LOSING MY RELIGION: the Cross, the Lynching Tree and Kenya's Post

LOSING MY RELIGION: The cross, the lynching tree and Kenya’s post-colonial enterprise

By Christine Mungai

“My kingdom is not of this world…” John 18:36

When we were children, our mother took us to St. Andrews Church in Nairobi every Sunday. A grand, cavernous cathedral-style building on the right side of Uhuru Highway, it was there that she and my father had had their wedding ceremony in 1983.

The Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) was founded by Scottish missionaries but would soon be known for what the Kikuyu called mutaratara – a liturgical style of worship that is composed, outwardly decorous and predictable. That was how my mother, Rose Wanjiku, had always done church. She was in charge of our spiritual formation; my father was largely irreligious – I now realise that this is not unusual, and perhaps the norm, in most Kenyan families.

In my teenage years, I met some cool kids who went to Nairobi Pentecostal Church, and I followed them there. The youth fellowship there was nicknamed Fortress, and for a 13-year-old raised to be a dignified mini-adult in church, the unbridled energy and chaotic emotionality of a Pentecostal service was enchanting. I loved Fortress. We had day (and night) concerts, youth camps, picnics and movies. I led praise and worship and preached on occasion. We went on “missions” where we proselytised to strangers, prayed in tongues and we baptised in the Holy Ghost.

My mother was not entirely pleased with my new spiritual commitments. I suspect that they seemed a little too ecstatic to her. She resisted my formation of a whole lifestyle that was outside her supervision or control. I would argue that at least I was spending my time in church, not “out there” like other girls. This would usually placate her.

I spent the rest of my teenage years being highly active “in the ministry” as we called it, both at my boarding school and at Fortress when I was home on vacation. And far from being a drag on my social life, church was actually fun. It was not only a sanctuary but also the place where I grew up, developed my own personality, and made deep and meaningful friendships, some of which remain to this day.

***

The tension between my mother and I was fuelled by teenage resentment and maternal anxieties, but – like our domestic strife – was located in the context of a country whose religious life had always been animated by its relationship with power.

The 1980s and 1990s were a time when Kenya’s Christian institutions were undergoing a profound change, whose effects remain with us today. Purportedly, Kenya is a Christian nation; census data indicates that nearly four in five Kenyans self-identify as Christian.

The Catholic, Anglican and Presbyterian churches accounted for 70 per cent of Christian congregations in Kenya by the time Daniel arap Moi became Kenya’s second president in 1978. Christianity was a colonial project in most of Africa. The missionaries may have been welcomed in individual communities, but the machinery of the colonial state followed very soon after, enforcing and accelerating the winning of (bodies and) souls.

In England, Lambeth Palace on the south bank of the River Thames is the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Houses of Parliament are less than 400 metres away, on the opposite bank. The British colonisers diligently replicated this spatial intimacy of church and state. In the capital cities of most former British colonies in Africa, the official residence of the Anglican archbishop was next to, or across the street from, the Governor’s Mansion.

In Nairobi, the Anglican archbishop’s residence, even today, is at the T-junction of State House Avenue and State House Road, right across the road from the official residence of the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief.

Because of their colonial roots, the mainstream churches had an uncritical relationship with the government, even after independence when both institutions were “Africanised”. The churches were firmly pro-establishment, preferring to “keep out of politics” and focusing on providing social services.

The Anglican and Presbyterian churches were formally organised under the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK). Formed in 1966, NCCK was an umbrella of 37 church organisations affiliated to the Anglican and Presbyterian churches. In 1978 (the year that Moi became president) NCCK was commissioned to undertake a theological study of three words: “peace, love and unity”. Peace, Love and Unity was the slogan underlying President Moi’s new political philosophy of Nyayo, as he called it. But Moi’s regime would end up being anything but peaceful, loving or uniting.

***

Moi was vice president when Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, died in 1978. The constitution directed that the vice president take office upon the death of the president, but in the years that Kenyatta’s health began to fail, politicians close to Mzee had tried to sideline Moi – ostensibly because he lacked the political clout of Kenyatta, and was ethnically Kalenjin, whereas those establishment politicians were mostly Kikuyu.

In fact, that group had tried to change the constitution to block the automatic succession of a president by his deputy. Though they failed in that regard, Moi nevertheless began his tenure with a deep sense of political insecurity.

By 1982 that insecurity had turned into a fully-fledged political crisis. In the early hours of August 1st of that year, a group of Air Force officers commandeered state radio and declared a coup. Within hours, forces loyal to the incumbent president had crushed the coup attempt, but it would be the pivotal point in the downward repressive spiral of the Moi regime, with increasing surveillance, detentions, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment intensifying in the mid- to late 1980s.

The “Peace Love and Unity” study coordinated by David Gitari (who decades later became Kenya’s Anglican archbishop) was intended to provide a theological interpretation of the Nyayo philosophy. The ultimate goal was to get the Nyayo philosophy incorporated in religious education in schools and also among church congregations. The study was published in 1983 as a book called A Christian View of Politics in Kenya: Love, Peace and Unity.

But as the political space became more constricted in the mid-80s, the NCCK became more vocal against the Moi regime. It must be said here that NCCK and the Catholic churches were ethnically disproportionately Kikuyu and Luo. This was possibly for historical reasons, as the early Christian missionaries were most active in areas dominated by Kikuyus and Luos.

Possibly to counter the rising malcontent, Moi created an alliance with a number of Pentecostal and evangelical congregations who would come together under the Evangelical Fellowship of Kenya (EFK) – and whose ethnic composition happened to be closer to that of Moi and his allies. Congregations, such as the African Inland Church (AIC), the Reformed Church of East Africa, Kenya Assemblies of God and the African Gospel Church were part of this evangelical fellowship; Moi himself was said to be a very religious man, an AIC faithful, whose habit was to wake up at 5am for prayer and reading the Bible.

Because of their closeness to the seat of power, the evangelical churches now came to occupy a privileged place in 1980s and 1990s Kenya. The position taken by the EFK during that time was one of consoling the State rather than confronting it; the image of the President as “God’s anointed” became a frequent one.

Meanwhile, NCCK and Catholic leaders continued to speak out against government excesses. The most vocal of these leaders were Rev. Timothy Njoya of PCEA (who for a time headed my mother’s congregation at St. Andrews), as well as Bishops Alexander Muge, David Gitari and Henry Okullu, all Anglican. Among the Catholics, the most outspoken was Bishop Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki of the Nakuru Catholic diocese.

As the university community was harassed and diminished, especially after state repression, detentions and surveillance were ramped up in the 1980s, the NCCK became the major institutional challenge to Moi’s regime. The churches had the organisational network and national infrastructure to mount and sustain a form of protest politics in what was then a one-party state.

In turn, government politicians adopted a defensive stance and challenged the legitimacy of the church in discussing matters of politics. The evangelical fellowship, for its part, led by Bishop Ezekiel Birech of the AIC and Bishop Arthur Kitonga of Redeemed Gospel Church, often denounced NCCK in vehement Sunday sermons that were then printed in state-leaning newspapers. Kenyan churchgoers saw the acrimonous split along denominational lines, but few saw its ethnic and political dimension.

Moi won the 1992 election against a badly fractured opposition and on the back of state-sponsored gangs that suppressed the vote in much of the country. But by this time Kenya was in dire economic straits, with decay everywhere you looked – uncollected garbage, spiraling inflation and crumbling public services.

