She wants to be remembered

Hamida Abdulhakim may be 83, but she vividly recalls the day her cooking attracted the attention of Mwalimu Nyerere. It was 1974 and the President was hosting a delegation of foreign officials at State House.
Hamida and other women from the TANU women’s wing were summoned to put together a meal worthy of the occasion.
“I prepared roast fish, and decorated the plate with colourful salad of cucumbers, green peppers and carrots,” she says, beaming with pride at the memory.  “It looked so good that it made it to high table and Mwalimu complimented it.”
It was the beginning of many invitations to cook at state functions. After the feast, Mwalimu asked who had cooked the fish and Mama Maria told him it was Hamida. “Mwalimu admired the food and from that day I was often invited to cook at State House,” she recalls.
Hamida, who joined TANU in 1960, was also an active politician and held different ranks in the party.
When the women’s wing opened a restaurant, she taught other party women how to cook. She was also a sewing instructor.
“After launching the restaurant, Mwalimu urgued women to study,” she says, “and I volunteered to teach cookery and sewing classes at Mzee Mosi Msosi TANU branch at Kariakoo.”
She was rewarded with a patriot certificate in recognition of her efforts to bring women together and educate them.
But it was not all smooth sailing: Hamida says discrimination was a major setback for women activists in those early days. In 1974, the same year that she impressed President Nyerere with her cooking, she was detained for a month on suspicion of selling of plots in Mwananyamala ward.
She was set free after preliminary investigations established that there was no basis for the allegations. “They were just made up by the male contestants, some of whom I had knocked out in the party ward elections,” she says.
In 1965, Halima applied for a job at Kilimanjaro Hotel, but she failed to meet the English proficiency requirement.
“Mwalimu heard about it and ordered Mr Cleopa Msuya (one-time premier) to open an institute at Anatouglou so women could study the language, and I was in the first batch.”
She joined the hotel, only to find that the working environment did not suit women.
They were not allowed to get pregnant, for example, and those who did were forced to choose between having an abortion and being sacked.
She recalls: “I fell pregnant in 1967 but the management did not get to it until my eighth month. They sacked me, but that was not the end of it. I opened my small food place and carried on with TANU politics.”
The veteran politician is now into traditional medicine. She says she got so sick at some point that she was close to death.
Then she had a dream in which she was commanded to be a herbalist. “I followed the voice,” she adds.
“The dreams keep coming and, thanks to them, today I cure diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes and asthma.”
Hamida has been married thrice—to Mohammed Khan, Iddy Mtingwa and Rajesh Khan. She had 12 children but only six are alive.
She laments that despite being a party founder member, the current crop of CCM leaders have abandoned her. She has just one request: “Please remember me.”
This article was first published in Kiswahili by Mwananchi on February 20, 2011 and was translated by Tanzania@50 reporter Athuman Mtulya