Bakhita: From Slave to Saint

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint.  By Roberto Italo Zanini, Ignatius Press, 2013.

 

Roberto Italo Zanini’s book Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a biography of Saint Josephine Margaret Bakhita, (ca. 1869–1947).  St. Bakhita is not one of the best-known saints from the twentieth century, but Zanini’s work will hopefully contribute to making more people aware of her heartbreaking and inspiring life story.  After a happy childhood in northeastern Africa, St. Bakhita was kidnapped when she was very young and sold into slavery.  After suffering unimaginable torments, she was rescued from a life of forced servitude and torture, and eventually came to Europe, where she converted to Christianity and entered religious life, where her simple yet joyous existence and her unshakeable faith served as inspirations to many people.

 

Zanini opens his book with a brief overview of St. Bakhita’s life:

 

“Bakhita, the first saint from Sudan, was an African woman who was beaten and tortured as the slave of a powerful Arab merchant and of a Turkish general.  Ransomed in Khartoum at the end of the nineteenth century by the Italian vice-consul and brought to Venice, she worked as the family nursemaid and was baptized.  She joined the Canossian Daughters of Charity founded by Saint Magdalene of Canossa and became a saint, living for fifty years in the convent on Via Fusinato in the town of Schio, in the Italian province of Vicenza.

 

Kidnapped as a child by slave traders, Bakhita was bought and sold five times over, as are many children in Africa and across the globe even to this day.  Of her family Bakhita remembered nothing.  She did not remember the name her father and mother gave her.  She remembered only the Arab nickname the slave traders gave her as a sort of backhanded compliment: Bakhita, that is, “Lucky.””

 

There are many paths to sainthood, but Bakhita’s was particularly painful, though the traumas she endured do not appear to have done any sort of harm to her spirit and faith.  Indeed, despite enduring a grave injustice and a horrible extended abuse, Bakhita was indeed lucky, far luckier than many of the other people who are victims of the modern slave trade.  Many people think that slavery died out by the end of the American Civil War, but though slavery has been made illegal throughout the West, slavery continues to exist in many parts of Africa and Asia, and different forms of slavery particularly in fields such as the forced sex trade, occur all over the world, even in the U.S.  The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution drove human trafficking underground, but untold numbers of people, especially children like Bakhita, continue to suffer.

 

Bakhita left numerous letters and writings about her life and spiritual experiences.  They are told in spare, true language and even though her prose is unadorned, her words have tremendous power.  In one particularly beautiful scene, she describes the emotions she felt when she touched a little silver crucifix for the first time.  Bakhita writes:

 

“As he gave me the crucifix he kissed it with devotion, then explained that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had died for me.  I did not know what a crucifix was, but I was moved by a mysterious power to keep it hidden, out of fear that the lady would take it away.  I had never hidden anything before, because I had never been attached to anything.  I remember that I looked at it in secret and felt something inside that I could not explain.”

 

A striking stylistic choice made by Zanini is to present Bakhita’s trials and tribulations simply and without anger, indignation, or ornamentation.  The horrible conditions she endured are described without embellishment or editorializing.  Much of Bakhita’s life as a slave is too awful to reproduce here, but one particularly cringe-inducing scene, where Bakhita and some of her fellow captives were forcibly tattooed, is described in stark and gripping prose, told simply but with unmistakable power.

 

After escaping slavery, Bakhita eventually entered a convent, where she spent the rest of her life living quietly and inspiring people with her faith and her warm and engaging personality.  Zanini describes the endearing effect that she had on those around her, writing that:

 

“Bakhita is a friend, someone with whom you can share your disappointments and failures, someone you can ask for advice.  Why?  Because a woman who has survived the oppression of slavery does not set herself apart from anybody.  Because listening to the whispers of suffering mankind continues to be the role most consonant with a woman who was the portress of the Canossian house in the town of Schio, Italy, who for years counseled and helped mothers worried about their children, who took countless little orphans by the hand, who aided fathers of families in finding work, who helped shelter soldiers in the convent, which was transformed into a hospital during the First World War.  She, the “Little Brown Mother” who spoke the dialect of the people of the Veneto region in northern Italy, is ever close to those who might feel a little inadequate or tongue-tied speaking to the saints.”

 

Bakhita: From Slave to Saint is a fast and easy read, and this book can do a great deal to spread her story around the world.  Bakhita is presented without a single character flaw, but in Zanini’s presentation, Bakhita is not the kind of perfect alabaster saint that one can admire but never live up to in life.  Instead, Bakhita comes across as a source of warmth, kindness, and sweetness that someone can easily want as a friend or mentor.  

 

Faithful people around the world are being touched by her life.  Zanini observes that:

 

“Devotion to Bakhita has spread in an astonishing way in India, Brazil, and the United States (especially among African Americans), to name but a few places.  Today Bakhita “sails” on the Internet, where many websites dedicated to her have sprung up.  The black nun from the Italian province of Venesia hears prayers in many different languages, for people are not ashamed to open their hearts to someone who, as a slave, once stood on the lowest rung of the social ladder, beyond the pale of any caste system of hierarchy.”

 

A particularly touching scene comes at the beginning of the book, as the simple room where Bakhita spent most of her life as a nun is described, as are the emotions Zanini felt when entering her small bedroom.  By the end of her life, Bakhita’s only possessions were a crucifix and a rosary.  She had given away most of her books as her eyesight failed, and at the end of her life, she met death with gentle acceptance and joy at the prospect of coming closer to God. 

 

Bakhita’s later decades were filled with quiet, peace, and prayer, and it seems like her traumatic years as a slave may have left innumerable scars, but good can come out of evil, and Bakhita’s story may serve as a comfort and a rebuke to many people.  The tribulations of Bakhita’s youth make most people’s daily problems seem downright paltry and ridiculous in comparison, and the way that she overcame her horrid early years and spent the rest of her life with strength and faith is truly inspirational.

 

 

For more information on organizations that seek to expose and eliminate human trafficking and to help the victims of modern-day slavery, an extensive but not exclusive list of the many groups addressing these atrocities can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_organizations_opposing_human_trafficking.

 

–Chris Chan