowly, season after season, the way cracks spread across dry ground. At first, it was small—watching the sky too closely, listening to elders talk about clouds that never came, noticing how voices changed when rain delayed itself. Fear lived in questions no one answered.

Will the rains come? 
Will the food last?

When drought settled in, fear learned how to stay. It moved into the body. You felt it when your stomach tightened before evening. You felt it when adults measured flour with care, when portions became smaller without explanation. You learned quickly that asking for more was dangerous—not because you would be punished, but because there was no more to give.

Hunger sharpened awareness.

You noticed everything. The sound of cooking pots—whether they rang loudly or sat quietly. The smell of food—whether it drifted far or stayed close. The way adults ate last, pretending they were not hungry. The way children were sent to sleep early so hunger would not have time to speak.

Fear made me cautious. 
Resilience made me resourceful.

I learned to read seasons before I could read words. The shape of clouds. The direction of wind. The way insects behaved before rain. I learned which fruits survived drought and which disappeared first. I learned how to stretch one meal across a whole day, how to drink water slowly so it felt like eating.

In drought years, play changed. Laughter became careful. Games shortened. Energy was guarded. We still ran, still played, but not recklessly. Every movement carried calculation. Childhood learned restraint.

But something else grew alongside fear.

Endurance.

You learned that a day without food did not end you. That sleep could come even with an empty stomach. That morning would arrive whether you were ready or not. You learned to wake up and walk anyway—to fetch water, to clear land, to follow instructions without complaint.

Fear taught me humility. 
Resilience taught me dignity.

I learned not to measure myself by what I owned, because ownership disappeared with drought. I learned not to depend on certainty, because certainty was seasonal. Instead, I learned to depend on people—on shared silence, shared labor, shared survival.

Adults did not explain resilience. They demonstrated it.

They worked fields even when the soil refused to answer. They shared food even when it hurt to do so. They made decisions slowly, carefully, knowing mistakes in hard years cost more. Watching them, I understood that strength was not loud. It was steady.

The cycles carved patience into me. 
They carved caution. 
They carved resolve.

Rain years taught me joy. 
Drought years taught me discipline.

Together, they shaped something lasting. A quiet toughness. An understanding that comfort is temporary, but survival is learned. That fear does not disappear—it becomes a companion you manage, not an enemy you defeat.

As a child, I did not have language for these lessons. 
But my body remembered them.

Even now, long after leaving Kibogoji, I still listen for the signs. I still respect seasons. I still know, deep inside, that abundance can leave without warning—and that when it does, you endure.

That is what Kibogoji carved into me.

Not despair. 
Not bitterness.

But the knowledge that I could survive hunger, fear, and uncertainty—and still wake up ready to live.

And that knowledge, once learned, never leaves you.

When rain did not come, the villagers went to the witch doctors to pray for rain. The witch doctors knew everything- from bringing rain to treating all human illness.

The worst drought came later. 
1983 to 1984.

By then, I was no longer new to Kibogoji. I understood its rhythms. I knew how to wait for rain and how to endure when it delayed. But those years were different. The rain did not simply arrive late—it almost did not arrive at all.

The land dried completely.

Rivers vanished into memory. Wells sank deeper and gave back less. Trees shed leaves early, as if conserving themselves. The earth hardened until even a hoe struggled to break it open. Fields stood empty, exposed, humiliated by the sun.

There was nothing to harvest. 
Nothing to sell. 
Nothing to exchange.

The village tightened.

Meals disappeared quietly. Once a day became rare. Some days, there was nothing but water. Children learned to sit still to preserve strength. Adults stopped pretending things would improve soon. Hope became cautious.

That was when people went again—more urgently—to the witch doctors.

This time, it was not ritual alone. It was desperation.

Prayers for rain multiplied. Sacrifices increased. Drums sounded longer into the night. The witch doctors spoke with authority, naming causes invisible to ordinary people—offenses committed, taboos broken, spirits angered. The drought was not just weather. It was punishment, imbalance, warning.

