When the sun rose over Dar es Salaam on October 29th, 2025, Benjamin Joseph Munisi was still a university student with dreams. By sunset, he was a name on a growing list of the dead.
Benjamin was a third-year student of business management at Mzumbe University, Mbeya Campus. He was 23 years old, full of ideas, laughter, and youthful ambition. Like many Tanzanian students, he believed that education was his ladder to dignity, that knowledge could lift both himself and his country. But that dream was violently cut short on election day.
He died in Dar es Salaam under circumstances that remain unclear. When the university leadership announced his passing, they mentioned only the date: “He died on October 29th.” No explanation. No mention of cause. No word of the violence that had engulfed the streets that day.
Benjamin’s death is not an isolated tragedy. It is one among thousands of deaths during Tanzania’s post-election unrest. The silence surrounding his killing reflects a deeper fear that has settled across the nation. Families of the dead are often too terrified to speak. Many are told to bury their loved ones quietly. They whisper their grief behind closed doors, aware that to demand justice might invite the same fate.
Those who knew Benjamin describe him as gentle, curious, and disciplined. His friends say he loved football and politics in equal measure. He often talked about starting a youth-led business one day, something that would employ others instead of waiting for a job that might never come. His professors recall a student who asked difficult questions in class, never satisfied with easy answers.
He was buried on November 6th in Kilimanjaro Region, where his family comes from. The funeral was simple and quiet. Some of his classmates were too afraid to attend. Others sent messages of condolence but avoided mentioning how he had died.
The fear that silences the living has become as lethal as the bullets that killed Benjamin. In Tanzania today, to name the cause of death is to risk one’s own safety. Yet truth is the only path to healing. It is the only way the living can honor those who have been lost.
Benjamin’s story, though brief, captures the struggle of an entire generation caught between hope and repression. He represents young Tanzanians who studied hard, believed in their future, and trusted their country to protect them. Instead, they found themselves hunted by the very forces meant to guard their safety.
Remembering him is more than an act of mourning. It is an act of defiance against the silence that feeds impunity. Every society that values life must refuse to let such deaths vanish into anonymity.
Benjamin Joseph Munisi was not a statistic. He was someone’s son, a student, a friend, a believer in better days. His story reminds us that peace without truth is merely quiet fear. His name must be spoken, his story told, until justice becomes more than a whispered hope.
If his death teaches anything, it is that the price of silence is the loss of more Benjamins. His life calls out for courage. The courage to remember, to speak, and to demand that Tanzania’s sons and daughters never again fall to the guns of their own protectors.
