Written piece
Tanzania is my breath
Shani Kondo
Tanzania
About this piece
A poem about Tanzania — her mountain, her stone, her people. About hospitality that needs no teaching, sunrises that need no words, and those who arrive at doors too narrow and come back anyway. Survival here is not loud. It simply does not stop.
Tanzania is my home.
My breath.
Not a postcard.
Not a map with borders someone else drew.
A breath — the kind that keeps coming
even when the air is difficult.
I think of the people first.
Always the people.
The ones who open their doors
before you knock.
Who share the plate
before they count what is on it.
Ukarimu —
hospitality that was never taught
because it never needed to be.
It simply lives here,
the way the sun lives here —
without asking permission.
And the sun here —
you have not seen a sunrise
until you have seen one rise behind Kilimanjaro.
The mountain holds the dark
a little longer than everywhere else,
and then —
it lets go.
All that copper and fire
spilling over a peak that has stood
longer than any word we have for time.
Uhuru at the summit.
Freedom, written in ice
that the world is slowly taking back.
But the mountain remains.
The rock beneath the ice remains.
Kama jiwe — like a stone.
Beneath the mountain, in the earth itself,
tanzanite —
blue-violet, found nowhere else,
only here, only ours,
pulled from the ground
by hands that knew
beauty is never just given.
It is survived into.
In the Serengeti the wildebeest
do not debate the crossing.
The river is dangerous. They cross.
The crocodile is waiting. They cross.
Because the other side is life
and life does not negotiate with fear.
I think of him —
a man I know,
a man like many I know —
who arrives at the clinic door
in his wheelchair
and the door is too narrow.
He has been to this door before.
He knows it is too narrow.
He comes anyway.
That is not defeat.
That is the survival of the destiny —
the quiet insistence
that this world was made for him too,
even when the world forgets.
Nguvu ya roho —
the strength that lives in the spirit.
Not borrowed.
Not waiting to be recognised.
Just there,
the way the birds are there
before the sun comes up —
singing in the dark
because the song does not need the light
to be true.
Ndege wa alfajiri.
The birds of early morning.
Tanzania's first sound.
The sound that says —
we are still here.
We are still here.
This is my thread.
Not perfect. Not finished.
Frayed at some edges
the way all honest things are.
But it holds.
Pamoja — together.
Every body in the room.
Every voice in the quilt.
Every thread pulled from difficult ground.
Especially those.
Glossary
Ukarimu (Swahili) — hospitality; generosity of spirit.
Uhuru (Swahili) — freedom. The name of Kilimanjaro's highest peak.
Kama jiwe (Swahili) — like a stone; immovable.
Nguvu ya roho (Swahili) — strength of the spirit.
Ndege wa alfajiri (Swahili) — the birds of early morning.
Pamoja (Swahili) — together.