Those who witnessed her work nicknamed her “Moses” after the man in Judaeo-Christian mythology who is supposed to have delivered the Jews from their Egyptian bondage. And she was not less deserving, for she did deliver many of her own people from real bondage that we know for a fact took place.

Harriet Tubman was an African-American slave girl who ran away from her enslavers but, not content with her own freedom, went back to the places of captivity and embarked on a campaign to free all her relatives and as many other slaves that she could, leading them out of Maryland to the northern states where slavery had been abolished.

She established the famed “Underground Railroad” that helped pass these freed slaves from “safe house” to “safe house,” sometimes all the way to Canada, and where she could help them to get jobs.

This was not some Amazon of a slave girl with extraordinary physical strength. In fact, during her childhood she had been beaten so badly on the head that for all her life she suffered seizures, fits and excessive sleepiness, which meant that whatever she managed to do she did with serious bodily difficulty.

But she was stood in good stead by an unshakeable faith in what was possible for people with determination. She was a very religious person, and historians suggest that she believed she was in conversations with God, or his representatives.

At some stage, she collaborated with the white abolitionist Jim Brown against the slave masters, helping him to recruit soldiers for his armed struggle that he thought had become necessary in order to destroy slavery.

Well, the revolt failed, and Brown was hanged, but Tubman and Brown’s actions stand out as among the earlier examples of people reaching out across racial lines to support good against evil. Brown called her “General Tubman” in recognition of her extraordinary courage, strategic astuteness and leadership qualities.

When the North went to war with the Confederate states over slavery, Tubman acted as a spy for the Union, infiltrating the South that she knew so well, and provided invaluable intelligence to the United States forces.

Later on in her life, she became a fearless campaigner for women’s right to vote, an extraordinary feat for a slave woman who had just accomplished what even today must come across as truly improbable. The cheek of doing the first thing and then thinking of the other!

That’s the woman the United States Treasury has just decided to honour by placing her picture on the $20 bill, which you would think anyone of sound mind would salute.

Many people of sound mind have indeed done that, hailing Tubman as a foremost champion of human rights, whose actions have placed her in the pantheon of all-time American, I dare say, world greats.

But the occasion has, almost predictably, triggered a backlash from racists, white supremacists and fascists who have taken to social media to pour scorn on the poor woman and those who have decided to honour her, using unprintable language.

I say almost predictably because there has risen in the US since Barack Obama became president, an unthinking willingness to insult black people, even shoot them, from people who might otherwise have been more civil.

This has even helped the presidential campaign of a mentally challenged Republican candidate who should ordinarily have been laughed off the stage but now seems only stoppable by his party elite’s intervention.

I don’t like Obama too much, but if I were American maybe that would change. Look, the country was in a mess like it has never seen since the Hoovervilles, the terrible carton towns of the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

The lanky lad from Kenya arrives and does some Luo magic, and lo and behold, the economy is on the mend and the worst estimates say numbers are headed north.

There is a real danger that people could start having ideas about having another African in the White House. Or a Jewish socialist, maybe?

It certainly is not the time to start digging up ghosts of dead Africans to put on the dollar bill. Especially not the face of a woman that would make Obama look good, if you see what I mean.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]