THE most famous Tanzanian billionaire, the late Reginald Abraham Mengi, was not rich in 1971. Actually, he had just returned to Tanzania after finishing his accounting education in Scotland.

His first wife, the late Mercy Anna Mengi, was already an employee of the East African Airways when they got married in early 1970’s.

Mercy Anna was not your typical African woman of that era. She was from an elite Chagga clan of Shangali – descendants of the Chagga Chiefsknown as Mangi. It means, at the social level, Mercy was a class above Reginald when they first met.

Mengi didn’t have royal blood, Mercy had – with privileges like education and connections to make good money. From the beginning, their partnership looked like a match made in heaven.

Mengi was intelligent, hardworking and ambitious with the know-how of how to make money. Mercy was a visionary, manager and a risk-taker.

No wonder, Mercy was the first to quit her job so that the family could focus on their family first business – ballpoint pen assembly plant; whose offices was at their home. Mengi continued to work as an accountant in an international firm.

The family made their first million dollar within a year from that business. That is not me speculating, it is from Mengi’s autobiography entitled I Can, I Must, I Will published a year before his death.

When Tanzania was experiencing some economic hardships because of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) forced by the Bretton Woods Institutions; it was again Mercy who saw the opportunity and asked her husband to go for it.

One of Mzee Mengi’s friends told me few months after his death that it was Mercy who urged the late billionaire to quit his job at the now PwC and focus on the IPP empire to make use of the money-making opportunities in the late 1980’s.

Mengi made the move and the rest, as they say, is history. By mid to late 1990’s, Mengi started to be known as the richest black man in Tanzania; a rare feat in a country where non blacks still control the wealth of the nation.

Mengi had all the headlines in the general public but at work, everybody knew Mercy was the person you wouldn’t want to mess with. She was the person who drove the workers to make what IPP came to be.

It is shocking that in his book, Mengi mentioned Mercy only once, in one line. That, to many who knew them and watched them at close quarter, was unfair. They spent more than 30 years together and regardless of what happened later in their lives, Mercy Anna deserved to be recognized for what she was.

Mercy Anna Mengi’s story is the story of many outstanding women in Africa. If you look at the powerful African men, their spouses are absent from the general picture. I want to focus on the millionaires and the billionaires, and the story is almost male dominated.

We don’t know a lot about Said Salim Bakhresa; probably the richest Tanzanian, we know a bit about his sons, but we don’t even know the name of his wife. Look at Mohamed Dewji, Rostam Aziz, Subhash Patel and many other and the trend is the same.

It is a male story. On the continent level, the richest woman is Isabel dos Santos and because of her gender and the association with the former Angolan President, José Eduardo dos Santos, her wealth will always be considered to be ill-gotten.

Think about all African Heads of States who were known to be corrupt and where their children are. Think about the Mobutus, the Biyas, Bokassas, Mubaraks and others and see if they have produced a billionaire heir. I believe Isabel is not clean, but her sex/gender is also a factor in whatever is going on in her life now.

As long as our richest and the successful leaves the powerful women in their lives outside the picture like what Mengi did to his first wife, our efforts to look for inclusive growth for all of us will be futile. If we want our daughters to grow and become successful and confident, they need to know about stories of the likes of Mercy Anna Mengi.

As a journalist, nowadays, I find stories about men’s success and failures to be uninspiring, monotonous and biased. It is time for the Mercy Anna Mengi to come out.

For God’s sake.