I was just a child at this time, but I remember the panic that seemed to seep into my parents’ conversations when they talked about money; the faint disgust with which my father handled the newly minted Ksh500 note (previously, Ksh200 was the biggest denomination). He said that this new note was a sure sign that Kenya was going to the dogs.

This was also the time that the “prosperity gospel” began to explode in Kenya. With a roughly evangelical stance, the prosperity gospel churches offered a version of Christianity that was both appealing and logically consistent with the political mood of the day, one that presented spiritual practice as a site for claiming back some power in a country where things were falling apart. Like the Pentecostal congregation that I was a part of, they were radical, emotionally speaking, in terms of an ecstatic worship experience. But politically, they were solidly conservative – they offered a privatisation of solutions in the face of public dilapidation that seemed beyond hope. Claim your miracle. Reap your blessing. Accept Jesus as your personal saviour.

***

As I grew older and became more politically conscious and intellectually mature, my faith began to be a source of deep internal strife. I was increasingly uncomfortable with interpretations of Scripture that seemed to be obsessed with meticulous sexual policing, which of course was always directed at the girls (“be careful not to cause a brother to stumble!”) but made almost no demands on the boys.

Perhaps it wasn’t incidental that many of our fathers were disinterested in the church – except when they were looking for a good woman to marry. Church was a place women learned, practised and refined their marriageability. Men didn’t need to. We were discouraged from dating casually, unless the relationship was headed towards marriage. That produced an incentive to declare things more serious than they actually were, or needed to be. And then the power play began – it fell upon the boys to proclaim whether that relationship was indeed headed towards marriage and upon the girls to demonstrate how wifeable they were.

One of the major traits of wifeability was the maintainance of the “purity” in the relationship. So we (the girls, mostly) expended enormous amounts of energy discussing “how far is too far” in relating to the opposite sex (Holding hands? Kissing? Petting? Actually, what exactly is petting?). And then, it seemed the boys would adjudicate whether the girl had adequately maintained the collective purity of the relationship or had fallen short of the glory of God. It was a bizarre dance that rested upon the presumption that a woman’s body was a kind of blank slate with no innate desires of its own.

This was during Mwai Kibaki’s first term as president. In the course of just five years, Kenya’s political mood made a full about-turn – from the joy and optimism of the 2002 election in which democracy had triumphed to the violent aftermath of the 2007 election.

Kibaki’s first swearing-in ceremony was the first, and I believe the last, political meeting my mother attended in her life; she walked from our home in South B to Uhuru Park to join the celebratory throng and watch a new democratic government take power. (Throng is a word I like. It is dense and heaving, as though people’s bodies were compressing and purging themselves, and each other, of the weight of dictatorship and failed dreams.) By then I was in my early twenties, and the friction between my mother and I would increasingly shift from being a dispute over denomination into one over politics.

Kibaki quickly consolidated power around his own Kikuyu elite, which seemed to me an obvious betrayal of the multi-ethnic and popular mandate that had brought him to power. But at family meetings, funerals and weddings, I would hear my relatives proclaim quite categorically that Kenya was much better off under a Kikuyu president. In fact, Kibaki was God’s anointed. At home I would constantly challenge my mother on those kinds of declarations, my voice shrill and my manner emphatic. How do we know that whoever is in power is God’s anointed? What is godly about chauvinism? Are we now saying that Anglo Leasing is the will of God? She would only wearily listen to me and wave me off.

Just five years later, in the aftermath of a disputed 2007 election, I watched in horror the smouldering remains of a church in Kiambaa, where a mob shut dozens of people in a church, blocked the door with a mattress and set the sanctuary on fire. As the smoke billowed on the television screen, my mother turned to me and calmly said the most cutting words she had ever said to me. “Do you think that when they come for you they will ask you who you voted for?”

It was clear what she meant. Kenya was a country where your ethnicity was everything. It could be the difference between life and death. And I hated to admit it, but she was right.

That day I was unconvinced that the personal holiness that we were taught to aspire to as a mark of the Kingdom would save me from a political system that was so depraved and unjust that I could be summarily executed for having the wrong last name. My piety would not save my body. Thirty people died that day, and so did most of my faith. I spent the next eight years of my life vaguely describing myself as an agnostic, “spiritual but not religious”, or generally avoiding matters of faith. It increasingly seemed absurd to me that one could be an African and a Christian, and even less a self-respecting, or at least politically conscious African, with any kind of serious commitment to social justice. Christianity is a white man’s religion, I thought. I don’t really know any African religions, so I will have none.

***

First-century Judea was a colonial project. The land itself brought in little revenue to the Roman treasury, but by controlling it, Rome could control the land and sea routes to Egypt, which was the breadbasket of the empire.

Judea was also a border province against the Parthian Empire (in modern day Iraq and Iran), a rival of Rome in the east. The Bible records that the Jews had been taken into exile in Babylon some centuries before, and though they had returned to their homeland, the Jews were viewed as suspicious and potential fifth columnists by Rome, because of that lengthy exile to the east.

It was here that the New Testament records than God became incarnate into man. Jesus, as described in the Bible, was not only from Judea, but from a town in Galilee called Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian faith now reflexively associates Nazareth with the power, awe and authority of the Divine, but in the first century Nazareth was nowhere to be bragged about.

The historic Nazareth was an area of entrenched poverty in the ancient world. The people of Nazareth were on the bottom of society. When Herod the Great – the Jewish king who was little more than a Roman colonial administrator – died in 4 BC, the Roman armoury in Sepphoris, just outside Nazareth, was robbed. The Romans retaliated by crucifying 2,000 Jews as a public warning against such revolts. Sepphoris was burned to the ground, and its inhabitants were sold into slavery.

Less than a decade later, there was another revolt, this time against paying taxes. Another Roman crackdown followed, with many more crucified. The place earned a reputation for being a hotbed of unrest; young Nazarenes were labelled gangsters and thugs.

The elite one percent in Jerusalem – the priests, teachers of the law and Sadducees – looked upon those from Nazareth as uneducated and uncultured; Nazarenes were subjected to slurs on their purported lax morals and were policed for their lack of manners. The people of Nazareth were considered a Problem People.

One can thus understand the disciple Nathaniel’s jaded statement when Philip excitedly tells him that he has met the Messiah: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” In fact, we ought to consider “Jesus of Nazareth” a politically loaded statement, akin to Jaymo kutoka ghetto. In the gospel of Luke, the birth of Jesus is spoken about in this metaphor of Empire.

The Mediterranean world called Caesar sôtêr (saviour of the world). Caesar was the one who brought Peace, Love and Unity, Pax Romana, to the ancient world. So when the gospel writers used the word sôtêr to announce the birth of Jesus: “To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord,” (Luke 2:11) they were essentially undermining the authority of the empire.

Crucifixion was a public execution that was carried out as a warning for those who rose up against the state, for those who refused to know their place. Jesus was executed for sedition, a political offence, and not blasphemy, a religious one – the inscription on the cross mockingly said “This Is The King Of The Jews”.

The way the Roman State tortured and executed Jesus and his early followers was not incidental. It tells us who Jesus was in relation to the state – crucifixion was done publicly, as a warning, in response to a perceived offence against the authority of Caesar.

More than 4,000 black men, women and children were lynched in the American South between 1900 and 1950. Lynchings were public events, sometimes announced in advance. Photographs were taken and used as postcards. Bodies were dismembered and parts handed out as souvenirs.

Both the cross and the lynching tree were symbols of terror, instruments of torture and execution, reserved primarily for slaves, criminals and insurrectionists, writes American theologian James Cone, who passed away this April. According to Cone, Jesus and blacks in America suffered a similar fate: both were publicly humiliated, subjected to the utmost indignity, unfairly tried and quickly condemned, tortured and left to die as a public warning.

