BY DANFORD MPUMILWA
Sometime in early 1996, I flew from Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA) to Gaborone, Botswana, via Johannesburg, South Africa, aboard our own national airline, Air Tanzania, for the first leg and South African Airways for the second.
I had a tricky engagement in Gaborone. At the time, I was an employee of the Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC). However, I had been invited by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) for an interview for the post of Head of Public Affairs and Communication.
Not wanting to offend my bosses at the AICC, I simply took a few days off ‘to attend to some personal affairs’. But then, that is a story for another day.
I landed safely at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone in the mid-afternoon. Everything was going smoothly until I reached the immigration desk.
The young immigration officer checked my passport twice before looking at me, seemingly very surprised.
“Are you sure you are Tanzanian?” he asked.
Now, I had been asked many different questions at several international immigration desks before, but never this particular question.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you are a Mpumilwa,” he replied.
That strange answer, to say the least, shocked me even further.
“Because my immigration boss here is also called Mpumilwa and from what I can see, he looks like you,” the immigration officer explained.
The officer then made a call. A few minutes later, a short, dark and heavy-set officer with piercing eyes emerged from one of the offices behind the immigration desks.
He looked at me and laughed.
“No way you can be a Tanzanian,” he told me.
He was around my age and closely resembled me, save for his prominent beard.
“There is no way there can be a Mpumilwa in Botswana,” I replied, as other airport staff gathered around us to witness this ‘miracle’.
To cut a long story short, after my interview, I was taken around Gaborone and some of the surrounding villages, where I met more surprised Mpumilwas, many of whom resembled the Bongolander Mpumilwas.
We were equally surprised to learn that there were Mpumilwa clans in these two countries, which, interestingly, do not share a border.
Even more surprisingly, I also came to learn that Botswana hosts a large number of Tanzanians in the diaspora, many of them professionals. When the late President William Mkapa visited Botswana, for example and wanted to address Bongolanders, he was reportedly forced to switch the venue from a conference centre to the city stadium.
Back to my mission. As if this were not a good enough omen, I also emerged top among the ten or so candidates interviewed for the SADC post. But, as fate would have it, a few weeks later, I was offered a new post with the United Nations.
Nevertheless, a month later, I was back in Gaborone, this time to assist SADC in interviewing another batch of candidates for the same post. But now I was at home among my Mpumilwa clansmen and women.
God bless early Bantu migration!
