Daniel Comboni - Mission To Africa

Mission To Africa

After a journey of four months, the missionary expedition that included Comboni reached Khartoum, capital of the Sudan. The impact of this first face-to-face encounter with Africa was tremendous, Daniel was immediately made aware of the multiple difficulties that were part of his new mission. But labours, unbearable climate, sickness, the deaths of several of his young fellow-missionaries, the poverty and dereliction of the population, only served to drive him forward, never dreaming of giving up what he has taken on with such great enthusiasm. From the mission of Holy Cross he wrote to his parents: “We will have to labour hard, to sweat, to die: but the thought that one sweats and dies for love of Jesus Christ and the salvation of the most abandoned souls in the world, is far too sweet for us to desist from this great enterprise”.

After witnessing at the death of one of his missionary companions, Daniel, far from being discouraged, felt an interior confirmation of his decision to carry on in the mission, as he wrote: “O Nigrizia o morte!”—"Either Africa, or death".

It is still Africa and its peoples that drove Comboni, when he returned to Italy, to work out a fresh missionary strategy. In 1864, while praying at the Tomb of Saint Peter in Rome, Daniel was struck by an inspiration that led to the drawing up of his "Plan for the Rebirth of Africa", a missionary project that can be summed up in an expression which is itself the indication of his boundless trust in the human and religious capacities of the African peoples: “Save Africa through Africa”.