In Mbeya, south-western Tanzania, near the borders with Zambia and Malaw, a man’s tired voice is echoing across Tanzania.
“I am tired. Your father Clemence Mwandambo. I am tired. Because all of you are my children. Bye bye. I have finished.”
These were Clemence’s last public words on Instagram before heavily armed men, identifying themselves as police, stormed his home near Mbeya Referral Hospital and abducted him. He is not known to have committed any crime. His real offence was moral, not legal: he spoke clearly, consistently and publicly against a regime drowning in hypocrisy and impunity.
Those words must not become his final testimony.
The state must say where Clemence Mwandambo is. It must explain why a law-abiding citizen was taken from his home like a terrorist. And it must understand that what happened to Clemence cannot be separated from what happened to Mbeya during the post-election massacre. The abduction of one man is a window into the terror inflicted on an entire region.
Mbeya: From hillside city to killing field
Mbeya is not just a dot on Tanzania’s map. It is a crossroads city, a meeting point of regions, cultures and trade routes; a place where ordinary Tanzanians wake up every morning to hustle, study, raise children and build small dreams one day at a time.
During the post-election violence, that everyday life was shattered.
While the world’s cameras remained mostly fixed on Dar es Salaam, Mbeya became one of the worst hit areas. Residents describe raids that began with the sound of boots and gunshots in the night. People were hunted in their homes and neighbourhoods, not just in the streets. Mothers waited for sons who never came back. Children were told that their fathers had “disappeared”. Hospitals quietly filled with the wounded, while bodies were moved, buried and miscounted.
We still do not know how many people died in Mbeya. We still do not have an official roll call of the dead, the disappeared and the wounded. The truth is being managed, edited and buried.
What we do know is this: a regime that allows entire communities to be terrorised during an election is the same regime that allows its agents to drag away a critic like Clemence in broad daylight. The massacre in Mbeya and the abduction of Clemence are not separate stories. They are dark chapters of the same evil book.
Abductions as a method of rule
Enforced disappearances are not accidents. They are not “excesses” by a few rogue officers. Around the world, they have been used as a deliberate technology of rule, especially by authoritarian governments that no longer trust their own citizens and no longer want to be questioned. International bodies have repeatedly described enforced disappearance as a strategy used to spread terror through society, because it punishes not only the victim but also every family, neighbour and potential critic who is left wondering if they are next.
In Africa, human rights groups have documented how enforced disappearances and abductions are increasingly used to silence journalists, opposition figures and activists. They are described as a “particularly cruel” tool of repression that violates multiple rights at once: the right to life, liberty, due process, family and dignity.
Tanzania is not new to this pattern. Over the past decade, and particularly in Samia Suluhu’s regime, reports by regional and international organizations have documented a worsening climate that includes abductions, disappearances and targeted attacks against critics of the government. Journalists, opposition politicians and activists have been abducted or attacked in circumstances widely believed to involve state agents or their proxies.
By 2025, as the election approached, this pattern hardened into a system. Analysts and human rights monitors pointed to scores of critics who had been arbitrarily arrested or abducted in the lead-up to the vote, some later found dead, alongside mass detentions of opposition supporters and the exclusion of major parties from the ballot.
Clemence’s abduction sits squarely inside this context. He was part of a small group of Tanzanians who still dared to speak publicly. Most people had already been silenced by the fear of exactly what has now happened to him. His disappearance is therefore not only a crime against one man, but a message to millions: “If we can take him, we can take you.”
This is how terror becomes a method of governance.
Mbeya’s open wound
Mbeya’s pain is not only physical. It is political, legal and spiritual.
Politically, the city stands as evidence that the massacre was not a “clash” between two equal sides but a one-sided assault in which citizens paid with their blood for daring to demand credible elections. Legally, Mbeya exposes the failure of the state to uphold its most basic obligation: to protect the lives and dignity of its people, regardless of their vote.
Spiritually, Mbeya is a place where grief could not be contained within family living rooms. It spilled into churches.
In the aftermath of the violence, the Catholic Diocese of Mbeya took a rare and courageous step. It issued a diocesan call to every parish, institution and Catholic faithful to dedicate a Sunday specifically to the victims of election violence.The Catholic Diocese of Mbeya called for special prayers on 9 November 2025 in all parishes within the Greater Diocese for those killed and injured. These prayers culminated in a Diocesan Mass at Mwanjelwa’s Kanisa la Hija, led by the Archbishop and Auxiliary Bishop, with a clear appeal for faith, unity and love.
