Youth humanism around the world

Tanzania

Sisi Kwa Sisi
Teenage Life Program

Sisi Kwa Sisi

Free-and-Fearless thinkers in Tanzania

Sisi Kwa Sisi is a humanist community based organization with the object of mobilizing and organizing people at the grassroots level for positive social changes through a human centred rational, scientific approach. The group has its headquarters in Mbeya town, in the southern highlands of Tanzania, bordering Zambia and Malawi. Sisi Kwa Sisi was founded in 1991 by Mr. Nsajigwa Mwasokwa together with 5 other young persons.

Mission
The mission of Sisi Kwa Sisi is to work very hard for the self-empowerment of people and families at the grassroots (peasants, youth, women and children) economically, educationally and ethically and in this way bring positive and progressive social changes in communities.

Sisi Kwa Sisi is a circle of philosophically inclined individuals who are critical of supernaturalism -traditional as well as religious- and who have embraced Rationalism. Through constant reading for intellectual enlightenment, the group discovered Humanism and came to realise that Humanist principles is what the group had been practising for many years. In 2002, Mr. Nsajigwa Mwasokwa of Sisi Kwa Sisi participated in the IHEU World Congress and met many humanist leaders from other countries.

To capture Sisi Kwa Sisi's mission in one statement: "to recapture the renaissance spirit, and to work towards an African enlightenment!"

Youth
The movement has many youth sympathizers. Many of them are inquisitive and searching for the meaning of their lives; they are evolving intellectually in varying degrees.

It is important to Sisi Kwa Sisi that young people (boys and girls) are encouraged to think freely and develop an inquiring mind without being blocked by fear due to dogma, tradition, superstition, authority, tenacity, absolutism, fanaticism and fatalism. Sisi Kwa Sisi aims to create freethinking: Freed from intellectual and mental
dependence. Free from arrogance, prejudice and intellectual tyranny, even if
it be the tyranny of majority's opinion (an argumentum ad populum).

Main objectives
The objectives of Sisi Kwa Sisi are:

• The fight against abject poverty by teaching, inspiring, mobilizing, and organizing unemployed youth in urban centers. The organization stimulates these young people to return back to agricultural farming where they can utilize the land and all its natural resources effectively for their good, stable, secured (and thus better) livelihood.
  
  
• Initiating appropriate technologies to transform rural farming from its presently subsistence level into an agricultural industry capable of providing better life to the majority of the youth, peasants and women.
  
  
• The development of responsible tourism in the Mbeya Region that is beneficial to people at the grassroots and that preserves the environment and ecology.
  
  
• Encourage knowledge-seeking & heuristic learning by giving young people a chance to discover varieties of progressive philosophical traditions stemming from different cultures. Progressive philosophy stands for ideas that encourage and love wisdom (for its own sake), reasoning, logic, analytical and critical thinking. This kind of attitude is very important and necessary for acting in the modern, scientific, global world we are living in.
  
  
• Sisi Kwa Sisi aims for a peacefully and pluralistic outlook on life in the communities the group is active. People are encouraged to think critically for themselves before they act, to find solutions for their problems and to respect other people's viewpoints. Sisi Kwa Sisi aims also to promote moral values that encourage and support high ethical standards of behaviour: virtues as altruism, teamwork, hospitality, humanitarianism, voluntarism, patience, sympathy, etc.
  
  
• Sisi Kwa Sisi works for the creation and development of small-scale-industries (SSI) as for creating employment and generating income to the community. SSI is the process of making raw materials into finished products.

Activities

Educational activities
Sisi Kwa Sisi has been mobilizing young persons and poor communities by:
-seminars/symposia sensitisation,
-teaching,
-counselling.

Socio-economic activities
Lack of facilties is a contraint on the organization's activities. Sisi Kwa Sisi doesn't receive support from the government because of it's apolitical stance: "a 'mistake' of not belonging to the ruling party or any other". To support its activities, Sisi Kwa Sisi undertakes therefore economic-based activities that have been the source of funding for Sisi Kwa Sisi's other activities.

These economic based activities are at the same time an integrated part of the organization's aims:
-Milk selling (1991-1995),
-Crop production and sales (1993-1995),
-Working at a farm to start a communitarian model (1995-1997),
-Cultural tourism project (1998-2003).

The challenge in Africa
For Humanism to become praxis of renaissance in Africa, the following needs be done:

-We have varieties of starvation in Africa, one is shortage of books and materials on the Humanist tradition. We need containers of positive-progressive books on naturalism, etc. Likewise audio's and films by leading freethinkers are needed.

-We need established centres/platforms of debate. In particular we need to make the Humanist message simple to the people at the grassroots level.

-Very important is the economic empowerment in Africa. Humanists must deal here with the people’s basic needs and be part of people’s solution by way of problem solving in meeting several of their economic problems/miseries. Abject poverty is real in Africa. And that explains in part why the fallacies in the form of religion, politics and superstition, keep on having a strong appeal on people. A model of a Humanist economic project as inspiration to other areas is highly needed. In Tanzania in particular, such an experiment is highly welcome.

-It would be good when there would be established humanist academians and humanist academic departments in Africa.

Support of the International Humanist Community
The Humanist circles in Africa need all the support from fellow freethinkers circles around the world. It is for the first time in history that secularist humanist-based teachings are being established here. By large, lack of facilities is the foremost hurdle.

There needs to be exchange programmes, visits between Humanists. This breaks “isolationism” especially here in Africa, where because of the non-existent of freethinkers’ fellow groups nearby, one is mentally and intellectually alone. Also let there be efforts to establish Humanist Academicians in Africa.

Contact
Postal Address: Sisi kwa Sisi
P.O. BOX 2869 or 1562 Mbeya Tanzania.
Also: P.O. BOX 12969 Dar-es-salaam Tanzania.
E-mail: sisikwasisi@hotmail.com, Contact person: Nsajigwa Mwasokwa
Website: www.infojep.com/culturaltours/mbeya.html (Sisi Kwa Sisi cultural toursim project)

Involvement in IHEYO
Sisi Kwa Sisi attends the IHEYO conferences and is part of AHAL, the African Humanist Alliance.

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Teenage Life Program (TELIP)
Uhuru street Rd, Ilala, P.O. Box 31891, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
+255 744 805226, teenagelifetz@hotmail.com
*Teenage Life Programme is a consultative member of IHEYO.

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