From: joachim omolo ouko
News Dispatch with Father Omolo Beste
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2014

Anicia Acen from Torit South Sudan writes: “Fr Omolo Beste today was the feast of Sudanese Saint Josephine Bakhita. How comes there are no many African Saints like whites. Do you have some African Saints in mind you can name? Otherwise I am sad that you left People for Peace in Africa and this has weakened its program and activities”.

Thank you for the question Anicia. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has offered category of some African Saints you can click here to read more-Category:African saints – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The problem of not making many African Saints is to do with poverty.

Saint-making requires a great deal of funding, up to almost about $1 million.

Now you can think of your grandma and pa who died in poverty somewhere there in Torit with all the requirements of becoming a saint.

It requires that through reflection and renunciation the person in question found divinity in interior life and became capable of extraordinary charity.

Then there are the miracles. A saint needs to have performed two, either during his life or through posthumous intercession: one for beatification and second for canonization, though the pope can waive the latter if he’s feeling generous. The first step in the process, being declared “venerable” by the pope, does not require any.

The most labored-over task in the process is the writing of the prositio, the formal argument for sainthood, whose “aim is to show an ordinary life that was lived in an extraordinary way.

Medical cures have always been the most common form of miracle attributed to saints. The papacy is generally suspicious of other supernatural events—visitations from the Virgin, experiencing the stigmata, levitation.

It is African pride that Josephine Margaret Bakhita, F.D.C.C. has become one of the African famous saints. In our community, the Apostles of Jesus Missionaries, Rev Fr Peter Odhiambo Okola has added as his third name’ Bakhita’ to demonstrate this pride.

Bakhita was a Sudanese-born former slave who became a Canossian Religious Sister in Italy, living and working there for 45 years. In 2000 she was declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. She was born in about 1869 in the western Sudanese region of Darfur in the village of Olgossa, west of Nyala and close to Mount Agilerei.

Sometime between the age of seven to nine, probably in February 1877, she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders who already had kidnapped her elder sister two years earlier. She was cruelly forced to walk barefoot about 960 kilometers (600 mi) to El Obeid and was already sold and bought twice before she arrived there.

Over the course of twelve years (1877–1889) she was resold again three more times and then given away. It is said that the trauma of her abduction caused her to forget her own name; she took one given to her by the slavers, bakhita, Arabic for lucky. She was also forcibly converted to Islam.

In El Obeid, Bakhita was bought by a very rich Arab merchant who employed her as a maid in service to his two daughters.

They liked her and treated her well. But after offending one of her owner’s sons, possibly for breaking a vase, the son lashed and kicked her so severely that she spent more than a month unable to move from her straw bed.

Her fourth owner was a Turkish general and she had to serve his mother-in-law and his wife who both were very cruel to all their slaves. Bakhita says: “During all the years I stayed in that house, I do not recall a day, that passed without some wound or other. When a wound from the whip began to heal, other blows would pour down on me”.

On 9 January 1890 Bakhita was baptised with the names of Josephine Margaret and Fortunata (which is the Latin translation for the Arabic Bakhita). On the same day she was also confirmed by Archbishop Giuseppe Sarto, the Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, the future Pope X.

On 7 December 1893 she entered the novitiate of the Canossian Sisters and on 8 December 1896 she took her vows, welcomed by Cardinal Sarto. In 1902 she was assigned to the Canossian convent at Schio, in the northern Italian province of Vicenza, where she spent the rest of her life.

During her 42 years in Schio, Bakhita being the only African nun among the whites was employed as the cook, sacristan and portress (door keeper) and was in frequent contact with the local community.

She suffered a great deal under white sisters but persevered since she was convinced that she was working for Jesus who called her to religious life.

Her last years were marked by pain and sickness. She used a wheelchair, but she retained her cheerfulness, and if asked how she was, she would always smile and answer “as the Master desires”.

Bakhita died at 8:10 PM on 8 February 1947. For three days her body lay on display while thousands of people arrived to pay their respects. Her feast day is commemorated on February 8.

Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail obolobeste@gmail.com

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