This local initiative echoed a national shift. Across Tanzania, Catholic bishops and other church leaders began to speak out more openly, condemning election-related killings as brutal and inhumane, calling the violence a stain on the nation and demanding independent investigations into the deaths and alleged secret burials.
The Church’s actions do not repair Mbeya’s wound, but they acknowledge it. In a country where the state tries to deny or downplay the scale of the bloodshed, such acknowledgement is itself an act of resistance.
Why the truth about Mbeya matters
Some will ask: why focus so much on one city when the entire country has suffered?
Because Mbeya is a test case.
If the truth about Mbeya can be buried, then the truth about the whole country can be erased. If we accept that men and women can be killed or disappeared in Mbeya without names, numbers or accountability, then we have accepted that any community in Tanzania can be treated the same way.
Documenting the Mbeya massacre means asking difficult questions:
- Who ordered the operations that led to the killings?
- Which units were deployed, under what rules of engagement?
- How many people were killed, wounded or disappeared?
- Where are the bodies of those who never came home?
- Which officials were in the chain of command when the blood was spilled?
These are not academic questions. They determine whether Tanzania remains a country of laws or slides fully into rule by fear.
Around Africa, we have seen what happens when enforced disappearances and massacres are allowed to become normal. Families roam prisons, mortuaries and mass graves searching for relatives. Communities lose trust in every institution. Politics turns into a zero-sum game where those in power cling to office at any cost, and those outside power learn that peaceful participation offers no protection.
If Tanzania continues down this path, Mbeya will not be an exception. It will be a template.
From prayers to pressure
The Catholic Masses in Mbeya, the statements from bishops across the country, the calls from other faith leaders for peace with justice: all of this matters deeply. It tells victims’ families that they are not crazy, not alone and not forgotten. It inserts moral language into a political crisis.
But faith alone is not enough to stop a state that has learned to rule by terror. Prayers must be paired with pressure.
That pressure has to come from multiple fronts.
From inside Tanzania: citizens, activists, lawyers, journalists, faith leaders and ordinary families must continue to insist that every person disappeared must be produced alive in a court of law, or their fate must be honestly explained. They must insist that the Mbeya massacre be investigated independently, not by committees hand-picked to produce convenient answers.
From the rest of Africa: governments and regional bodies that claim to stand for democracy and human rights must treat enforced disappearances and election massacres as a continental red line, not as internal “security matters” to be politely ignored. African human rights bodies have already recognised enforced disappearance as a multiple, ongoing human rights violation whose perpetrators are rarely brought to justice. They must now match that recognition with action.
From the wider world: international partners that trade with or fund Tanzania must understand that silence is a form of complicity. You cannot praise stability while looking away from the graves that make that “stability” possible.
Clemence, Mbeya and the struggle for memory
At the heart of this article is a simple, urgent truth: the story of Mbeya cannot be told honestly if we ignore the fate of people like Clemence Mwandambo.
Clemence was one of the few who refused to be intimidated into silence. He spoke on behalf of a generation that is tired of being treated as expendable; tired of elections that come with bullets; tired of living in a country where criticising your government is treated like a criminal act.
His final public words sound like a man who has carried too much on his shoulders for too long: “I am tired. Your father Clemence Mwandambo. I am tired. Because all of you are my children. Bye bye. I have finished.”
Those words must not become a farewell. They must become a starting point.
A starting point for a renewed demand that the government disclose where he is and under what legal framework he is being held. A starting point for insisting that abductions stop now and that those responsible are held to account. A starting point for a serious, credible, people-centred investigation into what happened in Mbeya during the post-election massacre.
If Tanzania is ever to heal, the country must face the truth that Mbeya is trying to tell. If Africa is ever to move beyond the age of “disappearances” and secret burials, we must treat Mbeya as more than a local tragedy. It is a continental case study in how quickly a state can turn its security forces against its own people, and how easily the world can look away.
Clemence’s story, and Mbeya’s story, are a warning and a responsibility.
We owe it to him, to the disappeared, to the dead and to the living to make sure that these are not the last words, not the last questions and not the last demands.
djbwakali@gmail.com
