Josephine Bakhita: The Girl Who Said No

In the late autumn of 1889, in the city of Venice in northern Italy, a young African woman did something no one had ever allowed her to do. She said no.

She was about twenty years old. Nobody knew her exact age, including her. She was living with a community of religious sisters, women who had given their lives to serving God, at a house they ran in Venice for people who wanted to learn about the Christian faith. She had been brought there about a year earlier by the Italian woman who considered herself her owner, and who had left her there for a time while she went abroad. Now that woman had come back, ready to take her to Africa. Everyone expected that the young woman would go, because she had always gone where she was told. She had been bought and sold, given away and passed from house to house, since she was a small child.

This time she refused. With a firmness that surprised everyone who saw it, she said that she would not leave. She wanted to stay with the sisters, and with the God she had come to know among them.

For three days the woman who considered herself her owner tried to make her change her mind, and the argument grew bitter. The head of the sisters’ house asked the most senior churchman in Venice for help, and the case was taken to the Italian authorities. On 29 November 1889 they gave their answer. The young woman had never legally been a slave in Italy at all. She was free.

Her name, or the name she had been given, was Bakhita. To understand why she said no, you need to know where she had come from, and what she had heard in Venice that made her brave enough to say it.

The Name She Forgot

Bakhita was born in Darfur, in the west of what is now the country of Sudan, in north-east Africa, around 1869. Her village was called Olgossa, and her people were the Daju. Her father was a respected man, the brother of the village chief, and she had three brothers and three sisters. Much later, when she dictated the story of her life, she began with that home. She remembered that she had lived a very happy and carefree life there, “without knowing what suffering was.”

That ended when she was perhaps eight or nine years old, around 1877. Slave raiders had already carried off her eldest sister. Then, one day while Bakhita was out near her village with a friend, two armed strangers seized her and took her away.

In the nineteenth century, a cruel slave trade still operated across this part of Africa. Raiders captured children and adults from villages like hers and marched them to market towns, where they were sold to work in households, on farms or in armies, in Sudan, Egypt and beyond. Many died on the way. Most never saw their families again. Bakhita never did.

She was so frightened that something extraordinary happened to her: she forgot her own name. The account written down by the sisters she later lived with says that the terror drove her name out of her memory, and she was never able to recover it. The name she carried for the rest of her life was the one her captors gave her: Bakhita. It is an Arabic word, and it means “fortunate,” or “lucky.”

It is hard to imagine a crueller name to give a stolen child. Whoever chose it probably meant nothing by it at all. But keep it in mind. By the end of her life, Bakhita had come to believe it was true, though not in any way her kidnappers could have imagined.

Sold, and Sold Again

Bakhita was marched barefoot a very long way, towards the town of El Obeid, and she was bought and sold twice before she even reached it. Once, she and another girl managed to escape. They ran through the forest at night, frightened of the wild animals and of being found, but they were caught again and sold to someone else.

Over the following years, she was sold again and again. Pope Benedict XVI, who later wrote about her, said that she was sold five times in the slave markets of Sudan. She worked in the households of several owners. Some of them treated her very cruelly. In one house, she was beaten so badly by the son of the family that she could not get up for more than a month.

Her worst years were in the household of a Turkish army officer, where she served his wife and his mother-in-law. She said that she could not remember a single day there without some new wound. It was there that Bakhita and the other girls were deliberately marked with cuts on their skin, made so that they would leave permanent scars. She said that she felt she was going to die. She carried the scars, and the marks of the whip, for the rest of her life.

We are not going to describe any more than that, and Bakhita herself, in later years, did not like to dwell on it. But it is important to say clearly what was done to her, because it was real, and because it is still happening. Millions of people in the world today are held in some form of slavery, including many children. Bakhita’s story does not pretend that slavery was anything other than evil. Nor should we.

The Master of the Stars

And yet something else was happening in Bakhita during those years, something no one could see.

She had never been taught about God. Nobody in the households where she served told her about Jesus. But she later remembered looking up at night, at the sun and the moon and the stars, and asking herself who the master of these beautiful things could be. “And I felt a great desire to see him, to know him and to pay him homage,” she said.

It is a remarkable thing for a child in her situation to have felt. Every master she knew was someone who owned her, someone she feared. And here she was, under the African sky, longing to know the master of the stars, without even knowing whether such a person existed, or whether he would be any kinder than the others.