During colonialism, several Kenyans experienced similar indignities. Otenyo Nyamaterere was killed by a British firing squad in Kisii in western Kenya for resisting the advance of the colonial state in the early 20th century. He was beheaded and his headless body left on a bridge. Waiyaki wa Hinga, the Kikuyu chieftain who resisted harassment and forced taxation, was buried alive at a prison camp in 1890. Koitalel arap Samoei, the Nandi chief who fought British occupation for eleven years, mounting guerrilla attacks on the railway and colonial forts, was shot at point blank range by a colonial official who had asked him to meet and discuss peace; Koitalel’s skull was then carried off to Britain.

Then there was General Baimungi Marete of the Mau Mau, a leader of the armed rebellion of the 1950s that fought for Kenya’s self-rule. General Baimungi and his lieutenants held out in forest camps as Jomo Kenyatta, who would become Kenya’s first president, negotiated an independence treaty with the British. The colonial structures were left intact; Kenyatta would now head this new expropriating state.

After independence, Kenyatta sent word to the Mau Mau fighters that they would receive land and compensation if they surrendered their weapons. They emerged from the forest and waited for their promised land, only to be killed by government agents. The bodies of Baimungi and two lieutenants were displayed publicly in Chuka for three days by an independent Kenyan government, and the Mau Mau was declared a banned organisation.

Kenyatta went on to publicly declare: “Mau Mau was a disease which was eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” The Mau Mau remained a banned organisation in Kenya until 2003. The colour of the administrators had changed, but the colonial logic remained intact. After independence, Kenyatta sent word to the Mau Mau fighters that they would receive land and compensation if they surrendered their weapons. They emerged from the forest and waited for their promised land, only to be killed by government agents. The bodies of Baimungi and two lieutenants were displayed publicly in Chuka for three days by an independent Kenyan government, and the Mau Mau was declared a banned organisation.

The fact that white colonisers would use the symbol of a Nazarene anti-colonialist to enforce and entrench the very project of colonisation is a testament to the twisted genius of white supremacy. But Jesus of Nazareth was no coloniser.

***

There’s a difference between priests and prophets, as religious scholar Jonathan Walton describes in his book Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. Priestly leaders believe that the structures of society are fundamentally good and that any political or social problems are the result of a few bad apples or degraded moral standards, as opposed to inherent flaws in the structures of society. Priests seek to nurture humility, patience and goodwill in their congregations in order to integrate them into the culture as productive and loyal citizens. By doing this, priests accommodate themselves and their parishioners to injustice without necessarily affirming it – at most, they encourage the congregation to endure those things that cannot be readily changed.

Priests generally seek to “stay out of politics”; whenever they do get involved in politics, it is usually to use their respectable social standing to have access to the ear of the powerful. Priests believe they can be a “good influence” to the ruling class, appealing to their moral goodwill to try and obtain justice. Pray for your leaders, they say. Touch not God’s anointed.

Priests are uncomfortable with social protest or real reform because it might lead to a loss of their social capital.

But the prophet is different. “The prophet views society as neither fundamentally good nor bad, but as fundamentally flawed,” Walton writes. Prophets have a clear theological and political conception of what those flaws are and an uncompromising declaration that if the injustice is not uprooted, the society will be destroyed.

The prophet is social reformer with no moral middle ground. No form of oppression is consistent with God’s will, the prophetic witness declares, and is actually in opposition to the very physical form that God chose to be incarnated in first-century Judea. Turn around! the prophet declares. You’re going the wrong way! It seems to me that Christianity’s prophetic roots were never fully formed; they were prematurely twisted into an entwining conformity with colonial and neo-colonial states – Rome, Britain, America, Kenya.

“The prophet views society as neither fundamentally good nor bad, but as fundamentally flawed,” Walton writes. Prophets have a clear theological and political conception of what those flaws are and an uncompromising declaration that if the injustice is not uprooted, the society will be destroyed.

I now see that the focus on personal piety and private redemption that energised my formative years ended up obscuring calls for social justice. The uncritical embrace of society’s unjust structures – especially the capitalist economy that has its colonial logic intact and the obsession with morals and manners – reflects the non-confrontational stance of the priest rather than the radical reform of the prophet.

The prophet is never neutral in the face of oppression. The prophet doesn’t want to “hear both sides”, doesn’t want to be “fair and balanced”, cannot be “objective”. The prophet is on the side of justice.

It is time for Kenyan Christians to live out their ministry for those caught on the underside of power today, for the “least of these”. In the words of James Cone, we cannot find liberating joy in the cross by spiritualising it, by taking away its message of justice in the midst of powerlessness, suffering and death.

The cross, as a locus of divine revelation, is not good news for the powerful, for those who are comfortable with the way things are, or for anyone whose understanding of religion is aligned with power.

Author’s note: Many thanks to Jeremy L. Williams for the many conversations that helped clarify my thinking for this article, and to Jonathan Walton for his ministry, and insightful books Watch This! and the forthcoming A Lens of Love.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

LOSING MY RELIGION: The cross, the lynching tree and Kenya’s post-colonial enterprise

By Christine Mungai After the 2002 general election that brought the Mwai Kibaki-led Rainbow Coalition into power, the church in Kenya took a vow of silence. Following the 2007 disputed election and its violent aftermath, Oliver Kisaka, a Quaker minister and vice president of the National Council of Churches of Kenya, alluded to the church’s 2002 vow of silence. In an interview in 2008 with Religion & Ethic Newsweekly, the minister stated:

“We have assumed that our religion is deep enough. The truth is that it is not deep enough. When push came to shove, there were ministers who sided with their ethnic communities. In other words, they were not prophetic to their ethnic communities. The right thing would have been to tell the community, ‘You cannot do this. You can’t burn other people’s property, even if you are aggrieved.’ But they were silent.”

If the church took a vow of silence in 2002, then in 2007 it took a cue from the soldiers at Golgotha who divided and cast lots for Christ’s tunic. The country did not just go into that year’s general election divided right down the middle, it also split the body of Christ. In the two subsequent general elections after 2007, church leaders have pledged allegiance to different coalitions, and have gone as far as “prophetically” declaring that their preferred candidate has been chosen by God. Which makes one wonder if the Christian God is schizophrenic.

The sight of the Big Man – who in his heyday was Churchgoer Number One – in the best seat in the pew every Sunday can make both the clergy and the laity to think that they are a law unto themselves.

But it was not always this way. In the high noon of former President Daniel arap Moi’s dictatorial regime, there were clergymen who, Sunday after Sunday, served the strongman ample doses of reality and religious checks. Clergymen who spoke against the excesses of the Kanu regime were, by and large, not beholden to pseudo denominational-tribal blocs. (The exception was the African Inland Church (AIC), which was Moi’s home church, and is the go-to church for many Kalenjins.)

Kenyans love using the term, “our very own” to appropriate a person or property. The sight of the Big Man – who in his heyday was Churchgoer Number One – in the best seat in the pew every Sunday can make both the clergy and the laity to think that they are a law unto themselves. And if the Big Man, is “our very own” then we can do as we damn well please.

Nothing illustrates this “our very own” syndrome than a disturbing story in International Religious Freedom Report 2003:

“In January 2002, Egerton University officials barred approximately 300 worshippers from the AIC from conducting services in the Lord Egerton Castle, which has been the subject of a longstanding property dispute between the University and the AIC. According to the AIC, President Moi allocated the castle and the 50 adjacent acres to the Church in 1995; according to records at the Ministry of Lands, the property belongs to the chaplain and two other individuals. President Moi issued a statement soon after the January 2002 incident indicating that the castle and surrounding property belonged to the University; however, AIC leaders urged their followers to ignore the statement.”

