Childhood
He was born in the town of Kigoma in western Tanzania - what was then Tanganyika - on 4 October 1949 and was baptised Godfrey about two months later on Christmas day, 25 December 1949, as a member of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) among whose supporters was Scottish explorer and missionary-doctor, David Livingstone, of the London Missionary Society.1
Dr. Livingstone campaigned against slavery and the slave trade but also helped pave the way for the colonisation of Africa.2
According to his autobiography, Godfrey Mwakikagile was born at Kilimani Hospital and lived with his parents in one of the government houses in Mwanga, on a street with the same name, in the town of Kigoma when his father worked as a medical assistant. He later moved to Ujiji with his parents where his sister was born.
He was, according to his birth certificate, baptised by Reverend Frank McGorlick (from Victoria, Australia), a Scottish minister of the Church Missionary Society in Kigoma his parents belonged to. But he was brought up as a member of the Moravian Church at Kyimbila in Rungwe District in what was then the Southern Highlands Province in colonial Tanganyika, as he states in his books, Life in Tanganyika in The Fifties and My Life as an African: Autobiographical Writings. The pastor of Kyimbila Moravian Church was his great uncle, Asegelile Mwankemwa, who was the younger brother of his maternal grandmother.3
He moved to Rungwe District with his parents when he was 5 years old after living in different parts of Tanganyika - Kigoma, Ujiji, Kilosa, Morogoro, and Mbeya - where his father worked as a medical assistant for the British colonial government. According to his autobiography, his father also worked at the Amani Research Institute in Amani, in Muheza, Handeni, and Tanga before moving to Kigoma four months before Godfrey Mwakikagile was born. Rungwe was his parents' home district. Both were born and brought up in Rungwe District and were members of a tribe indigenous to that part of Tanzania.4
Rungwe District, ringed by misty blue mountains, is close to the border with Malawi and is located in the Great Rift Valley north of Lake Nyasa.
Godfrey Mwakikagile went to school in Tanzania and in the United States.
Tanganyika united with Zanzibar in 1964 to form Tanzania.
Read more about this topic: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The real dividing line between early childhood and middle childhood is not between the fifth year and the sixth year—it is more nearly when children are about seven or eight, moving on toward nine. Building the barrier at six has no psychological basis. It has come about only from the historic-economic-political fact that the age of six is when we provide schools for all.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)