49 Facts About Godfrey Mwakikagile

Godfrey Mwakikagile's parents moved from Tanga to Kigoma in May 1949 five months before he was born.

Godfrey Mwakikagile died in Muheza in 1937 and was buried at Power Station, Muheza.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's paternal grandmother Laheli Kasuka Mwaibanje who once lived with her husband in Kyela where their son Elijah was born came from Mpata village in the ward of Kabula in Selya in Busokelo in the eastern part of Rungwe District.

Godfrey Mwakikagile worked in different parts of Tanganyika and was one of the few medical assistants in the entire country of 10 million people.

Godfrey's mother Syabumi Mwakikagile who came from Kyimbila in Rungwe District was a pupil of Tanganyika's British feminist educator, and later Member of Parliament, Mary Hancock, who taught her at Kyimbila Girls' School in the Southern Highlands Province in the early 1940s.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was named Willie by his mother soon after he was born, a prebaptismal name he does not officially use but by which he is known among his relatives and other people who knew him when he was growing up, as he has stated in his autobiographical writings and in other works including a book he wrote in 2023 about one of his secondary school teachers who was a national leader in Tanganyika's independence movement, Julius Mwasanyagi: A forgotten African nationalist.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's father played a critical role in his early life and education.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was a strict disciplinarian and taught him at home when he was attending primary school from Standard One to Standard Four and during the first two years of middle school, Standard Five and Standard Six, before he left home to go to boarding school in 1963, three miles away, when he was 13 years old.

Godfrey Mwakikagile taught him when he was out of school and went home during holidays in his last two years of middle school in Standard Seven and Standard Eight.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's mother, who taught Sunday school and was a volunteer adult education teacher for some time teaching adults how to read and write, taught him at home when he was in primary school.

Godfrey Mwakikagile became a Member of Parliament and a cabinet member in the early part of independence under Nyerere serving as Minister of Labour.

Godfrey Mwakikagile has permission to leave Tanganyika and return here.

Godfrey Mwakikagile did not even want American Peace Corps in Tanzania.

Malecela was the first African to serve as District Commissioner of Rungwe District in the town of Tukuyu soon after independence in the early 1960s when Elijah Godfrey Mwakikagile was a member of the Rungwe District Council where he was a councillor for many years.

Ngwilulupi and Elijah Godfrey Mwakikagile came from the same village four miles south of the town of Tukuyu, knew each other since childhood, were classmates from Standard One at Tukuyu Primary School to Malangali Secondary School and later became relatives-in-law when they married cousins.

Elijah Godfrey Mwakikagile was a first cousin of one of Tanzania's first commercial airline pilots, Oscar Mwamwaja, who was shot but survived when he was a co-pilot of an Air Tanzania plane, a Boeing 737, that was hijacked on 26 February 1982 and forced to fly from Tanzania to Britain.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's mother was an elder sister of Oscar's father.

Owen's father Johann Chonde Mwambapa was an elder brother of Godfrey Mwakikagile's mother, the last-born in her family.

Godfrey Mwakikagile worked at the same police station in Mwanza with Peter Bwimbo who, after independence, became head of the Presidential Protection Unit and President Nyerere's Chief Bodyguard.

Godfrey Mwakikagile wrote about Benjamin Mwambapa in his book, Mlinzi Mkuu wa Mwalimu Nyerere, on the years they worked together at the police station in Mwanza since 1953.

Godfrey Mwakikagile attended Kyimbila Primary School - founded by British feminist educator Mary Hancock and transformed into a co-educational institution - near the town of Tukuyu in the late 1950s.

Godfrey Mwakikagile attended Mpuguso Middle School in Rungwe District, Mbeya Region, in the Southern Highlands.

Godfrey Mwakikagile wrote, among other works, An African Season, the first book ever written by a member of the Peace Corps, and Conviction: Solving the Moxley Murder, about a homicide which received extensive media coverage because it involved a member of the Kennedy family.

Godfrey Mwakikagile attended Songea Secondary School from 1965 to 1968 in Ruvuma Region which was once a part of the Southern Province.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was one of the major participants at the Tabora Conference of 1958 when the role of TANU was debated on how the party would carry on the independence struggle as a nationalist movement without compromising the interests of the black African majority.