One of the thorns on the side of Moi was the sharp Bishop Alexander Kipsang Muge of the Anglican diocese of Eldoret. Bishop Muge paid the ultimate price for speaking against rampant land grabbing, the autocracy of the Kanu regime and endemic corruption. He died in a mysterious road accident after defying the then Labour Minister Peter Okondo’s threat that, if he visited Okondo’s Busia backyard, he would not leave alive.

As early as 1974, Anglican Bishop Henry Okullu was advocating for political pluralism. But he would take this campaign notches higher after Moi ascended to power, calling out myriad excesses in Moi’s dictatorial leadership. In 1990, Okullu made his displeasure known after the assassination of Foreign Affairs Minister Robert Ouko.

Interestingly, Moi called on Okullu in the early 1990s for guidance on a whole range of issues, mostly relating to post-election violence after the first multiparty elections in 1992. Political pundits believe the wily Moi was trying to assuage and silence this vocal critic by pulling him closer to political power and further from pulpit-pounding.

If the government is the proverbial horse, then the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA)’s Reverend Timothy Njoya is the indefatigable gnat that has been biting the horse’s backside if and when it seems like it is becoming too big for its saddle. And for his efforts, Reverend Njoya has endured physical beatings by Moi’s security apparatus to within an inch of his life.

Sometimes dissent takes time to foment. In his Holier Than Thou blog post, Patrick Gathara notes that after independence “churches were initially reluctant to criticise the increasingly authoritarian bent of the Kenyatta government…no individual of the church challenged the nation and “those in authority” in the mass media till David Gitari’s radio sermons following the assassination of J.M. Kariuki in 1975.”

Then there was the late Archbishop David Gitari of the Anglican Church of Kenya, who spoke boldly for multiparty politics and against economic and political injustices, and challenged the excesses of Moi.

When a leading Pentecostal minister was asked in 1992 which party he supported, he replied that the Bible instructed him to support AGIP, which was an acronym for “Any Government in Power”. However, supporting AGIP – aka Kanu – was a quid pro quo arrangement. In return for their support, these ministers and their ministries got land, miscellaneous state favours, unchecked access to State House, cash handouts and money during church-building harambees. It is noteworthy that the prelates who stood against Moi came from religious institutions – such as the ACK and PCEA, the Catholic Church under Bishop Ndingi Mwana‘a Nzeki and the Methodist Church under Bishop Lawi Imathiu – that were backed by centuries or score years of history. It can be argued that these institutions – and, by association, their clerics – had earned their stripes and collars. That, unlike the new Pentecostal “ministries” that started crawling from under the cross’ woodwork in the 1980s, these giants did not have the shelf life of a packet of maziwa ya nyayo. That their history, structures and global influence gave them courage and faith to stand up when, like in Daniel’s case, Moi and his apparatchiks threatened to hurl them in the lions’ den.

The babies in the church sphere, who were mainly Pentecostal “ministries” – and mostly one-man armies – just folded up at the juggernaut that was the state as they could not afford to upset their tithes and offering cart.

The Ndungu Land Commission Report states:

“Ngong Road Forest is located between Jamhuri Park, St. Francis Church, Karen and Langata Roads, Bomas of Kenya, Langata Women’s Prison and Kibera. It was gazzetted as a forest reserve in 1932 at a time when it covered an area of 2,926.6 hactares. Various excisions have taken place over the years for public and private development. They include Lenana School, Extelcoms, St. Francis Anglican Church, PCEA Mugomoini, Langata Cemetery, the War Cemetery, Kenya Science Teachers College, the Meteorological Department, ASK Showground. By 1978, the forest covered 1,328.2 hactares”.

The report further states that, as was the case in Karura Forest, the bulk of the illegal and irregular allocations of Ngong Forest occurred in the late 1990s and involved fraudulent transactions. And the church has been complicit in some, if not many, of these transactions.

Church leaders who were suckered by Moi’s charms were, by design or default, cut to the size of a mustard seed, forced to sing Moi’s song and, before they could cross themselves, were according him deity status when they unashamedly called him “Mtukufu”, a title that loosely translates to God or Our Lord.

A story is told of how former President Moi once summoned Christian religious leaders to a State House rendezvous. The dress code was dog collars. No buts. The Kenya Assemblies of God’s (KAG) head, Reverend Peter Njiri, and his entourage must have missed the memo. They showed up at State House dressed to the hilt, in suits and ties, minus the obligatory dog collars. The men of God were frozen at the gate. Their pleas and prayers that they had been invited by “Mtukufu Rais” fell on deaf ears. It is alleged that this why KAG missed out on the parcels of land that were dished out during that prayer meeting. The flipside is that, in that instance, the missing dog collar saved KAG from joining the compromise choir.

Speaking of choirs, Galia Sabar-Friedman writes in Church and State in Kenya that on 13th September 1984, President Moi stated:

“I call on all ministers, assistant ministers and every other person to sing like parrots. During Mzee Kenyatta’s period, I persistently sang the Kenyatta tune until people said: This fellow has nothing except to sing for Kenyatta. I say: I didn’t have ideas of my own. Why was I to have my own ideas? I was in Kenyatta’s shoes and therefore I had to sing whatever Kenyatta wanted. If I had sung another song, do you think Kenyatta would have left me alone? Therefore you ought to sing the song I sing. If I put a full stop, you should also put a full stop. This is how this country will move forward. The day you become a big person, you will have the liberty to sing your own song and everybody will sing it.”

As recently as 2014, the then Nairobi Senator, Mike Sonko, almost bestowed the title “Mtukufu” on President Uhuru Kenyatta. Sonko called President Kenyatta, and – playing to the gallery – put the president on speaker phone after the National Construction Authority demo squad descended on Kenya’s largest church auditorium, Winners’ Chapel, in Nairobi’s South B area. Sonko’s impudent intervention and the impromptu presidential veto stopped the legal process in its tracks.

This is what endears a political leader to both the clergy and the laity, even if the politician is as guilty as sin. After pulling that saviour stunt, Sonko could have added another feather, in addition to Kamba elder, to his cap: that of church elder.

Such dalliances are veritable slippery slopes. Because, after being wined and dined and seduced into Caesar’s bed, clergymen cannot clap back at Caesar’s hands, even if those hands have Luciferian tattoos all over them.

In Kenya Christian lexicon, “getting into ministry” is one of the most abused terms. “Getting into ministry” can be likened to a get-rich-quick scheme, with many broke and busted types taking this ministry route, not to fish for man, but for mammon. Which is why, in 2014, the government put a brake on the registration of new ministries to curb this menace. But to be in the government’s good books, many church leaders dabble in the art of doublespeak, besides being life members of AGIP. And so it was no wonder that this March, President Kenyatta played an overt political card when he overrode his Attorney General and lifted the ban on the registration of churches. It is anyone’s guess whose praises such church leaders will harp.

Nowadays, politicians have taken the rule right of Moi’s handbook; they have made it a habit of attending church services on Sunday, kneeling on the altar and being anointed, even if the previous day they were on a hate-mongering murderous mission. Sacrileges that would have made the likes of Okullu, Gitari and Muge lose their religion have become common occurrences. They are mostly perpetrated by the new Pentecostal preachers on the block, although the established preachers and churches have, by dint of their deafening silence, become accomplices to this crime against Christians’ collective conscience.

