Varieties of worship in East Africa

Our friends and readers of our blog already know how much we have been uplifted and nourished on Sunday mornings in a variety of churches. And also, once in a while, very disturbed. Let me offer a montage in this posting, drawn from our recent experiences in Nairobi and from our travels in Ethiopia and Uganda.

Scene One. Let’s begin with yesterday’s service. Picture a very large stone nave patterned after an English Gothic cathedral, a choir dressed in crimson robes who open the Holy Communion service with an English Tudor introit setting, then move out of the choirstalls to sing an arrangement of an American African-American spiritual, the soprano soloist singing and dancing energetically while the choir sways and claps behind her. In the back row two figures stand out: a tall and slender black man of 60 or so who is the most enthusiastic handclapper in the choir and a stocky white-haired man of 70 or so, the only white member of the choir, who looks a little skeptical about the whole affair but is gamely giving it a go. All this accompanied by two choir members playing drums and – you would expect a piano but instead you hear an organ, a magnificent instrument that played a Bach prelude earlier, now lining out the melody and filling in a rhythmic backdrop for the singing.

Other elements of the service include a Gloria sung in Swahili, several fine hymns from Hymns Ancient and Modern (“Alleluia! Sing to Jesus” and “Come Down, O Love Divine” among them), and Scripture readings and sermon on the theme of the gift of the spirit at Pentecost. And there is a subtle balance between contemporary idiom and traditional content in the liturgy of the prayerbook of the Anglican Church of Kenya. All in all, an uplifting and inspiring service to end our five months in Kenya. We will miss All Saints’ Cathedral, even though we have attended only four or five times, choosing to visit lots of other churches as well.

I spoke with the white-haired man after the service: he greeted me and wondered whether we are living permanently in Nairobi, having noticed us in the congregation. “I have been singing in this choir for 43 years,” he said, watching its slow transformation from a white choir with a few black faces to an almost entirely African group. He served in the colonial and then the new Kenyan administration, he said, until he retired several years ago.

Scene Two: One week earlier on the church calendar was Ascension Sunday. We were traveling in northern Uganda with our friend David Burrell, a Holy Cross priest, retired from his work in the Theology and Philosophy departments at University of Notre Dame. We had booked a “chimpanzee tracking walk” for 9 am on Sunday, so we shifted our worship to Saturday evening. With David on the one chair in his small room at a German-run guest house in the town of Masindi, Susan and me sitting on the bed, we read the Psalms and Scripture lessons appointed for the day from his prayerbook, and David offered a homily, raising his voice when necessary to be heard over the cacophony of arriving guests in the hallway. He spoke about the ways in which Christ defies all our expectations and calls us to serve him in ways and in places that we might never have imagined. Then we joined him in the liturgy of the Mass, receiving the host from a saucer and drinking the wine from a small tumbler.

No choir, no vestments, no organ, no pews or altar—only three of us gathered together, sharing the meal of remembrance that binds all Christians together.

Scene Three: So many of my students are Pentecostals—one time at our Tuesday tea it was eight out of ten—that we decided to visit Nairobi Pentecostal Church on Valley Road, 15 minutes’ walk from our flat. We found ourselves in a huge sanctuary seating perhaps 2500, joining an opening medley of praise songs led by a well-rehearsed team of singers, guitarists, keyboard players, and drummers. The sermon was given by one of the pastors, lively and engaging in delivery but very strange in content. The message of the day (based on a reading from Ephesians, I think, but it isn’t listed in the bulletin) was that postmodernism is the great enemy of Christian faith, because it is essentially the same as atheism. There was much talk of the dangers of philosophy and the temptations of relativism. Among the phrases that I wrote down in my notes: “New Age philosophers bear no trace of the glory heat of heaven,” but “the Spirit can change even the hearts of stone of philosophers.”

