lit a candle 4h agoMy mother kept the Jesuit mission newsletter a cousin used to send from Dar es Salaam, and that is where I first read Fratern Masawe's name, in a short piece about Hekima College. Years later I came across a recording of his 2024 address for the college's anniversary, where he said he still carried 'a forty year old part of Hekima' within him. I watched it alone at my desk in Utrecht and sat with that line for a long time. Strange to be moved by a man you only ever knew through a page and a screen.
Their story
Fratern Masawe was a Tanzanian Jesuit priest who spent more than four decades in the service of the Society of Jesus and became one of its most senior African leaders. A former Provincial of the Eastern Africa Province and President of the Jesuit superiors of Africa and Madagascar, he served…
Fratern Masawe was a Tanzanian Jesuit priest who spent more than four decades in the service of the Society of Jesus and became one of its most senior African leaders. A former Provincial of the Eastern Africa Province and President of the Jesuit superiors of Africa and Madagascar, he served from 2012 at the order's General Curia in Rome as General Counsellor and Regional Assistant for Africa and Madagascar, advising two Superiors General on the life of the Jesuits across the continent.
Masawe was born in Tanzania in 1956. He entered the Society of Jesus on 4 July 1979 and was among the students present when Hekima College in Nairobi, the first Jesuit school of theology in Africa, opened its first academic year in September 1984. He was ordained a priest in 1987 and then went to Belgium, where he earned a licentiate in pastoral theology at the Lumen Vitae Institute.
Back in Tanzania he was parish priest and local superior in Mwanza, the Provincial's delegate for Tanzania and a province consultor from 1990 to 1994. In 1994 he became country director of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Tanzania, at a time when the country was receiving very large numbers of refugees from the Great Lakes region. He made his tertianship in Detroit in 1995 and 1996, pronounced his final vows on 8 December 1996, and on 1 May 1998 became Socius, or chief assistant, to the Provincial of Eastern Africa.
He went on to lead the Eastern Africa Province as Provincial and to serve as President of JESAM, the conference of Jesuit major superiors of Africa and Madagascar. In that role in 2008 he set up a committee to study how a Jesuit university for Africa and Madagascar might be created. In February 2012 Father General Adolfo Nicolás named him General Counsellor and Regional Assistant for Africa, succeeding Fr Jean Roger Ndombi, and he took up the post in Rome that September. After the 36th General Congregation in 2016 he also became Assistant ad providentiam, one of the small group of senior advisers to the Superior General, and he continued to serve Father General Arturo Sosa.
In December 2025 he received the St Peter Canisius Medal of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in Africa and Madagascar, presented by Father General at the Curia, in recognition of his work in shaping Jesuit higher education on the continent. In June 2026 the Society announced that Fr John Kobina Ghansah would succeed him as Regional Assistant, while Masawe remained a General Counsellor and Assistant ad providentiam.
About sixteen months before his death Masawe suffered a serious heart attack, and in his last months he was cared for at the infirmary of the Canisius Community near the General Curia. He died there on 19 October 2026, aged 70. The Society of Jesus announced his death the next day and asked Jesuit communities and friends to pray for him, for his family and for his Province of Eastern Africa.
Biography adapted from Society of Jesus (jesuits.global) death notice, 20 October 2026; Jesuits of West Africa Province notice, 19 October 2026; Jesuit Conference of Africa and Madagascar; gesuiti.it (7 February 2012); DIR .
Photos
2by People Forever
Fr Fratern Masawe, SJ
by People Forever