Change of regime also means change of heart. Or is it a case of who pays the fiddler calls the tune? Some prelates who were vocal agents of change during the Moi days hit the snooze button when they got into the August House, or became mouthpieces of the status quo. A good example is Reverend Mutava Musyimi who became a government apologist after he went to parliament on a Jubilee ticket.

After the 8th August general election, many church leaders were unequivocal in “prophetically” stating that President Kenyatta’s re-election was the will of God. The Supreme Court ruling put their so-called prophetic pronouncement in crosshairs. The bombshell ruling implies that if the devil is a liar, he has some co-conspirators in the Kenyan clergy.

And whereas Ndingi Mwana ‘a Nzeki did not shy away from speaking up even if he earned the ire of the powers-that-be, John Cardinal Njue has maintained a studious silence and has been accused of playing footsie with State House.

The aforementioned just goes to show that many Christians in Kenya do not have pastors, but slaughterhouse lords. There are few prophetic voices, and many profiteers. That is the price sheep pay when their shepherds divide and turn the body of Christ into pounds of flesh.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

LOSING MY RELIGION: The cross, the lynching tree and Kenya’s post-colonial enterprise

By Christine Mungai On 31 July 2017, the day that Chris Msando’s body was found at the city mortuary, I was on the eighth floor of the Cardinal Otunga Plaza in the middle of Nairobi’s central business district. The floor houses the office of Cardinal John Njue, the head of the Catholic Church in Kenya. I was there to discuss peace and justice issues that the church had been conveying to the country in the lead-up to the 8 August 2017 general election.

I had squeezed in a meeting with his personal secretary, Fr. Calistus Nyangilo, who informed me that the body of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC)’s acting ICT manager had been located. “Actually I was with his eminence when the report came through,” Fr. Nyangilo told me. “This is bad for peaceful elections,” Cardinal Njue had told him.

First, a word about Chris Msando. I had met Msando about two months ago at a workshop that had sought his audience to explain the IEBC’s election preparedness to a group of journalists, election specialists and observers. He spoke last. For 45 minutes, Msando took us through what he considered to be a water-tight technological schedule to curb electoral malpractices.

Throughout his stay at the workshop, he took notes, but when he stood to speak, he spoke off the cuff, without a script. He was confident, eloquent and knew his subject matter very well. He had his facts on his fingertips. Another 30 minutes was spent answering inquisitive and tough questions from the participants. At the end of our engagement, many of us gave the IEBC the benefit of the doubt. Initially, we were sceptical about the IEBC’s prep work, but Msando reassured us.

“I want to debunk the myth that the Catholic Church has not been preaching about both peace and justice,” said Fr. Nyangilo. “Maybe the messaging could be wrongly worded, but the church has been adamant that peace and justice are a prerequisite for a credible and just election.” Shooting from the hip, I had begun by asking the Cardinal’s personal secretary why the church seemed to be concerned more about peace, as opposed to justice, or even a credible election.

Sometime in June 2017, lawyer Charles Kanjama, addressed the Catholic church’s top clergy and told them that the church had been sourly “divided in half” during the 2007 general election ethnic flare-up. The one-on-one discussion took place at the Queens of Apostle Seminary in Nairobi, situated off Langata Road. Because of this division, the church could not speak in one voice. It had been deflated and had lost its legitimacy, and could, therefore, not be trusted by its laity or even by the rest of Kenyans.

On 27 July 2017, the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) had issued a pastoral letter titled “Seeking Peace and Prosperity” that quoted from the Book of Jeremiah 29:7. Said the letter in part: “The clarion call has been to have Just, Fair, Peaceful and Credible Elections.”

But the pastoral letter was a far cry from the homily and punchy letters that the Catholic church had issued in the past. The letter, just a two-page affair and signed by Rt. Rev Philip Anyolo, the Bishop of Homa Bay and the chairman of KCCB, is nothing more than an exhortation by the Catholic church’s top clergy to the Kenyan people: “We are calling upon all Kenyans to seize this opportunity to exercise our constitutional right and give us leaders of integrity.” The letter ends by “beseeching God to take charge of the whole process of elections.” Then the letter signs off by calling for peace…peace…peace.

That the Catholic church – the biggest and most influential and powerful of the Christian denominations in Kenya – has lost its legitimacy and trust among Kenyans has been a public secret since the botched general election of 2007. Indeed Fr. Nyangilo himself told me as much. “The church has been trying to reclaim its trust – and it takes a long time. That election divided the clergy and it was one of the lowest moments of the church and it has not been easy.”

Since the post-election violence of 2007–2008 that almost tore the fabric that had held the country together since independence in 1963, the Catholic church has been hoping to exorcise the ghost of disunity and division that threw the church off balance. “I will be honest with you, it has been both an individual and collective struggle to reclaim the unity of the church,” said Fr. Nyangilo. He told me that the Archdiocese Justice and Peace Committee had deployed some of its members to talk about justice and peace around the country among the Catholic laity, albeit away from the limelight of the mass media.

Why is the Catholic Church not broadcasting its powerful message loud and clear?

The apex of the Catholic church’s ethnic division peaked when a Catholic priest was killed during the 2007-2008 post-election flare up. Fr. Michael Kamau was a priest who hailed from Nakuru diocese but taught at Tindinyo Seminary in Bungoma. On 30 December 2007 or thereabouts, he drove from Tindinyo heading to Nairobi. He was coming to pick a fellow priest who had been seconded to teach at the same seminary. He was excited and happy since the priest he was going to pick was to teach the same subject he was teaching. On reaching Nakuru, Fr. Kamau, aware that taking the Nairobi-Nakuru highway was risky, took the Kabarnet-Mogotio road leading to Mogotio town. Mogotio was an area that he was familiar with because he had worked there as a parish priest. He, therefore, knew the residents well. But little did he know what lay ahead of him. He was stopped by marauding youth, who, upon realising that he was a Kikuyu, killed him on the spot.

“Father Kamau was killed in the area he had worked as a priest,” a priest from Mitume parish in Kitale, who knew him well, would later tell me. “The people who killed him knew him and they killed him because he was a Kikuyu,” said the priest when we met in Nairobi. Consumed with anger and bitterness, my priest friend told me: “We must avenge the death of Father Kamau…the Kalenjins killed one of our own. We must get our justice.”

Justice has been a difficult subject for the Catholic church’s clergy since 2008. Itself wrought by ethnic division, the church could not purport to talk about justice, even among its laity, when in 2008 its clergy lost all pretense of being united by the Catholic creed.

Otieno Ombok, a staunch Catholic and a peace expert who sits on the board of the Archdiocese of Nairobi Justice and Peace Committee, admitted to me that the Catholic Church completely lost it in 2008. “For a long time after the 2007–2008 debacle, brother priests from warring ethnic communities could not talk to each other,” said Ombok. “The conference of bishops was worse: it was a diametrically divided house.” He added that the senior bishops – “and you know who I am talking about” – could not even sit and share a meal for the longest time.

The antagonism between some of the bishops has been palpable. So bad has been the ethnic and political division among the Catholic clergy that an Archdiocese of Nairobi priest, who asked me not to reveal his name for fear of retribution, told me point blank, “I do not recognise Cardinal Njue as my spiritual head.” The Cardinal, he said, ruined the church when he openly sided with Party of National Unity (PNU). (PNU is the vehicle that former President Mwai Kibaki used to seek re- election in 2007.) “As the head of the Catholic Church, his titular role is to steer clear from partisan politics,” he added. “Yes, the Cardinal is entitled to his personal political opinion, but he should not make it public, or be seen to openly associate with a political figurehead or a political party for that matter.”

