Renato Kizito Sesana

Renato "Kizito" Sesana (born 1943) is an Italian Comboni missionary, journalist and humanitarian worker. He is well known for his work to rescue the street children of Nairobi.

Early life

Renato Sesana was born in Lecco, Italy in 1943. In 1962, he graduated with a junior degree in mechanical engineering, and went to work at the famous Moto Guzzi factory in nearby Mandello del Lario.

Sesana entered the novitiate of the Comboni Missionaries in Gozzano, Italy, in 1964. He later studied theology for four years at Venegono Superiore and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1970. He assumed the name 'Kizito', after Saint Kizito (the youngest of the Uganda Martyrs, who was canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1964).

In the early 1970s, Sesana worked for ''Nigrizia'', a prestigious Comboni magazine, of which he was the youngest editor ever, in more than a hundred years history of the magazine. He was appointed its editor between 1973 and 1975, during which period he began to travel around Africa, writing and taking pictures.

In 1975, Sesana studied English in the United States, living at the Holy Cross Parish in Los Angeles, California. He returned to Italy the following year and in 1977 graduated in political science from the University of Padua, Italy. His thesis focused on African Americans in the Catholic Church.

Missionary and Humanitarian Work in Africa

Father Kizito’s missionary work in Africa started when he was assigned to Zambia in 1977. He served in a rural parish for three years before moving to the capital, Lusaka. Assigned to a poor slum area called Bauleni, Father Kizito worked especially with the youth and started a lay community called Koinonia.
In this period, in collaboration with the theologian Valentino Salvoldi, he wrote a book calling for an African Synod, “Africa: the Gospel Belong to Us” which was later published also in Italian and Portuguese.

In February 1988, he was sent by his congregation to Nairobi, Kenya, to set up the ''New People'', a Comboni magazine for Anglophone African countries. The first issue of the magazine was published in July 1989, and Father Kizito was its editor up to 1995. It is still one of the most widely spread Catholic magazines in Anglophone Africa.

Once in Nairobi, he started a lay community in Kenya, also called Koinonia, with a group of young men whose inspiration was the life of the early biblical Christians as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The Community members were from different professions and backgrounds, and they lived together sharing their dreams, successes and failures. Today, the Koinonia Community has about forty members in Nairobi, and ten in Lusaka.

Koinonia Kenya was registered as a corporate body in 1996, after which it established various social enterprises to help improve the local society within which it is based. Its activities and social projects give priority on the marginalized in society, such as children in difficult circumstances – especially street children – as well as women and young people from poor

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases