vehicle. Like most Kenyan drivers, he treated the road like an airport runway. Cecil and I were sometimes bombing it down a narrow, gravelly track near Kitui village with a steep embankment on one side. Every time I asked him to slow down he replied, ‘God cares for us.’ I did not share his confidence that God would necessarily keep us alive if we plunged over into the ravine.
Religion and church are so much more relevant to the people of Africa than Ireland. It provides them not just with hope, but also with practical support, education, health, and employment. The larger mainstream churches in Kenya—such as Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian—also act as the only honest brokers in a country where the people are rightly suspicious of government, profiteering charities, and some meddling international organisations.
As is typical in any Kenyan village, everybody walks to Mass at the mission house church, some for many kilometres, and they love socialising outside afterwards. The people, many of whom wear tattered clothes for much of the week, dress up in their best second-hand suits or in elegant bright dresses and hats. Masses are so jammed that children sit around the altar and crowds of people listen from outside the church, while looking in the windows. They possess the zeal of new converts. A Mass can turn into a disco of sorts: entire congregations singing loudly and dancing in the uninhibited African fashion. Every Mass is a celebration of music and colour. It lasts for hours, and is nothing like the sober monochrome Sunday mornings in Ireland. Catholicism has a more liturgical focus that is truly African. I always had to look twice each time I saw a black Madonna or a black Christ on the cross. The African priests are often men in their thirties; the African nuns so young I found many attractive! It is a vibrant, relevant Church in Africa, and growing rapidly.
Kitui is perhaps two-thirds nominally Christian at this stage—but almost 100% animist at the same time, at least to the extent that witchcraft appears to be pretty much universally believed in. It is in some respects like rural Ireland right up to the 1950s: Christianity co-existing with ‘pagan’ beliefs and superstitions regarding curses, charms, fairies and so on.
‘In Kitui, Brendan, to pass your own bad luck on to your neighbours, you singe your corn black, and spread it along the path for others to pick up on their feet,’ Mutinda told me. ‘They pick up your bad luck and walk away with it.’
In Donegal, I heard similar tales from older folk of tossing a ram skull backwards over one’s shoulder with a pitchfork into a neighbour’s field, or placing three hen eggs in the neighbour’s haystack, in order to pass on the bad luck. Of course, many Akamba deny witchcraft even exists, and a mzungu will only pick up hushed references to some of the practices.
Of the two-thirds nominally Christian, some people might be Pentecostal one month, Anglican the next, Catholic shortly thereafter. Some may set up their own church for a time and practice some witchcraft while they were doing all this—depend-ing on what school their child needs to go to, or simply for the sake of it. Christian zeal in Kenya was also responsible for my lack of sleep on many occasions. Fundamentalists used to roar over loudspeakers in Swahili until 2am opposite the Catholic mission house, where I sometimes stayed at the weekends. When I had finally nodded off, I would be woken up again at 4am by an evangelical call to prayer blaring over a megaphone—in imitation of the Muslims, presumably.
An old Irish priest (the same one who grabbed the boy for calling him British) once furiously left the mission house and pulled the plug out on their equipment to get some sleep. Fr. Frank had a different method. The preachers were roaring abuse and condemnation of Catholic beliefs in Swahili, backed by the obligatory passages from the bible. Fr. Frank calmly strolled over, and in
Religion and church are so much more relevant to the people of Africa than Ireland. It provides them not just with hope, but also with practical support, education, health, and employment. The larger mainstream churches in Kenya—such as Catholic, Anglican, and Presbyterian—also act as the only honest brokers in a country where the people are rightly suspicious of government, profiteering charities, and some meddling international organisations.
As is typical in any Kenyan village, everybody walks to Mass at the mission house church, some for many kilometres, and they love socialising outside afterwards. The people, many of whom wear tattered clothes for much of the week, dress up in their best second-hand suits or in elegant bright dresses and hats. Masses are so jammed that children sit around the altar and crowds of people listen from outside the church, while looking in the windows. They possess the zeal of new converts. A Mass can turn into a disco of sorts: entire congregations singing loudly and dancing in the uninhibited African fashion. Every Mass is a celebration of music and colour. It lasts for hours, and is nothing like the sober monochrome Sunday mornings in Ireland. Catholicism has a more liturgical focus that is truly African. I always had to look twice each time I saw a black Madonna or a black Christ on the cross. The African priests are often men in their thirties; the African nuns so young I found many attractive! It is a vibrant, relevant Church in Africa, and growing rapidly.
Kitui is perhaps two-thirds nominally Christian at this stage—but almost 100% animist at the same time, at least to the extent that witchcraft appears to be pretty much universally believed in. It is in some respects like rural Ireland right up to the 1950s: Christianity co-existing with ‘pagan’ beliefs and superstitions regarding curses, charms, fairies and so on.
‘In Kitui, Brendan, to pass your own bad luck on to your neighbours, you singe your corn black, and spread it along the path for others to pick up on their feet,’ Mutinda told me. ‘They pick up your bad luck and walk away with it.’
In Donegal, I heard similar tales from older folk of tossing a ram skull backwards over one’s shoulder with a pitchfork into a neighbour’s field, or placing three hen eggs in the neighbour’s haystack, in order to pass on the bad luck. Of course, many Akamba deny witchcraft even exists, and a mzungu will only pick up hushed references to some of the practices.
Of the two-thirds nominally Christian, some people might be Pentecostal one month, Anglican the next, Catholic shortly thereafter. Some may set up their own church for a time and practice some witchcraft while they were doing all this—depend-ing on what school their child needs to go to, or simply for the sake of it. Christian zeal in Kenya was also responsible for my lack of sleep on many occasions. Fundamentalists used to roar over loudspeakers in Swahili until 2am opposite the Catholic mission house, where I sometimes stayed at the weekends. When I had finally nodded off, I would be woken up again at 4am by an evangelical call to prayer blaring over a megaphone—in imitation of the Muslims, presumably.
An old Irish priest (the same one who grabbed the boy for calling him British) once furiously left the mission house and pulled the plug out on their equipment to get some sleep. Fr. Frank had a different method. The preachers were roaring abuse and condemnation of Catholic beliefs in Swahili, backed by the obligatory passages from the bible. Fr. Frank calmly strolled over, and in
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