The Cardinal’s predecessor, Cardinal Maurice Otunga, said the priest, was pro-establishment, no doubt, but the one thing he never did was to openly and tacitly side with President Moi and his Kanu party. “Today, every Catholic, every Kenyan knows Cardinal Njue is pro-establishment, he is pro- Jubilee. His role in the lead-up to the 2007 elections was obvious for everybody to witness.”

The renegade priest reminded me that the reason why the Catholic church is limping in this electioneering period is simply because it cannot pretend to moralise to anyone; its leadership is punctured and there is little trust among the college of bishops. “The feeble peace messages sugar- coated with weak justice expressions is simply because the church’s head is interested in maintaining the current political status quo. When the conference of bishops comes together to issue a pastoral letter – like they did on 27 July 2017 – it was to give the impression that they are united and are speaking in one voice, but all that is a PR stunt.”

Yet, while the church that has been struggling to reclaim its power and glory, it has also been readying itself for any post-8 August 2017 election eventuality. In the last month, the conference of bishops has been inviting “election experts” at its Waumini House offices in Nairobi to help it think through the probable scenarios in the lead-up to and after the elections.

In one of these sessions, a facilitator presented the following four possible scenarios:

Scenario 1: Good elections – that will be credible and peaceful. The victor and the loser will both accept the results. Therefore, the transition of power will be smooth.

Scenario 2: Good elections – that will be credible, but that will result in violence because the loser – even after losing fairly – will not concede defeat, hence will not agree to hand over power.

Scenario 3: Bad elections – but “peaceful” because the might of the security apparatus that will be deployed massively will force a false peace. The people will be coerced to accept bad results – leading to a “negative peace”. (Otherwise called the Ugandan peace scenario.)

Scenario 4: Bad elections – that will result in an explosion of violence, even with the presence of the mighty security apparatus. Anarchy will reign supreme.

The in-house discourses that the KCCB has been holding with various experts are ostensibly to help it craft appropriate messages to Kenyans, as well as to prepare itself for the best of times and the worst times. “That notwithstanding, the Catholic church clergy can craft a theology of justice – if it wanted to,” said Ombok. “It doesn’t have to wait for experts to tell it what to do.” Ombok said a larger part of the problem is that the church’s leadership sits comfortably with the state, therefore implicitly, it is pro-establishment.

The truth of the matter is that ethnic division is not only a preserve of the Catholic church; all the mainstream churches in Kenya today are a reflection of political/ethnic division. During former President Moi’s time, the African Inland Church (AIC) was openly identified as both a “Kanu and Kalenjin church”, so much so that its then head, Bishop Silas Yego, openly associated with Moi, and occasionally even attended some Kanu meetings. Yego even helped Moi fend off criticism from the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK), the umbrella body that brings all the Protestant churches together. After the introduction of political pluralism in 1991, Yego instigated a breakaway group of evangelical churches that accused NCCK of being a political outfit. (NCCK had been on the frontline of exposing Moi’s excesses and in urging him to open up the political space for multiparty politics to thrive.)

Interestingly, NCCK today is a pale shadow of what it was in the 1980s and 1990s when it openly challenged the Moi regime. Today, under the leadership of Rev. Peter Karanja, it has all but gone quiet. Rev. Karanja, although an eloquent church minister, is apparently a victim of the 2007–2008 post-election violence that saw a large section of the non-Kikuyu Anglican laity view him as an apologist for a “Kikuyu state”.

In 2007, the PCEA church leadership openly took sides in the politics of the day. It drummed up support for President Mwai Kibaki and the PNU party. Its adherents, many of them from the ethnic Kikuyu community, tended to conflate their church creed with Kikuyu political leadership. The Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), from its inception in Kenya in the early 20th century, when the missionaries first set foot in the central Kenya areas of Tumu Tumu in Nyeri and Thogoto in Kiambu, has always been associated with Kikuyu nationalist apologists. A Maasai evangelical pastor once told me that after the Scottish PCEA missionaries had gone, the Kikuyu church leadership that was left behind sought to Kikuyu-ise the church. “When the PCEA church came to evangelise in Maasailand, for example, many of the Maasai children’s names would be turned into Kikuyu-sounding names; others would be given outright Kikuyu names – all in the name of receiving baptismal names.”

This is not to say individual PCEA ministers have not opposed the church’s apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Timothy Njoya, now a retired PCEA reverend – though he still preaches at his favourite PCEA church in Kinoo in Kiambu County – fought epic battles within the church and with the state. These battles are acknowledged nationally and globally.

The recent death of Reverend John Gatu in May 2017, a one-time moderator of the PCEA church in Kenya and a good friend of Rev. Njoya, reminds us of the battles he also waged against the state during Jomo Kenyatta’s time. In his biography Fan the Flame, he chronicles how he opposed the 1969 Gatundu oathings and the threats that were levied against him. Njoya remembers Gatu as a church minister, who like himself, fought for justice everywhere and for everyone.

“To the various church establishments, the preaching of peace, and not justice, means that they are only interested in maintaining their own status quo and that of the government of the day,” says Ombok. “It is the way the church has been socialised, since the missionaries’ activities coincided with those of the colonial masters.”

“The peace narrative in the slums is a euphemism for veiled threats and subtle intimidation, coupled with scriptural menacing carefully selected by the quasi-messianic and self-styled pastors, who are just out to eke a living.” Faced with the daily vicissitudes of slum life, the social worker told me, the peace message, when constantly drummed, can easily influence those who are constantly being reminded that “a demand for justice is tantamount to a demand for violence.” The implicit message being passed on is: between peace and “violence” what would you rather have?

Six months to the 2007 general election, a motley group of evangelical/revivalist churches’ leadership came together under the auspices of the House of Bishops. They agreed to speak publicly on the critical issues that would ensure a smooth election that year. The issues included accountability, credibility, fairness, justice, transparency and, well, of course, a peaceful election, among other things.

But unbeknownst to some of the bishops, a splinter group went to the State House and reportedly met President Kibaki. “After the ‘clandestine’ State House meeting, our friends’ demeanour and all the issues we had said we would champion and vocalise changed overnight,” a bishop who was part of the House of Bishops coming together confided in me. Apparently, the group that had been left behind came to learn that there had been greasing of palms, but more fundamentally, the group that had gone to eat ugali (eating ugali in Kenyan political parlance has come to mean going to State House to be bribed) all belonged to one ethnic community. “There are no prizes for guessing from which community the group of bishops who had gone to see the president came from,” the bishop, who sought anonymity, told me. That is the same group that insisted that the important thing was the country to remain peaceful.

“In the slums of Nairobi and its environs, it is these evangelical/Pentecostal/revivalist churches that are now being used to spread this false message of peace,” said a social worker with a community- based organisation in Kibera, an informal settlement that was the site of much violence in 2007-2008. “My hunch is that they have been given money by the Jubilee Party to cause ‘fear and despondency’, even as they claim to advocate for peace,” said the social worker, who because of the nature of his work, asked that his identity be concealed.

“Life in the slums is always tenuous, people live on the edge all the time – but in peace. When you begin talking about keeping the peace and being peaceful, you inadvertently create doubt in people and the ‘peace’ that is being preached acquires a different meaning,” said the social worker. “The peace narrative in the slums is a euphemism for veiled threats and subtle intimidation, coupled with scriptural menacing carefully selected by the quasi-messianic and self-styled pastors, who are just out to eke a living.”