As a child, this drought carved fear deeper than hunger ever could.

Hunger could be endured. 
Uncertainty could not.

Every morning, I looked at the sky first. Every night, I listened for rain that never came. Sleep was shallow. Dreams were dry. The land that once felt demanding now felt threatening.

Yet even then, resilience took root.

People shared what little they had. Families combined meals. Children were fed first when possible. No one survived alone. That was not allowed. Survival became collective, enforced not by rule but by necessity.

I learned that strength does not look heroic during drought. 
It looks quiet. 
It looks tired. 
It looks like waking up anyway.

The 1983–84 drought stripped Kibogoji to its bones. It exposed fear, belief, endurance, and the thin line between faith and despair. And it left its mark on me.

Long after the rains finally returned, something in me stayed alert.

I never fully trusted abundance again. 
I learned that hunger can return without warning. 
That land can turn away. 
That survival is never guaranteed.

But I also learned this:

If you can live through hunger in Kibogoji, 
if you can sleep through empty nights and still rise, 
then fear no longer owns you.

It walks beside you—but it does not stop you.

That drought finished carving what the earlier seasons had begun. 
It left me cautious. 
It left me durable.

And it left me prepared for a world that would, again and again, demand endurance.

Chapter Five: Years of Rain, Years of Hunger

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Years of Rain, Years of Hunger

Years of Rain, Years of Hunger

Kibogoji was a blessed land.
But its blessings depended entirely on rain.

When the rains were good, life was easy. The land opened itself generously, and harvests were heavy. Granaries filled. People smiled more. Crops were exchanged for the things that mattered—clothing, salt, cooking oil, sometimes even a bicycle. New clothes came once a year, and that was enough. In good years, no one complained.

Food was plenty. There were celebrations after harvest. Drums echoed through the valley. Boys disappeared into the bush and returned as men, having gone through circumcision rites. Girls entered puberty and were gathered by older women to be taught how to become wives, through customs that included genital mutilation—painful rituals carried out in the name of tradition. These were days when the whole village moved together, bound by belief, rain, and the promise of tomorrow. In years of rain, everyone was happy.

Drought years were different.

When the rains failed, everything failed.

This was Kibogoji in the early 1980s—a time of turmoil for Tanzania itself. After the Uganda war, the country fell into a deep recession. Ujamaa, once full of promise, was failing. In towns, people lined up for hours to buy soap, sugar, and basic necessities. Sometimes the shelves were empty by the time their turn came.

In the villages, the suffering was quieter but heavier.

Coupled with the lack of rain, life became unbearably hard. There was nothing to sell. Nothing to exchange. No clothes that year. No salt. No oil. The land turned hard and dusty, cracked like old skin. Hunger crept in quietly at first, then stayed.

In drought years, people walked for miles into foreign lands to exchange their labor for food. They worked on other people’s farms, bent over fields that were not theirs, just to earn a meal. It was humiliating work, but hunger leaves no room for pride. A day of labor earned a small portion of food.

Once the food was earned, it had to be carried home—balanced on the head, step after step, mile after mile—back to Kibogoji to feed waiting families. By the time it arrived, the food was already spoken for. Children ate. Mothers rationed. Fathers pretended they were not hungry.

Most times, the food lasted only a few days.

Then the journey began again.
Again and again.
Walking. Working. Carrying.
Fetching food so life could continue, just a little longer.

You have never known hunger if you have never lived through hunger in Kibogoji.

Meals became rare. One meal a day, if you were lucky. Some days, there was nothing at all. You drank water and went to sleep with an empty stomach, listening to your own body complain in the darkness. Children grew quiet. Adults spoke less. Hope shrank with each dry morning.

In Kibogoji, rain was not just weather.
Rain was life.
And in those years—when the nation was struggling and the skies were empty—its absence was hunger.