We were surprised by the conventional structure and by its comparative brevity, just under 90 minutes. Not once was the congregation invited to engage in ecstatic prayer or testimony, something that is very common in a wide range of evangelical churches here and in Ghana. Nor was there any sign of the “prosperity gospel” message that Paul Gifford (in his recent book on the church in Kenya, which I am reviewing for Calvin Theological Journal) found to be pervasive in Pentecostal churches here. There really were no distinctively Pentecostal elements in the service, which was very much like services at Nairobi Baptist and Nairobi Chapel. But what caught us completely by surprise was the church’s campaign to defeat the proposed new Kenyan Constitution.

Many Kenyan church leaders oppose the constitution because of two provisions: the option of submitting family law matters to Moslem courts, carried over from the 1962 constitution, and the inclusion of an exception for maternal health in its anti-abortion clause, where current law (a British status from the 19^th century) allows abortion only to save the mother’s life. (See my forthcoming piece in Christian Century for a more extended comment on the debate.) These are being described, inaccurately, as anti-Christian and pro-abortion clauses. Nairobi Pentecostal’s “Operation Ezra,” we learned, has trained a thousand pastors and a thousand lay leaders to campaign against the constitution, because “our stance is that the Church of Christ in Kenya is saying No.” Allowing Moslem courts to continue to resolve marriage and divorce disputes will advance “the Muslim agenda” for taking control of Kenya, said the pastor. While Muslims raise large families and encourage their relatives to immigrate, “we are being encouraged to abort our Christian children. Do we want to be colonized yet again? We can see through this document! The time of separation is now. Stand up for Jesus!” (These are verbatim quotations, but there was probably other material between these statements.) The congregation applauded enthusiastically through most of this demagoguery.

I left my Bible in the pew at Nairobi Pentecostal by mistake. Rather than attend another service and try to retrieve it, we bought a new one.

Scene four: Sunday morning at another of Nairobi’s leading Protestant megachurches, Nairobi Chapel. When we attended in 2001 it met in a large joined-together shed in town, but the several hundred who attended were spilling out on all sides. Now that site, Mamlaka Hill Chapel, is one of five spinoff congregations, while the “mother church” meets under a huge tent complex along Ngong Road south of town.

Worship proceeded very much as at other large churches we have attended, with lots of singing and a well-drilled praise band. But after the opening song session it was announced that the ushers would fan out among the congregation—around 2000 under the huge tent and in adjoining areas—both to collect our offerings and to distribute communion elements. The pastor hurried through a very short communion service, and cubes of bread and little cups of grape juice were distributed and consumed. In more liturgical churches the Eucharist is the very heart of worship, but here it seems to be something you need to include from time to time as a supplement to the real worship, the singing and preaching.

The sermon by the senior pastor began with a string of amusing stories and witty comments, made passing reference to the Scripture passage that had been read, and moved on to practical matters of family and professional life. And he invited his two daughter and his dog—a Rottweiler—to come out on stage, illustrating some point or other about faithful living.

Many of our friends from Daystar and elsewhere attend “Chapel.” (After the service Njonjo and Katindi Mue, a leading human rights lawyer and an economic and political analyst who we had been trying to track down since we arrived, recognized us and sought us out.) I’m told the preaching is usually a bit more focused on Scripture, but always in the context of helping aspiring Kenyans cope with the challenges of career advancement and increasing prosperity. But we found the service skewed more toward entertainment than spiritual nurture, however. If we had had time to visit a few more times, we might have revised this impression.

Scene five. From Nairobi Chapel, cross Ngong Road, enter the Ngondo slum by way of a deeply rutted and often muddy track that runs between concrete block and corrugated iron house walls, then turn left on the muddy lane where women sitting outside tiny shops offer candy, vegetables, shoe repair, and mobile phone cards. Turn right down what looks more like a goat track than a road, and in 100 meters find a sign for Riruta United Methodist Church and Children of Africa Hope Mission. Pick your way through mud puddles to the ramshackle building. You are no more than a kilometer from Nairobi Chapel, but it might as well be a thousand.