Faced with the daily vicissitudes of slum life, the social worker told me, the peace message, when constantly drummed, can easily influence people who are constantly being reminded that “a demand for justice is tantamount to a demand for violence.” The implicit message being passed on is: between peace and “violence” what would you rather have?

I found this to be true when I spoke to a middle-aged father of three in Lakisama estate, which neighbours Mathare North, another low-income area in Nairobi. “What we want is peaceful elections – not violence.” Violence here is interpreted to mean disruption of the daily and natural order of life. “Elections will always be stolen. So long as they let us (voters) be, there’s no problem. In any case, leaders are chosen by God not man – that is what the Bible says.”

Thus, the peace narrative’s other purpose is the normalisation of electoral malpractices, which people should just “accept and move on.”

A more nuanced message that the peace narrative is not talking about – yet that is being hinted covertly – is the notion that a nation’s leader is picked by God. It does not matter whether the leader in question coerces, kills, maims, rigs or steals to remain in power. For the religionists and Christian Right, the end justifies the means. And that is why the peace narrative is largely being drummed by evangelicals – quasi “criminal” men and women – who themselves were “chosen” by God to preach to the people. These kind of pastors litter the slums, where they have converted semi-permanent iron sheets structures into Christ’s tabernacles.

A self-respecting mother of two from Kiamunyi estate in Nakuru told me that a country’s president is ordained by God. “The language of justice, which translates into violence and opposition politics, cannot be equated to the language of peace – which is all embracing and Godly. God is telling us to be peaceful and he is the one who will give us a president.” Nobody captured the contradictions of the Kenyan church better than my friend Fr. Carole Houle, an American Maryknoll priest and an anthropologist by training who is now resident in the United States. Before retiring, he was the Superior General of the Maryknoll Fathers in East and Central Africa. I got to know Fr. Houle after he came to Kenya from Tanzania, where his congregation had headed the Musoma diocese for close to 25 years, and where he had also forged close ties with the late Tanzanian president, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere.

“When I came to Kenya,” recalled Fr. Houle, “I found a Catholic church that was highly ethnicised. The priests coalesced around their ethnic identities and so did the laity.” Even in those early days of the 1990s, he could foresee that this was a recipe for disaster, especially for a fragile nation-state like Kenya. “Depending on the occasion, my Catholic friends and priests alike were Catholic first, Kenyan second, and their ethnic identities third.”

This would be the order of their identity priority when in the church precincts, but immediately after the parishioners stepped out of the church, the order would be re-organised. “They would assume their ethnicity identity as their first priority, they would be Catholics second and Kenyans third.” These identities, he observed, could shift effortlessly.

“Peace is an important ingredient of the electioneering process,” says Ombok, “but not at the expense of justice. Kenyans are a peaceful lot – it is an oxymoron to ask Kenyans to keep the peace. What Kenyans are demanding for is justice.”

Ombok has been working with Ghetto Radio to spread the message of peace during this electioneering period. His programme is supported by the International Republican Institute (IRI), which also supported peace caravans around Nairobi County in 2013. “Our peace messages are an exhortation to the youth – many of whom listen to Ghetto Radio – not to allow themselves to be (mis)used by politicians from across the political divide to cause mayhem in the campaign period.”

It is not only the church has that been struggling to peddle a peace message that Kenyans are interpreting as lullabies to lull them into “accept and move on” once more. A captain of the insurance industry who is also a member of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) recently told me, “All what KEPSA is doing – pretending to preach peace – is to hope the status quo can remain and to pray for the best.”

“But I will tell you this, the KEPSA leadership is living in a bubble,” said the insurance guru, who asked me to conceal his name so as not to antagonise his company and the KEPSA fraternity. “It is disingenuous for the KEPSA leadership to purport to preach peace instead of calling for credible elections.” The private sector, the captain confided, is undergoing its greatest test ever, “all because of the Jubilee coalition’s ineptitude and grand looting.”

“I think there is going to be violence,’ he predicted. “Nobody is buying this false narrative of peace and remaining calm.” He said his Asian colleagues were closing shop a week before the elections, travelling abroad, from where they will monitor the unfolding events. “If all turns out well, we will be back in business by 15 August,” his colleagues had told him. “As the country is being inundated with peace messages, drums of war are being beaten in certain sections of the country,” said a lawyer friend who has been doing litigation work in Eldoret. “I have been in the North Rift for the better part of July and I can tell you the voters there are being militarised as if being prepped for battle.”

The lawyer, whose clients include both Jubilee Party and NASA coalition candidates, said he had also been in Baringo County for two weeks and what he witnessed there left him with no doubt that the clarion calls for peace was a diversionary tactic of the Jubilee Party. “Songs of war, talk of defending our birthright, people being asked to protect their leaders – by all means, by any means necessary. This is what is happening in William Ruto’s key fanatical support zones,” said the lawyer.

Drinking copious mugs of tea in a Nairobi restaurant, the lawyer said he had an eerie feeling of the calm before a storm when he was up in Eldoret and Baringo County. “I was on my tenterhooks all the time I was in Kabartonjo and Kabarnet…the Kalenjins have sworn not to let power slip through their hands. I am not sure about anything anymore.” He said that when he was in Bomet and Kericho he felt more relaxed.

In spite of the peace messages ostensibly being broadcast all over Nairobi and central Kenya, many of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s fanatical supporters are speaking a different language: a combative language of not ceding ground. “If we are not going to have ‘peaceful’ (read going our way by hook or crook) elections, then let Uhuru unleash the military might on these people (these people being anybody opposed to the leadership of the Kikuyu hegemonists),” said an Uhuru supporter from Kiambu County.

In the opposition turfs, the peace messages are being interpreted to mean: this time around, we are not falling for your (President Uhuru’s) ruse – of accept and move on. “If President Uhuru tampers with the election results, we are not going to court, we will burn the country,” my ghetto friends from Huruma have vowed. “We are ready…for any possible eventuality.”

A couple of day ago, a gangland youth leader from Kariobangi North was addressing his gang members of about a hundred young men. “This time ni kufa kupona, Jakom anawahi uprezo na lazima tumwapishe.” (This time round, it will be a matter of life and death, the chairman – Raila Odinga – will win the presidency and we are going to swear him in). “Ounye anataka kumwaga amiero, lakini pia yeye ajua tuko chonjo.” (Uhuru is planning to unleash the army on us, but he should know even us we are prepared).

The gangland youth was congregating a stone’s throw away from the Holy Trinity Catholic Church. The peace narrative, it seems, may just turn out (this time around) to be just that: a once-upon-a- time narrative.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Christine Mungai

THE POPE THAT REFRESHES

There is something extremely refreshing about the leadership of Pope Francis. He is spontaneous, humble, simple, direct and at times deliberately undiplomatic. His incisive off-the-cuff comments together with his focused acts of kindness to prisoners and the homeless must make his handlers very uncomfortable, yet he touches the hearts and minds of just about everyone.

Francis offers his model of the Church in a clear and frank manner when he says, ‘I prefer a Church that is bruising, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security’ (Joy of the Gospel Article 49). He is in fact saying that he wants a church that is relevant in the real world rather than one that is locked up in the security and comfort of the sacristy. He wants engagement rather than caution and rejects the false security of outdated structures that prevent us from seeing the suffering in our midst.