The Bible says something similar. The heavens declare the glory of God, Psalm 19 says, and the apostle Paul wrote that God’s eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen in what he has made. Bakhita did not know any of those verses. She simply looked up, and wondered.

A Different Kind of Master

In the early 1880s, a great uprising swept across Sudan, led by a religious leader called the Mahdi, against the Egyptian government that ruled the region. As the fighting came closer, Bakhita’s owner, the Turkish officer, decided to leave, and he sold most of his slaves. In Khartoum, the capital, around 1882, Bakhita was bought by an Italian diplomat named Callisto Legnani, the Italian consul.

Bakhita was about thirteen. And she noticed something at once. In Legnani’s house, no one used the whip when they gave her orders. For the first time since she had been taken from her village, she was treated kindly. She later remembered peace in that house, and even happiness, though it was mixed with grief for the family she would never see again.

She was still not free. Legnani had bought her, and in Sudan she was still considered property. But over the next two years she was safe. Then the war reached Khartoum, and Legnani had to flee. Bakhita begged him to take her with him, and he agreed. They crossed the desert by camel to the port of Suakin on the Red Sea, took a ship, and in 1885 arrived in Genoa, in Italy. She was about sixteen.

In Italy, Legnani gave Bakhita to a friend’s wife, Signora Michieli, and Bakhita went with the Michieli family to their country house near the village of Mirano, near Venice. When the Michielis’ daughter Alice, nicknamed Mimmina, was born in 1886, Bakhita became her nanny. She loved the little girl, and Mimmina loved her.

“Who Is This?”

Around this time, the man who managed the Michieli family’s property, Illuminato Checchini, gave Bakhita a small silver crucifix: a cross with the figure of Jesus on it. As she later remembered it, he kissed it and explained that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had died for us. She did not understand what that meant. But she kept the little cross, and she looked at it often, secretly, and wondered about it. Who was this man who had suffered like that?

In 1888 the Michielis decided to move to Africa for good. Augusto Michieli had bought a hotel in Suakin, the same port Bakhita had sailed from. While the family’s Italian property was being sold, Signora Michieli needed somewhere safe to leave Mimmina and her nanny. On Checchini’s advice, she placed them both with the Canossian Sisters, an order of women devoted to teaching and caring for the poor, at the house they ran in Venice for people preparing to become Christians. Bakhita arrived there in late November 1888.

And there, at last, someone explained to her what the cross meant.

The sisters taught her about God. She later said that they introduced her to “that God who from childhood I had felt in my heart without knowing who He was.” The master of the stars had a name. And he was not like any master she had ever known.

Bakhita learned the dialect of Venice, and in that dialect the word for the master of a household is “paron.” It was the word she came to use for God. All her life she had known masters who despised her, who beat her, or at best found her useful. Now she heard of a Paron above every master, who had made her, who knew her and loved her, and who had sent his Son, Jesus, to live and die for her. She learned that Jesus himself had been stripped, beaten and whipped, like a slave. He had been nailed to a cross, the very thing on the little silver crucifix she had kept. And he had died there for the sins of the world, and risen again, and was waiting to welcome her as his own.

For a girl who had been owned, that changed everything. The Bible says that Christians did not “receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear,” but the Spirit by whom they cry out to God, “Abba! Father!” (Romans 8:15). Bakhita had been a slave since childhood. Now she was being told that she could be a daughter.

Free

That is why, when Signora Michieli came back to Venice towards the end of 1889 to take her to Africa, Bakhita said no.

It was not that she was ungrateful. She was fond of the family, and leaving Mimmina was painful. But she had found something she could not leave behind, and she knew that in Africa she would have no chance to be baptized, or to learn more about the Lord she had come to love. It was the first time in her life that she had refused to obey someone who claimed to own her, and she did it calmly, firmly, and without backing down.

Signora Michieli was furious, and for three days she tried to change Bakhita’s mind and to take her by force. The sisters’ superior appealed to the Patriarch of Venice, the senior church leader in the city, and the matter was passed to the state authorities. The answer they gave on 29 November 1889 was simple. Slavery had already been outlawed in Sudan before Bakhita was born, and Italian law had never recognized slavery at all. In the eyes of the law, she had never been anyone’s property. She was free to go wherever she wanted.

She chose to stay.

On 9 January 1890, at about twenty years old, Bakhita was baptized. She took the name Josephine. For years afterwards, people saw her kissing the baptismal font, the basin of water where she had been baptized, and saying, “Here, I became a daughter of God!”

Think about what had happened. Her kidnappers had taken her name and her family and her childhood. They had given her a new name as if she were an animal. Now, freely, she received another name, as a daughter, from a Father who would never sell her and never let her go.

Madre Moretta

Freedom did not send Josephine Bakhita away from the sisters. It drew her closer to them. She felt that God was calling her to give her whole life to him, and in December 1893 she began training to become a Canossian sister herself. On 8 December 1896, in the city of Verona, she made her vows. On that day she prayed that she might fly south to her own people in Africa and tell them loudly of God’s goodness, and she prayed especially for her mother and father, her brothers, and her sister, who she believed was still a slave.

She never did go back to Africa. In 1902 she was sent to the Canossian convent in Schio, a small industrial town in the foothills of the Alps, and apart from a few years away she lived there for the rest of her life. Her work was the plainest work a convent has: she cooked, she sewed and embroidered, she looked after the church, and for many years she was the doorkeeper, greeting everyone who came. She would gently lay her hands on the heads of the children arriving each day at the convent’s school. During the First World War, part of the convent became a military hospital, and she helped to care for the wounded.

The people of Schio came to love her. Many of them had probably never seen an African person before. They called her Madre Moretta, “our black mother,” and they meant it with affection. They remembered her gentleness, her smile and her short, simple advice: be good, love the Lord, pray for those who do not know him.

In 1910, at her superiors’ request, she told the story of her life, and it was written down. In 1931 it was published in Italy, and she became famous. For several years in the late 1930s she travelled around Italy to tell her story and help prepare young sisters going to Africa as missionaries. People often asked her the hardest question of all: what would she do if she ever met the people who had kidnapped and tortured her? She answered that she would kneel and kiss their hands, because if those things had not happened, she would never have become a Christian. It is easy to misread that. She was not saying that slavery was good, or that the slavers had done well. She was refusing to hate them, and refusing to let them have the last word on her life. “Poor things,” she said of them on another occasion. “They did not know the Lord.”

During the Second World War, Schio, as an industrial town, was bombed. The townspeople felt safer with the old African sister among them, and she told them calmly that God was in charge. In her last years she was ill and in pain, and confined to a wheelchair, but when people asked her how she was, she would answer, “As the Master desires.” At the very end, her mind went back to the slave roads of her childhood, and she begged the nurse to loosen the chains on her, because they were heavy. Then the fear passed. She died peacefully at Schio on 8 February 1947, at about seventy-eight years old.

The Catholic Church later declared her a saint, in 2000, and she is remembered especially by people working against human trafficking today. She is honoured as patron of Sudan, the country she was stolen from. But Bakhita herself would have pointed away from herself to her Paron. A stolen girl had been given the name “fortunate” as a cruel joke. At the end of her life, she believed it was the truest thing anyone had ever called her: not because of what had been done to her, but because, in the middle of it, the Master of the stars had found her and called her his daughter.

In Their Own Words

“Seeing the sun, the moon and the stars, I said to myself: Who could be the Master of these beautiful things? And I felt a great desire to see him, to know him and to pay him homage.”

— Josephine Bakhita, remembering her years in slavery, in the story of her life dictated in 1910

Think It Through

1. Bakhita longed to know the “Master” of the stars long before anyone told her about God. What do you think the world around you says about God, and what can it not say?
2. Bakhita called God “Paron,” Master, a word that had meant fear and pain for her whole childhood. Why do you think it mattered to her that Jesus himself had been beaten and whipped?
3. The first time Bakhita refused to obey an owner was when she said no to leaving Venice. What gave her the courage? When does saying no take more courage than saying yes?
4. Bakhita said she would kiss the hands of the people who had kidnapped her. Is it possible to forgive someone without saying that what they did was all right? What is the difference?

Read More on Ochorus

Josephine Bakhita did not write books, and the story of her life that she dictated is not in the Ochorus library. But her author page carries a full biography, with much more of her own words: about the night sky over Darfur, the day of her baptism, her years at the convent door in Schio and her answer to the question of forgiveness.