St. Josephine Bakhita

The word ‘Bakhita’ means fortunate in the native language of this saint.

She was born in Olgossa in the region of Darfur, in Sudan, Africa. It was 1869, when slavery was still rampant. As a young girl she did not experience poverty, being the niece of a tribal chief of the Daju people of the time.   She was only about 7 or 8 years old when Arab slave traders kidnapped her while she was working in the fields with her family. She was forced to walk barefoot to a slave market in El Obeid, having been sold and bought at least twice along the rigorous journey.

She continued to be sold and bought as a slave, so that she spent her youth in slavery, moving from one owner to another. In fact she had lost track even of her original name so that whenever she was asked for her name she started to answer simply “Bakhita’, a name that had been given to her by her captors, probably because she had survived the life threatening  experiences of her young  life because throughout her years as a slave she had been tortured, beaten and branded. One time she was cut multiple  times and then she had salt rubbed in her wounds!

During all this time Bakhita was not a Christian but she always looked at the wonders of Creation in awe, wondering “who could be the Master of these beautiful things.”

Finally she was bought by Callisto Legnani, the Italian Vice Consul in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. After 2 years he took her with him to Italy and gave her as a gift to his colleague Augusto Michiele, who put her with his family as a nanny. When the family needed to return to Sudan to attend to family business, Bakhita begged to be left in Italy. Her mistress left her in the care of the Canossian sisters in Venice. It was during this time with the sisters that she found her call to follow Christ by embracing Christianity.

On her return from Sudan, her mistress insisted that Bakhita had to return to her service. But Bakhita refused to leave the sisters. The superior of the institute decided to apply to the civil authorities on behalf of Bakhita’s rights, because besides the fact that slavery was not authorized in Italy, slavery had been abolished in Sudan even before she had been abducted! When the court ruled that Bakhita was a free woman, she chose to remain with the Canossian Sisters.

On the completion of her preparation as a catechumen, she was baptized, taking the name of Josephine Margaret Fortunata ( a Latin translation of Bakhita) and on the same day she was Confirmed and received the Holy Eucharist. Eventually she joined the Canossian Sisters and was sent to a convent in Schio, Vicenza, Italy.  For 42 years she worked as a doorkeeper and a cook but she was also commissioned to speak to the sisters who would be going to Africa as missionaries.

In these encounters, when she spoke about her experiences, her kidnapping and slavery, she not only forgave her kidnappers but  also thanked them because she considered herself fortunate as  she believed that otherwise, she would not have had the experience of her encounter with Jesus Christ.

She died on the 8th February 1947.