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An Italian State Television RAI docudrama travestizes her life; there is no evidence of any torrid emotional involvement with her last master, an Italian, as portrayed in the film, complete exploitation unrelated to her as the saint of very common people. She was born a twin. Her father had the rank of village head-man, fairly wealthy with servants. She was kidnapped out of sight of her family. She went on a perilous overland forced march that is echoed in details with Jules Verne’s “Dick Sand, Boy Captain at 15”, the most effective literary account of the vicious character of Muslim and African slavery overland in the continent’s interior; like the book, Bakhita saw a fallen slave dragged off the path by African, Muslim slavemasters, she could hear him being beaten to death. Her name Bakhita, “Lucky”, was fairly common among slaves, a sales point; she never remembered her original birth name; her birth place has been identified. She was kept in the household of abusive Turkish slavemasters, she was hideously ritually scarred on her back by the wife, requiring a month to recover during which she couldn’t move. She was sold several times, lastly to Italian people; she was committed to care for an Italian girl toddler, but there is no credible evidence she was subjected to undue possesdiveness on the part of the child as portrayed in the RAI miniseries. She was portrayed as extremely wise when the peasants had a crisis like a plague, but with no evidence from her life, she was just a very ordinary person. Her mistress left her daughter in her care when she went back off to colonial Italian possessions in Africa. During that time, she was in contact with Catholic nuns, she wanted to be baptized, when her mistress tried to compel her to return to Africa, she would have lost her place being catechized in coming into her chosen faith, she resisted leaving the country, the Cardinal Archbisop of Venice, Guiseppe Sarto, later Pope St. Pius XII (he could heal people during his lifetime), intervened in Josephina Fortunata (Bakhita’s) behalf, after a court hearing, she was effectively freed. Children seeing the Black Mother, their first African ever, would sometimes run off screaming. Sr. Josephina didn’t mind. She worked as a hospital orderly caring for invalided soldiers during World War 1. She was interviewed by an woman Italian magazine writer in the 1930s, her increasing fame reflecting on her Canossian order of religious sisters required by obedience that she go on a speaking tour, but she suffered from stage fright. She never thought of herself as special. She remarked that her enslavement was inadvertently the best thing that ever happened to her, because without it, she never would have become a Catholic—and a Saint.