The Pope is just reminding everyone what it means to be light and salt to the world (Mt 6) in the 21st century. However, one suspects that his style of leadership is not welcomed or appreciated by the vast majority of prelates around the world. He visited Kenya in November 2015 and spoke boldly in Kangemi about the dreadful injustice of urban exclusion and the wounds that are caused by ‘minorities who cling to power and wealth, who selfishly squander while a growing majority is forced to flee to abandoned, filthy and rundown peripheries.’ There are hundreds of Kangemis all over Kenya.

Francis’s brave words in the Kangemi slum made little or no impact on the civil and religious authorities. His advice and challenges had been forgotten before he got back to Rome. The city of Nairobi did not pursue an urban renewal plan and the Catholic Church did not pressurise them to respond appropriately either

His brave words, however, made little or no impact on the civil and religious authorities. His advice and challenges had been forgotten before he got back to Rome. The city of Nairobi did not pursue an urban renewal plan and the Catholic Church did not pressurise them to respond appropriately either. The chance was gone. The pastoral visit may have encouraged the faithful but did not bring the transformational change that Francis would have hoped for.

Kenya is regarded as one of the most corrupt and unequal societies on the planet and most accept that almost as a badge of honour without demonstrating any outrage or shame. The churches provide services to the victims of inequality but are generally silent on questioning a system that allows such injustices to emerge and develop. Churches are big on charity but weak on confronting the root causes of injustice.

The churches in Kenya are well established professional outfits; however, that same level of professionalism may limit their ability to confront the authorities. They are in fact regarded as part of the establishment and so are hesitant to demand an overhaul or even a review of the status quo. For a number of reasons, church and state are cosy partners in the management of this nation.

Regretfully, the same problems that haunt society in general are also found within the churches and that limits their ability to speak prophetically on the issues that bedevil citizens. Most churches have proved unable to confront the twin evils of ethnicity and corruption because they too are plagued with these problems. This may disappoint us but should not be surprising, as they are human institutions even if they claim to be divine in origin.

It is not unreasonable to expect churches to transcend their ethnic differences and to witness to something bigger than the morass that is found in the political sphere. Weak, generalised statements on matters of national importance indicate a lack of collegiality in their leadership

However, it is not unreasonable to expect churches to transcend their ethnic differences and to witness to something bigger than the morass that is found in the political sphere. Weak, generalised statements on matters of national importance indicate a lack of collegiality in the leadership of the churches. They demonstrate an absence of common ground for the common good on the issues that bedevil the nation.

GENERALISED, VAGUE STATEMENTS THAT ARE FORGOTTEN IN 24 HOURS

Again, there is a great reluctance by churches to identify and speak out on specific instances of theft of public funds. These are never named by the churches nor are the perpetrators challenged to resign and face prosecution. So we get generalised, vague statements that are forgotten in 24 hours. Despite the mega corruption scandals of the past three decades, the churches have not made any significant contribution towards confronting the rot even though they meet the victims of grand corruption on a daily basis in their congregations.

Corruption is rife in every sector of society and the churches too have issues of looting and accountability that they have not addressed in an open and transparent manner. Travel around the country and Christians of all denominations will relate horrific stories of theft of funds with the only penalty being the transfer of the offender to another area where most likely they will commit similar offences. Of course, religion is also a growth industry and a good business venture for those who failed in other spheres.

This is not to suggest that religious leaders as a whole are just as corrupt as the political class. However, their unwillingness to address internal issues of corruption when they do arise means that they lack the dependability and respect to speak consistently and with conviction when the public coffers are looted. Of course the political class are equally aware of religious leaders’ inconsistency so they know they are not a real threat to them and that that weakness can even be converted into a resource for the politicians at critical moments.

Many speak of a golden era when the church leadership spoke frequently, consistently and with a single voice on the issues of the day. That, of course, was during the Moi era when the injustices and abuses were more blatant and the state more belligerent

Politicians know that many church leaders have bank debts, skeletons in the cupboard and recurring expenditure needs in their jurisdiction. That is the reason they come for prayers together with a bevy of media and why their large contributions towards church fundraisers buy silence and support. Because overseas funding for church activities is drying up, many religious cannot resist the political handouts even when they have grave suspicions about the origin of these funds. But that is the trap and they lose their integrity even when they use the hand-outs for a legitimate cause.

Many speak of a golden era when the church leadership spoke frequently, consistently and with a single voice on the issues of the day. That, of course, was during the Moi era. Times were different then. The injustices and abuses were more blatant and the state more belligerent. When we recall the political assassinations, illegal detentions, torture chambers, rigged polls, a one-party state, a partisan judiciary and a mute legislature, we realise it took courage to speak as a group and with consistency. However, it was easy to find unity on those horrific crimes and injustices. The outrage and desire for change united the churches and pasted over the many differences that existed within their own ranks.

KIBAKI WINS, THE CLERGY LET DOWN THEIR GUARD

The churches relaxed and let down their guard when Mwai Kibaki came to power in 2002. They felt their job was done and they could return to their houses of worship and do what they were ordained to do. However, their job was only half done as the new Constitution was not in place and corruption and negative ethnicity – the twin legacy of the Moi era – were as rampant as ever, with cartels driving both vices.

Prophetic leadership not only demands that one transcend the issues that prevent development but that the majority are included in the new vision. A pro-poor agenda would unite Kenyans of all faiths and none

Since 2002, the churches have never quite recovered, nor found a voice again in the public arena. Partly, that was because the church leadership had passed on to new, inexperienced and occasionally authoritarian, ambitious hands that were quite comfortable with the way Kibaki led the country. A further reason was that the failure to implement the MOU between Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga divided many religious groupings along ethnic and political lines. Just as the politicians could not hold together, neither could the religious bodies and it has been well-nigh impossible to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

So what is the way forward, particularly around this election period? Of course, the churches will be active in civic education and election observation. However, such activities are often just side shows not impacting on the campaign agenda and lacking the strength and professionalism to give them a credible, independent standpoint if the presidential ballot is contested. So they may appear to be busy but their impact will be limited.

Perhaps a much greater role could be played by churches if they together with other faiths present a pro-poor agenda that impacts on the campaign debates. They can act to offer hope that the masses can receive a proper share of the nation’s wealth and in the process reduce poverty drastically

This, of course, would require a well-resourced think tank on social and economic affairs that offers solutions and programmes with regard to employment, taxation, investment, housing, land use etc. An urgent realistic agenda that would be binding on the political parties is required. In the process, issues of ethnicity and hate speech would be cast aside as politicians find themselves compelled to respond to an agenda that has been set outside their circles of influence. Of course such an attractive agenda would also reduce tension and assist in creating national dialogue around the matters that are of everyday concern to citizens.

There are several other issues that churches should address that would bring transformational change. Extrajudicial killings have become a hallmark of the current regime. Its elaborate propaganda machine has also won over public opinion on this subject. The message relayed is that suspects, criminals and terrorists deserve to die and that the rule of law does not apply to them. However, if Muslim and Christian leaders spoke on the right to life of all suspects they could force the security machinery to be accountable and law-abiding and thus enhance the safety of citizens.

The corruption agenda is another ever-present elephant in the room. Yet even if faiths cannot fight this malignant cancer alone, they have such large constituencies that they can at least confront the apathy that exists with regards to mega graft. They must enlighten their faithful on the destruction that corruption visits on the economy and public services and indeed the soul of the nation.

BYSTANDERS OFFERING MERCY WHEN CALAMITY OCCURS? So will the faiths be faithful to their mission and calling or will they be left sitting on the fence ready to host those displaced by a disputed election outcome? In other words, will they be proactive in giving leadership and setting the agenda or will they be bystanders offering mercy when calamity occurs? Time will tell.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.