Petro Kilekwa
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Petro Kilekwa (also Chilekwa, late 1860s/early 1870s – 1967) was an African man who, after having been enslaved, became a teacher and later an Anglican priest. His autobiography, published in 1937, was titled Slave Boy to Priest: The Autobiography of Padre Petro Kilekwa.{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ULeCBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA232 |page=232 |title=Historical Dictionary of Slavery and Abolition|first=Martin A. |last=Klein |edition=2|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield |year=2014 |isbn=9780810875289}}
Biography
Kilekwa was born in Zambia, in a Bissa village, in the Mbisa tribe near Lake Bangweulu. He was born "Chilekwa"; Ki-, he says in his autobiography, "is a Swahili prefix". He was enslaved in the 1870s{{cite journal|title=Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora |first=Pier M. |last=Larson |journal=Journal of World History |volume=19 |issue=4 |year=2008 |pages=431–64 |jstor=40542678 |doi=10.1353/jwh.0.0027 |s2cid=162279646 }} as a boy in what he called "the Maviti wars"{{cite book |title=The Rienner Anthology of African Literature |editor1-first=Anthonia C. |editor1-last=Kalu |publisher=Lynne Rienner |isbn=9781626375833 |chapter=Petro Kilekwa: Slave Boy to Priest |year=2007 |pages=221–30}} (the term may point to "any brigand rather than to a specific ethnic group"{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EKtJCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA42 |page=42 |first=Matthew S. |last=Hopper |title=Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire |publisher=Yale UP |year=2015 |isbn=9780300213928}}). His mother was unable to pay his ransom — eight yards of calico cloth—and he was taken to the coast, headed for the Persian Gulf. However, the ship of his enslavers was stopped by the Royal Navy; HMS Osprey took them to Muscat. The group spent a month or so there, but then Kilekwa and another boy, Mambwala volunteered to serve on the Osprey and become seamen. They did odd jobs while the Osprey, looking for slave dhows, sailed throughout the Gulf and up the Euphrates to Basra (in present-day Iraq). One day, while most of the sailors were on shore in Bushehr, Persia, slavers tried to kidnap them but were prevented. They traveled as far as India and went sightseeing in Bombay. When the Osprey was to return to England, the two were transferred to HMS Bacchante; they were in Bombay again for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887.
Kilekwa then went to Zanzibar, where the Universities' Mission to Central Africa took care of him. He was baptized and trained as a teacher. He married a woman, Beatrice Muyororo, with a similar background: she had also been enslaved and then set free by the British Navy, and like Kilekwa, she converted to Christianity and became a teacher. They taught together near Lake Malawi, where Kilekwa became a deacon and six years later a priest. He was ordained at the end of June 1917 with three others: Leonard Kangati, Lawrence Cisui, and Gilbert Mpalila.{{cite journal|title=A Short History of the Universities Mission to Central Africa |first=Frank |last=Winspear |journal=The Nyasaland Journal |volume=9 |issue=1 |year=1956 |pages=11–50 |jstor=29545756 }}
By 1949, he was retired, living in Kiungani (in the Pwani Region of Tanzania) on "a small holding leased to him by the Government".{{cite journal|title=Slave-Boy to Priest |first=C. W. B. |last=Arnold |journal=The Nyasaland Journal |volume=2 |issue=1 |year=1949 |pages=7–15 |jstor=29545584 }} He died in 1967, in his mid-nineties.{{cite journal|title=Reviewed Work(s): The Central African Journal of Lovell J. Procter, 1860–1864 by Norman Robert Bennett and Marguerite Ylvisaker |first=Roderick J. |last=Macdonald |journal=The International Journal of African Historical Studies |volume=5 |issue=2 |year=1972 |pages=335–37 |jstor=217552 |doi=10.2307/217552 }}
References
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Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:Writers of slave narratives