We went to Ngondo Monday to visit the school—the “Hope Mission”—established and supported by our friends Rev. John Makokha and his wife Anne Baraza. In four rooms, none larger than 5 x 8 meters, seven classes of children aged 3 to 9 (or 10 or 11 or 12, since many have been out of school) perch on benches, or two to a chair, while volunteer teachers give them lessons in English, mathematics, Bible, and social studies. One room has 25 6 year olds sitting on plastic chairs facing in one direction, 20 4 year olds on benches facing in the other direction, while two teachers lead different lessons. The children are orphans, mostly because of AIDS, or “vulnerable children” whose parents cannot care for them. Enrollment was once as high as 250 but it stands now at 105, the maximum that they can accommodate in the current cramped facilities. Each child receives tea in the morning and lunch in the afternoon. For many it is the only meal of the day.

In this very room a few weeks ago we joined John and Anne and their congregation, mostly women from the surrounding slum with their young children at their feet or on their hips, for Sunday worship. The “praise team” here is just Anne, leading song after song in Swahili, dancing and swaying and shaking a tambourine. Women from the congregation take turns leading songs, too. When we agreed to come to the service John insisted that I must “bring the Word,” so I found the lectionary text for the day, a post-Resurrection appearance in the Gospel of John, and prepared a sermon, which John’s colleague pastor Peter translated into Swahili.

There were about twenty in attendance, crowded into one room because most of the building was flooded from recent rainstorms. The landlord, insisting that “rain comes from the sky, not from me,” refuses to make roof repairs or grade the muddy yard to make a dry space for children’s play. By Monday the interior was dry again, but the yard was a muddy mess.

John and Anne receive occasional contributions from donors in addition to support from the offerings on Sunday morning, which can’t amount to more than a few dollars a week. But God has called them to this ministry, and they carry on in a spirit of confidence and hope.

What is even more remarkable is that they have a third ministry besides the congregation and the school: John is Kenya coordinator for Other Sheep, an international organization working to overcome homophobia and make space in the church for GLBT Christians. Because of this affiliation, he has been effectively cut off by his diocese. His bishop even returned a $20,000 contribution designated for support of the school, fearing that conservative donors in the US would refuse to support other projects if he passed it along. The US office of Other Sheep provided support for their ministry for two years—all of $240 a month—but that has now stopped. Recently John and Anne, and their two daughters and one additional orphan whom they have taken in, had to sleep in the hallway for several nights until they raised enough money to pay overdue rent. (Renters’ rights don’t really exist here, unfortunately—there was no eviction order, just a new lock on the door.) We went right over and gave them the funds for the rent, and today we made another donation to support the school. We hope to mobilize some regular support among friends back home.

It’s hard to imagine living with so little, yet doing so much for people whom the rest of Kenyan society has essentially cast aside: AIDS orphans, mothers barely able to feel their children, gays and lesbians shunned by family and community. John told us once that God has helped him cast out many evil spirits in a village in Tanzania that invited him to lead several days’ revival services. (Far from supplementing his income, the trip cost him out of pocket because the village could pay only a portion of his travel expense.)

In that cockeyed shack, with a roof so low that I could stand up only on one side, singing along in Swahili as best we could, we felt a profound sense of coming together to give thanks and proclaim God’s goodness in our lives. It was one of the most memorable and most genuine worship experiences that we have had.

Scene six: Susan is working on an account of our Ethiopia trip, and I will include just a couple of sample scenes. It is just after sunset in the provincial town of Bahir Dar, at the southern end of Lake Tana where a dozen ancient monasteries occupy peninsulas and islands—our destination by boat on the following morning. Our guide, Kebede, a devout Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, has had dinner with us at our hotel and is heading to his accommodations across town. Ten minutes later he phones to say that the Feast of St. George is still being celebrated at the church just down the road, and perhaps we would like to walk over.