Dreams from Kibogoji: Chapter Four

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Chapter Four: Kibogoji Life

The journey to Kibogoji was not easy.

We slept that night knowing the hardest part still lay ahead.

The next morning, we met Mr. Salim—the man who would take us the rest of the way to Kibogoji. He was quiet, steady, and prepared. His most prized possession was a Phoenix bicycle, strong and worn, built to survive long distances and rough ground.

Our belongings were tied carefully to the back of it, balanced and secure.

There were four of us: my mother, my younger brother, myself, and Mr. Salim. The bicycle was not for riding. It was for carrying what little we owned.

So we walked.

We left Turiani early in the morning and walked from dawn until dusk on the first day. The path cut through forests and open land, through silence broken only by insects, birds, and the sound of our own breathing. My legs burned. My feet protested with every step. By nightfall, we had covered three-quarters of the journey. We slept where we could, tired enough that sleep came despite discomfort.

At first light the next morning, we began again. By midafternoon, we arrived.

Kibogoji did not announce itself.

We stepped into the middle of a forest. There was no village center. No rows of houses. No signs of arrival. Just trees, tall grass, and a single grass-thatched hut standing alone. No toilet. No fence. No sense of safety as I understood it then.

That first night in Kibogoji was one of the scariest nights of my life.

As darkness settled, the forest came alive. We heard lions roaring close—too close. Their voices rolled through the night, deep and commanding. We could hear them chasing warthogs, the sudden chaos of movement, the sharp end of life happening just outside our thin shelter. It was terrifying. The walls of grass felt useless against the sounds of power moving freely around us.

Morning brought light, but not comfort.

My stepfather took us around the farm. We saw the footprints clearly pressed into the soft earth. Large. Fresh. We were shown where the lions had killed a warthog during the night. Evidence that what we heard was real, that danger was not imagined.

Later that day, the neighbors began to arrive.

The elders came openly, greeting my mother respectfully, welcoming her into a place that demanded strength. Their words were calm, measured, curious. The children came differently. They hid in the forest and tall grass, watching from a distance. Curious. Cautious.

They were staring at us.

Children with shoes. Children wearing decent clothes. Children from somewhere else.

We were no longer waiting.

We had arrived.

And Kibogoji—wild, demanding, and unforgiving—had opened its arms.
Learning to Live

Daily life in Kibogoji announced itself before sunrise.

The morning did not begin with clocks or bells. It began with sound—the crowing of roosters, the lowing of cattle somewhere far off, the rustle of trees waking with the wind. Smoke rose early from cooking fires, thin and blue, carrying the smell of burning wood and boiled maize. That was breakfast most days. Ugali when there was enough flour. Thin porridge when there was not.
Water was not nearby. We walked for it. Long walks with yellow containers, following narrow paths pressed into the earth by many feet before ours. I learned quickly how to balance weight on my head, how to walk without spilling, how not to complain.

Children did not complain in Kibogoji. Complaining wasted energy.

The days were ruled by work. Clearing land. Gathering firewood. Watching younger children. Following instructions without explanation. I learned how to use a small hoe before I learned how to write my name properly. My hands grew hard. My feet tougher. The forest became familiar, no longer just a place of fear but a provider—fruits, roots, firewood, medicine.

The people of Kibogoji were Nguu.

They spoke Kinguu, a language that rolled and clicked in ways Kiswahili did not. At first, it sounded like singing to me—soft, fast, full of emotion. I understood nothing. But children learn fast when survival depends on it. Words came slowly. Names for food. Names for tools. Names for warnings.

I learned that greetings mattered. You did not rush past elders. You stopped. You bent slightly. You spoke with care. Respect was not optional—it was the foundation of belonging.

The elders wore wisdom quietly. Meetings happened under trees. Decisions were discussed slowly. Silence was allowed to sit between words. As a child, I learned that listening was valued more than speaking.

