Kenya

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 13, 2000 by Evelyn Mattern

President Moi also plays the "down Kenyan" tribes -- Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin, and others -- against each other, inflaming ethnic tensions as a means of retaining power. When he visited Wajir recently, all the phones were disconnected as a security measure.

Since independence, the churches in Kenya have moved from "semi-establishment" status (Anglican and Presbyterian under the colonial regime) to that of protesters against government authoritarianism. No other institutions exist outside the single-party state, so church leaders are the only ones who can challenge it. One outspoken Anglican bishop has died under suspicious circumstances.

The Roman Catholic bishops may be less vulnerable than other church leaders because they speak together as members of the Catholic Conference. Archbishop Raphael Ndingi of Nairobi has been pushing for a constitutional revision to allow movement toward a multiparty system. The Roman Catholic church has many young priests and sisters who serve the poor with spirit. Lively liturgies and some probing theology nourish active lay people. Especially near the cities, building on its heavy involvement in health care and education in a country that has too little of those commodities, the church can afford to be prophetic.

Kenya is not one of the 40 most impoverished countries the Jubilee 2000 debt forgiveness campaign is focusing on, though 28 of the 40 are in Africa. Like other African countries rich in resources, it has lost the ability to sustain itself because of both internal corruption and external pressures, such as the international debt structure. Like other African countries, Kenya ceased to play a role in geopolitical maneuverings after the end of the Cold War. The West no longer needs to buy Kenya's friendship. Some observers predict that as Islamic fundamentalism progresses across the African continent, the West will begin again to take Kenya seriously. For now, however, Africa provides few consumers and markets for investment capital. Few who live there will buy computers and use them to speculate in Europe, Tokyo or New York. A used Mac will do quite well for e-mail in Wajir -- if the phone line is working.

My cardiologist friend got it right. Africa is outside our line of vision, off of our economic map. But it must remain on our moral map. We are profoundly connected. In his novel Petals of Blood, the exiled Ngugi wa Thiong'o has a character say, "I saw that we were serving the same monster-god as they were in America.... [H]ow many Kimathis must die, how many motherless children must weep, how long shall our people continue to sweat so that a few, a given few, might keep a thousand dollars in the bank of the monster-god that for 400 years had ravished a continent?" The whole world is now organized around "economism," the service of wealth or Mammon. The West, we might say, takes what is offered in tribute to its god. The Third World, in the United States as well as Africa, offers up as tribute its starving and futureless children.