What could I say that would change anything

I am a Tanzanian philosophy graduate and a seminarian of the Archdiocese of Dar es Salaam. School started at Maua Primary School in Kilimanjaro, finished in 2011, then O-Level at Ifati Secondary School in Moshi in 2015 and A-Level at the Salesian Seminary in Dodoma in 2018. I began philosophy at Mwendakulima National Major Seminary from 2020 to 2022, and in 2025 I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from Urbaniana University, through Jordan University College in Morogoro. I am now preparing to commence my theological studies there.

I live and write in Dar es Salaam, in Kiswahili and English, as two separate books, not one book moving between the two. Each is written whole in its own language. A reader should get the argument entire in the language they actually think in, and not a translation of somebody else’s.

The argument itself is simple, and I will not let it go. Everyone already has a philosophy. Almost nobody chose theirs. It arrived from the family, from the school, from whatever the crowd was saying that year, and it runs quietly in the background deciding how the money is handled, how the work is treated, how the hard seasons are survived. When it is a bad one, the life goes badly and the person never traces it back.

Kila mwanadamu anahitaji falsafa njema ya kumuwezesha kuishi kwenye ulimwengu huu geugeu.

So I wrote twenty-one of them down. Not definitions, philosophical insights you can pick up and carry. Each chapter traces an idea to its root, anchors it to a thinker who lived it well enough to prove it, sets it against the confusion we are actually in right now, and then answers the only question that matters: what should be done now?

I am direct about the pressure on young Tanzanians, because pretending otherwise helps nobody. The betting. The gambling. The overnight miracles. The deal that promises to double your money if you stop asking questions. I do not moralise about any of it. I blame the shape of the thing: people are fighting, but the system rejects them, and then I argue for a philosophy of work and money that can survive contact with it. Chapter twelve is the practical one. Chapter twenty is the one that says none of it works alone.

Bishop Bernadin Mfumbusa reviewed the manuscript and pushed the thinking through, particularly chapter eight, on vision. I say this plainly because it is plainly true: Without him, and his help reviewing and passing through my ideas, I would not have written my book. He died in 2026. I reached for an old proverb and admitted I had nothing. Niseme nini ili iwe nini: what could I say that would change anything.

Since the launch I have carried the book into bookshops, parishes and school halls, and I keep going schools to sit with the students, talk through what is actually frightening them and encourage them to keep going. That is the part I would keep if I had to give up the rest.