Josephine Bakhita

On November 29, 1889, a decision was made in Venice about a young African woman. It happened at the Institute of the Catechumens, a house of the Canossian Sisters where adults were prepared for baptism. A lady from the Michieli family had come to take her back to Africa. The young woman did not want to go.

She had no papers and no family in Italy. She did not even know how old she was. She had lost her own name. Everyone called her Bakhita, the name slave traders had once given her.

The Patriarch of Venice, the highest churchman in the city, called in the King’s Procurator, a public prosecutor of the Kingdom of Italy. According to Sister Maria Carla Frison, who keeps the archive of the Bakhita shrine in Schio, what followed was something like a trial. The outcome was clear. Slavery did not exist in Italy. Bakhita was free and could choose for herself where she would stay.

She chose the house of the sisters and the God she had come to know there. She would become a sister herself, live for more than fifty years in a small Italian town and die there as a woman known throughout the country. In 2000 the Roman Catholic Church declared her a saint. Today she is regarded as the patron saint of Sudan and of victims of human trafficking.

How did a girl from Darfur end up in a convent in Venice?

A VILLAGE IN DARFUR

She was born around 1869 in Darfur, a region in the west of what is now Sudan. She never knew her date of birth. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography her village was called Olgossa and her family belonged to the Dargiu people. She had brothers and sisters. An older sister had already been taken by slave traders.

In those years Sudan was under Egyptian rule, which in turn was part of the Ottoman Empire. The Sudanese spoke of the “Turks” when they meant those rulers. In the vast area between Darfur and the Nile, trading in people was an ordinary source of income.

About her early years we know almost nothing except what she later told herself. According to the Canossian archivist she had a twin sister and her childhood was peaceful. The Vatican biography also says something striking about that time: as a child she had already experienced God in her heart, without knowing who He was.

THE GIRL WHO FORGOT HER NAME

When she was still small, two men seized her out in the fields. How old she was differs from source to source. The Vatican, the Dictionary of African Christian Biography and Pope Benedict XVI put it at about nine. The Canossian Sisters, the archivist in Schio and Pope John Paul II say seven. She herself did not know for sure.

The shock made her forget her name, and the names of her parents. The traders gave her a new one. In Arabic, Bakhita means “the fortunate one”.

She was sold and sold again, at the slave markets of El Obeid and Khartoum. How many times, the sources do not agree. Benedict XVI wrote five times. Other sources speak of four sales or of eight owners. According to her own account she once tried to escape. She was caught.

SCARS THAT REMAINED

She suffered most in the house of a Turkish general. I will not describe it at length. It is enough to know what the sources say together: she was beaten, and her body was cut with knives in a way that never faded. Vatican News speaks of one hundred and fourteen scars, Benedict XVI of one hundred and forty-four. She carried them for the rest of her life.

Perhaps you wonder how a child survives something like that. Bakhita never made a hero’s tale of it later. She spoke about it calmly, without hatred. I will come back to that.

A CONSUL IN KHARTOUM

In 1882 there was a turning point. In Khartoum she was bought by, or for, the Italian consul Callisto Legnani. The Vatican writes that in his house, for the first time in years, she was not beaten. He treated her kindly.

It did not stay peaceful there. A revolt had broken out in Sudan, led by a religious leader who called himself the Mahdi, the promised redeemer of Islamic tradition. His followers rose against the Egyptian rulers and their foreign allies. Legnani had to leave the country.

Bakhita asked whether she could come with him. In her own words, as Vatican News quotes them, she dared to ask him to take her with him to Italy. He said yes. They traveled to the port of Suakin on the Red Sea and from there by ship to Genoa. According to the archivist in Schio this was in 1885. Vatican News gives 1884.

NANNY IN ZIANIGO

In Genoa, Legnani handed her over to a family he was friends with, the Michielis. The Vatican writes that this happened under pressure from Mrs. Michieli. They went to live in Zianigo, a village near Mirano, not far from Venice. There Bakhita became the nanny of their little daughter Alice, whom everyone called Mimmina.

She was still not free. She was property that had changed owners. But for the first time she was in a setting where she heard something about the God she had not yet known in Darfur.

Augusto Michieli bought a hotel in Suakin, the port Bakhita had sailed from. The family wanted to go back to Africa. In 1888 Mrs. Michieli went ahead. On the advice of the man who managed their property, Illuminato Checchini, Mimmina and Bakhita were placed with the Canossian Sisters in Venice in the meantime.

WITH THE SISTERS OF CANOSSA

The Canossian Sisters were a Roman Catholic order of women, founded by Magdalene of Canossa from Verona. Among other things they worked in education and catechesis, teaching the faith. The house in Venice where Bakhita arrived was meant for catechumens: people preparing for baptism.

There she truly heard for the first time who God was. According to the Vatican she recognized in Him Someone she had already sensed, long before she knew His name. She learned the Venetian dialect. Benedict XVI wrote in his encyclical Spe Salvi that in it she learned to call God by the word paron, boss or master. She had had many masters. This Master was different. He loved her. According to the pope, she knew she was “definitively loved”.

Do you know God as master? To most people today that word sounds harsh. For someone who had known real masters with whips, it was the very word that made all the difference.

"BODY AND SOUL"

In November 1889 Mrs. Michieli came back to collect her daughter and Bakhita. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography she was herself Russian Orthodox and did not support Bakhita’s wish to be baptized a Roman Catholic. That detail appears only in that source.

Bakhita said no. She wanted to stay. Later she explained that otherwise she would have lost body and soul, Sister Frison relates.

The patriarch and the authorities became involved. Whether it can be called a real court case is not clear. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography speaks only of the intervention of the patriarch and representatives of the government. The archivist in Schio speaks of something like a trial. All the sources agree on the outcome. On November 29, 1889, it was established that Bakhita was free.