Customs were woven into ordinary moments.

Food was shared, even when scarce. A visitor never left hungry if anything could be spared. Children belonged not just to their parents, but to the village. Discipline came from any adult who saw the need. You did not argue. You absorbed.
At night, stories replaced electricity. We sat close to the fire while elders spoke of ancestors, of land, of spirits that guarded hills and punished arrogance. The forest, I learned, was not empty. It was alive, watching, remembering.

I learned fear differently in Kibogoji.

Not the sharp fear of lions alone, but the steady respect for nature. You learned where not to walk. When not to speak loudly. How to read signs in the soil, the wind, the behavior of animals. Survival was knowledge passed hand to hand, mouth to ear.
Slowly, almost without noticing, Kibogoji stopped being foreign.

I began to understand jokes in Kinguu. I learned the rules of games played without words. I learned when to run and when to stay still.

The children who once hid in tall grass now ran beside me.
We were still different. But difference no longer meant distance.
Kibogoji was teaching me its language—not just Kinguu, but the deeper one.
How to live with less. How to belong without owning. How to listen before speaking.
And without realizing it, I was no longer just passing through.
I was becoming part of the mountains.

Chapter Three: The Mabama – Tabora Hiatus

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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

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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.

Dreams from Kibogoji: Chapter One

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Dreams from Kibogoji

It was there, between those mountains, that I learned how to live.

How to live among people I did not know.
People who welcomed me anyway, despite my strange ways, my unfamiliar speech, my difference. I was barely seven years old. It was 1979.

I arrived tagging along with my mother, my younger brother always close by, my shadow and my comfort. I did not know their language. They barely knew mine. I spoke Kiswahili. They spoke Kinguu—the language of the Nguu people. Mountain people. A people of raised land and steep paths. Though they are part of the Wazigua, who mostly live on flat plains, the Nguu chose the hills, the mountains, the places that require effort just to exist.

My Kiswahili carried a Tabora swing, an accent shaped by where I was born. The children my age could not understand me. Their conversations flowed in Kinguu, fast and familiar, shaped by generations. Kiswahili, to them, was distant and awkward. So we spoke without words.

With our hands.
With looks.
With patience.
With time.

The journey to Kibogoji was long and exhausting, both in distance and in meaning. It began in Mabama, Tabora—where I was born and raised for the brief seven years of my life before everything changed. Mabama was a small village, but it carried many signs of development. There was a large primary school with over seven hundred students. A small but functioning dispensary. A train station where trains ran day and night, their whistles cutting through the air. There was a busy marketplace for tobacco and cotton processing. A large Tanzania Defence Force camp. Running water. Strong soccer teams. Several buses traveling to Tabora and other parts of Tanzania.

Mabama was connected. Alive. Positioned for growth. It was flourishing with people working, trading, building lives.

Then, suddenly, I was traveling thousands of miles away to a place that could not be compared to where I came from.

There were no real roads.
No school.
No dispensary.
Nothing.

Kibogoji sat in the middle of nowhere, near the border of Morogoro and Tanga regions. Remote in every sense of the word—geographically, culturally, developmentally. It felt as though the world had forgotten it, or perhaps never known it at all.

It took many months to adjust to the language barrier. To play with the other children, we had to teach each other. I taught them Kiswahili. They taught me Kinguu. It was an exchange I will never forget. Children are resilient like that—we find ways to belong, even when we have nothing in common but curiosity.

We played soccer with very few words.
We laughed without translation.

They taught me how to be self-reliant. How to hunt small animals. How to gather fruits from the bush. How to read nature and live from it. There was nothing to buy. Everything was bartered—skills for skills, food for effort, trust for trust.

Between those mountains, in that forgotten valley, I learned survival. I learned humility. I learned community. I learned that language is not only spoken—it is lived.

And somehow, in that quiet place called Kibogoji, I learned how to live.