St. Josephine Margaret Bakhita

Saint Josephine Margaret Bakhita was born around 1869 in the village of Olgossa in the Darfur region of western Sudan, west of Nyala and close to Mount Agilerei.

At about nine years of age she was kidnapped by slave traders, who had taken her elder sister two years before. She was forced to walk barefoot some 960 kilometres to El Obeid, and was sold and bought twice before she arrived there. Over twelve years she was resold three more times. The trauma of her abduction is said to have made her forget her own name; she took the one given to her by her captors — Bakhita, Arabic for “fortunate”.

Her owners in El Obeid and later a Turkish general treated her with great cruelty. She recalled that scarcely a day passed without a wound, and she bore for life the scars of more than a hundred patterns cut into her skin.

In 1883 she was bought in Khartoum by the Italian Vice-Consul, Callisto Legnani, who treated her kindly. When he returned to Italy she begged to go with him, and in 1885 they arrived in Genoa. She was given to the family of Augusto Michieli and became nanny to their daughter, Mimmina.

In November 1888 Bakhita and Mimmina were left in the care of the Canossian Sisters in Venice. When Signora Michieli returned to take them to Sudan, Bakhita firmly refused to leave. On 29 November 1889 an Italian court ruled that, since slavery was not recognised in Italian law, she had never legally been a slave. For the first time in her life she was free to choose — and she chose to remain with the Canossians.

On 9 January 1890 she was baptised Josephine Margaret Fortunata, and on the same day received Confirmation and First Holy Communion from the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Giuseppe Sarto, the future Pope St. Pius X. She entered the novitiate in 1893 and made her vows on 8 December 1896.

From 1902 she lived at the Canossian convent in Schio, near Vicenza, serving as cook, sacristan and portress. Her gentleness, calm voice and constant smile made her beloved; the townspeople called her Madre Moretta, “our Black Mother”. Through the Second World War they felt protected by her presence.

In her last years, marked by pain and illness, she kept her cheerfulness. Asked how she was, she would smile and say, “As the Master desires.” She died on 8 February 1947. She was beatified in 1992 and canonised by Pope St. John Paul II on 1 October 2000. Her feast is kept on 8 February.