My Experience as Mr Mmbaga

My name is Wilbert Junior Kapinga, I am honoured to be given the opportunity to play the role of the character Mmbaga, based on the real life person on Mabaga. From September all the way up to January, I spent my time analysing Mr Mabaga and getting an insight of his lifestyle and his characteristics. Mabaga had his own welding business and his design was considered to be the best in town and he gained a large amount of money from this, which then allowed him to save up enough money in order to buy a motorbike. Mr Mabaga has always been good with his hands, because he loved welding. Mabaga loved riding his well earned motorbike, until one day a bus ruined his life by turning right unexpectedly, without indicating and didn’t see Mabaga and knocked him. In that one moment his life changed forever because of this one incident which left him disabled. From this day on, Mabaga never had faith in himself due to his circumstances. After his accident, all his dreams fell into misery. 

In the beginning days of his accident, Mabaga became insecure of his current state and he hated to be teased about the fact that he is disabled and hated to do things which were out of his comfort zone. This factor did not only hurt his feelings but indulged him to give up on everything he ever wanted to be. At first, I found it very difficult to impersonate this character because I had to learn how to not move my legs and how to operate a wheelchair. Our goal in this production was to raise an amount of 1.8 million in order to get Mr Mabaga a prosthesis, to help him perform daily activities such as walking, eating, or dressing. We are exhilarated to say that we were successful and we were blessed enough to obtain a total of 2,784,750 Tanzanian shillings. To conclude, I hope I was able to function as a figure of hope to other people and to invigorate others to believe and never give up regardless of the situation.

Here is a breakdown how the 2,784,750 tshs was raised!

- General donations from the 3 shows - 1,913,750 tshs

- Cushy for your Tushy (Primary Student Council) - 300,000 tshs

- Rania - 87,000 tshs

- Food stall - 205,000 tshs

- Hospitality - 79,000 tshs

- Harmeet - 200,000 tshs