She was about twenty. She said goodbye to Mimmina, the child she had cared for for years. According to the archivist this cost her a great deal. It was her first choice as a free woman, and it was a choice for God.

A NEW NAME ON JANUARY 9, 1890

On January 9, 1890, she was baptized. On the same day she received confirmation and her first communion, the three sacraments by which an adult is received into the Catholic Church. The Patriarch of Venice himself administered them. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography this was Cardinal Domenico Agostini.

She was given three names: Giuseppina, Margherita and Fortunata. The last is the Latin word for fortunate. So the name her kidnappers had given her in mockery took on a new meaning. She kept the name Bakhita.

Later she said of that day: “Here, I became a daughter of God!” The Vatican includes that sentence in her official biography.

I keep coming back to that little sentence. Someone who had been traded as property calls herself a daughter. She had had a father and a mother, but their names had vanished from her memory. Now she had a Father whose name she did know.

"YES, FATHER"

She stayed a few more years in the house of the catechumens. More and more clearly she felt that she wanted to become a sister herself. In 1893 she began her novitiate, the period of training for new sisters. Before her vows she was examined by Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, who was then Patriarch of Venice. He would later become Pope Pius X.

On December 8, 1896, she took her vows as a Canossian sister. Benedict XVI writes that this took place in Verona. The Vatican has preserved a prayer she wrote for that day. In it she asked whether she might one day go to her own people to tell them about God’s goodness. She mentioned her father and mother, her brothers and her sister, who she believed were still living in slavery.

In 1902 she was transferred to Schio, a small town in the province of Vicenza. According to Sister Frison, when she was asked whether she was willing to go, she answered with two words: “Yes, Father.” She would stay in Schio for the rest of her life.

MADRE MORETTA AT THE DOOR

Her work was simple. She cooked, sewed, embroidered and looked after the sacristy, the room where the things used for Mass are kept. She became best known as the doorkeeper. Anyone who rang at the convent door saw her.

The people of Schio called her Madre Moretta, which you could translate as the little black mother. It was a term of affection, not an insult. Children loved to come to her. Some girls once asked her whether she would rather have been born white. She said no. Everything her Lord had done, she considered good, the archivist relates.

During the First World War, according to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, the convent became a military hospital, and Bakhita helped care for wounded soldiers. From the same Canossian tradition comes a story from a war year that is not known exactly. Because of the color of her skin she was taken for a spy. She stayed calm, took the men to her room and showed them the window where, she said, she had received her calling. After that they left her alone. I have found this story only with the Canossian archivist.

A STORY THAT SPREAD

In 1931 a book about her life appeared, Storia meravigliosa, A Wonderful Story. The author was Ida Zanolini, a laywoman connected with the Canossian Sisters. She based the book on what Bakhita had told her herself. The book made her known throughout Italy.

According to Benedict XVI she then traveled around Italy to raise awareness and support for the missions, the work of the church in other parts of the world. As she went, she told her story. Wikipedia gives the years 1935 to 1939 and a training house for missionary sisters in Vimercate, near Milan. I have not found a second source for that.

What did she tell people? A student from Bologna once asked her what she would do if she met her kidnappers. According to a text that the Pontifical Urbaniana University prepared for the Vatican, she said that she would kneel and kiss their hands. Without them she would never have become a Christian. Asked whether she could forgive the people who had tortured her, she answered: “Why not? poor things! They did not know the Lord.”

You do not have to find that easy. I do not find it easy either. She did not excuse the cruelty. She simply saw more in it than cruelty.

"AS THE MASTER DESIRES"

Her last years were hard. She was ill for a long time and in much pain. Anyone who asked how she was, according to the Vatican, received a short answer: “As the Master desires.”

At the end the past came back. She asked the nurse for something that was not there. “Please, loosen the chains… they are heavy!” So it reads in a life sketch from Vatican Radio. More than sixty years after she had worn them, she felt them again.

On February 8, 1947, she died in the convent in Schio, with the sisters around her. Vatican News gives pneumonia as the cause. According to the Vatican her last words were a cry to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Afterwards people came from the town to see her one last time.

BACK TO SUDAN

Twelve years after her death the inquiry into her life began, the process that precedes canonization in the Catholic Church. On December 1, 1978, the church declared that she had practiced the Christian virtues to a heroic degree. On May 17, 1992, Pope John Paul II beatified her.

The following year the same pope went to Khartoum, the city where Bakhita had been sold as a child. Sudan had by then been at war for years. In his homily on February 10, 1993, he called her a daughter of the country. She had been sold as merchandise, he said, and yet she remained free, “Free with the freedom of the saints.” He gave her to the Sudanese as an example and as a patron.

On October 1, 2000, she was canonized in Rome, together with one hundred and twenty martyrs from China, the Spanish founder María Josefa Sancho de Guerra and the American Katharine Drexel. In his homily the pope asked for prayer for Sudan, which had been torn by war for seventeen years.

In 2007 Benedict XVI wrote about her in Spe Salvi, his encyclical on hope. Since 2015 her feast day, February 8, has also been the International Day of Prayer against human trafficking. This was decided by two organizations in Rome, the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and the international union of superiors of women’s orders.

THE WINDOW IN SCHIO

She never went back to Darfur. The prayer of 1896, to be allowed to go to her own people, was not answered the way she asked. She stayed at the door of a convent in Italy, to the end.

I think of the window to which she led the men who wanted to arrest her. She had nothing to hide. She only pointed to the place where her Master had called her. A girl without a name, sold at the market of El Obeid, stood at a window in Schio and knew who she was.