Godfrey Mwakikagile stated in one of his petitions to the United Nations that one day the people, subjected to land dispossession, will find out that their fertile land was declared White Highlands for white settlers as happened in neighbouring Kenya where the Kikuyu lost their land in the Central Highlands to the British settlers, triggering the Mau Mau rebellion - war of independence.

Godfrey Mwakikagile had a deep booming voice and thorough command of both Kiswahili and English and was one of the most articulate and remains one of the most-forgotten early nationalists in Tanganyika's colonial and post-colonial history.

Godfrey Mwakikagile articulated positions which thrust him into prominence as one of the national leaders and not just of the Hehe people in Iringa District in the Southern Highlands Province during the struggle for independence.

Godfrey Mwakikagile has addressed the subject in his book Julius Mwasanyagi: A forgotten African nationalist.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was hired by the news editor, David Martin, a British journalist who later became Africa correspondent of a London newspaper, The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday paper, covered the Angolan Civil War for BBC and for CBC and who was a close friend of President Nyerere.

Godfrey Mwakikagile underwent training, which included basic military training, at Ruvu National Service camp when it was headed by his former primary school teacher Eslie Mwakyambiki who later became a Member of Parliament representing Rungwe District and Deputy Minister of Defence and National Service under President Nyerere.

Godfrey Mwakikagile then went to another National Service camp in Bukoba on the shores of Lake Victoria in the North-West Region bordering Uganda.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was a student of Nyerere in secondary school at St Francis College, Pugu, on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam, and president of Tanzania for 10 years, serving two consecutive five-year terms.

Godfrey Mwakikagile worked as an information officer at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in Dar es Salaam.

Godfrey Mwakikagile left Tanzania in November 1972 to go for further studies in the United States when he was a reporter at the Daily News under Mkapa.

Godfrey Mwakikagile has through the years focused on the failure of African leaders and governments to address the continent's problems, abusing their power, misusing and squandering resources which could have been used to improve living conditions of their people and develop the continent which does not even need foreign aid because of its vast amounts of natural resources.

Godfrey Mwakikagile contends that bad leadership is the biggest problem African countries have faced since independence because leaders are not held accountable for their actions and rig elections to stay in power and even perpetuate themselves in office, a problem he has addressed in his books including Ethnicity and Regionalism in National Politics in Kenya and Nigeria: A Comparative Study.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's books are mostly found in college and university libraries throughout the world.

Godfrey Mwakikagile said her analysis was the same as Mwakikagile's and those of other prominent people including Nelson Mandela, Chinua Achebe, Ali Mazrui, and former Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, stating that she made the same point they did.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was the first student from Tanzania to be sponsored by the organisation.

Godfrey Mwakikagile was one of two students among those sponsored who became authors.

Godfrey Mwakikagile went to the same Catholic church President Nyerere did in Oyster Bay, Dar es Salaam.

Godfrey Mwakikagile read Nyerere's writings to his students in economics classes at Aquinas College and said about Nyerere: "Godfrey Mwakikagile is one of the best world leaders we have today," as Mwakikagile has stated in some of his books including Reflections on Race Relations: A Personal Odyssey.

Godfrey Mwakikagile composed some instrumental music in 1993 - self-taught - but did not release it until thirty years later, as he has briefly explained in one of his books, Julius Mwasanyagi: A forgotten African nationalist, in which he states that he pursued it only as a hobby during that time and has, instead, focused on writing books through the years.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's books are used in various academic disciplines up to the post-graduate level including doctoral studies.

Godfrey Mwakikagile has written some books about the African diaspora, mainly Black America and the Afro-Caribbean region including Afro-Caribbean communities in Britain and the United States.

Godfrey Mwakikagile reviewed the first edition of Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era in the African Studies Review, an academic journal of the African Studies Association, in 2003.

Godfrey Mwakikagile's books have been reviewed in a number of academic publications, including the academic journal African Studies Review, by scholars in their fields.

Godfrey Mwakikagile has written about race relations in the United States and relations between continental Africans and people of African descent in the diaspora in his titles such as Black Conservatives in The United States; Relations Between Africans and African Americans; and Relations Between Africans, African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.