Black History Month: Njiba

In November, our Boston team brought together ATD Fourth World members from around the world for a seminar on governance. The message below was shared by Njiba Mbuyi, a member of ATD Boston who came to the United States from Democratic Republic of Congo. We think it’s a different kind of story than what you usually hear for Black History Month, hope you enjoy:"We were thinking about leadership and I was thinking about the story of my father and then to my grandmother. My father is what he is because of my grandmother, the youngest wife of my grandfather. Soon after he married her and she was pregnant he passed away. She had to stay with the family because my grandfather’s dying word was that if any wife decided to go back to her family, she’d go alone without her children. My grandmother married his brother and raised my father. She had many children, but only one survived. Her motivation was for her son to become a great man and she put all of her energy into that. She started farming.I asked my father what her uncle did and he said that men would take wives but wouldn’t take care of them. My grandmother put my father in Catholic school. People didn’t go far in school, it was colonial times. He had to go 30 miles away and she made the journey to go see him. She put him with relatives to take care of him while at school. Many kids had to travel the distance from home to school, so many of them would quit. Or they’d have to work while in school, so it was like torture for them and they’d quit.My father was lucky enough to live with his relatives and he got through primary school. There was a lot of ethnic conflict going on in their region so they went farther away. It was time for my father to go to high school and it was 100 miles away. My grandmother involved my aunt in working the farming job so my father could go to school. He was lucky enough to finish and by that time my country got independence. He got a teaching job. Most of the white people from Belgium who were there were leaving the country, so he was obliged to teach. He got a scholarship to do higher education and he got a finance degree. He became that great man that my grandmother wanted him to be. He became an executive for a big company. Through my grandmother, my father put a lot of people in his family and people he didn’t even know through school.It’s been a kind of light, not only for my father but also for the community. What my grandmother did didn’t just stop with my dad. It didn’t go only in the family, but also outside my family too.When I look at the story I see that my aunt was sacrificed so my father could go to school. At the end of the day, her children were educated, men and women, by my father." This February we’ve been asking folks to share what Black History Month means to them, and how it relates to their family or their community. We'll be sharing the messages throughout the month.