As we approach the church we hear a man’s voice singing over a loudspeaker in a style that we’ve learned to recognize. These “popular spiritual songs” borrow something from Western popular music, something from the sinuously intertwined melodies of the Middle East, something from the traditional liturgical chants that the Ethiopian church has used since the 7^th century. In contempory Amharic, not in the liturgical language (Ge’ez), they recount miracle stories from the Ethiopian holy books.

Gathered around the church’s front steps—mostly young men on one side, young women on the other, but with no strict separation—was a crowd of several hundred, many holding candles. In an open space a group of women in richly embroidered gowns beat on drums and perform a sort of circle dance. The singer is a priest standing just outside the closed door of the church. All the women gathered around wear filmy white veils over their heads. Women and men alike bow in prayer from time to time, then resume listening and watching. We feel as if we are a hundred meters and a thousand years distant from our hotel.

After half an hour the priest ceases singing and enters the church, but the people do not follow. Evidently the evening ceremony was outdoors only. A young man dismounts from his bicycle to greet us and ask us whether we understood the singing, and then he is joined by Kebede, who spotted us as the crowd dispersed.

Scene seven: Just a few days later, another thousand kilometers down the road on our tour of northern historic sites, we are beginning to tour the southern group of churches at Lalibela. As we near the door of one of them, a solo man’s voice rings out. We step inside and hear a dozen other male voices respond, and the pattern continues: solo and response, solo and response. There is no harmony, only a unison male chorus. And because we are standing in a church that was hewn out of the solid rock, the melodies bounce off every surface to envelop us in a sea of sound.

The language this time is Ge’ez, and our guide tells us that the men are singing Psalms and responses from a liturgy for morning prayer. King Lalibela built this church and ten more nearby in the early 13^th century. The men who worshipped there during his reign probably dressed very much like these men, in loose white robes, and sang like them as well. Indeed, their daily life may not have changed very much either. Ethiopia is much poorer, and agriculture much less mechanized, than anywhere else we have traveled in East Africa.

Everywhere else in Africa, Christianity arrived with the missionaries. Some of them accompanied the slave ships, while others came with fewer encumberments in the 19^th century. But here in Ethiopia, the church was established in the time of the apostles, and Christianity has been the dominant religion since the 4^th century. Eighty generations of Christian teaching and worship! It puts recent events like the East-West schism of 1054 and Luther’s 95 theses in 1517 into a new perspective.

Some rules for a successful stay in Africa

As we prepare to depart from Nairobi in a few days—and to return to Africa for five months in Accra, Ghana, beginning in early August—we are recording some of what we have learned, for the benefit of other visitors to this fascinating continent. Follow these guidelines and you will enhance your experience in many ways.

Rule 1: In any bureaucracy with which you have dealings (a university, a government office, a travel agency, a hotel or lodge), assume that nothing will happen as it is supposed to, or when it is supposed to. On those occasions when things do go according to plan, you will then be happily surprised.

Rule 1A: If your lodging has electricity and a connection to the mains water supply, do not assume that there will be electricity and running water at all times. Instead, be grateful when they are available.

Rule 2: If you are scheduled to meet with someone at 11 am, be sure to be ready by 2 pm.

Rule 2A: If you are scheduled to meet with someone at 11 am in order to give him or her money, be sure to be ready by 6:30 am on the previous day.

Explanation: for reasons that scientists have not yet been able to fathom, watches and clocks do not work reliably near the equator. They give the illusion that there are 24 equal hours in the day, but in fact some hours are shorter, others longer, following a corollary of general relativity theory: time intervals depend on whether you meet a relative or friend and on whether he or she has urgent matters to discuss. The best policy is to regard clocks and watches as wall decorations and jewelry but not to look at them very closely.

Rule 3: Maintain all the anticipatory and defensive habits that you have acquired in north Philadelpia / central Chicago / Los Angeles / Miami / Washington when walking and using public transit in urban areas; but discard all the anticipatory and defensive habits you have learned to apply to purportedly friendly strangers in US cities. They really are interested in talking to you, and their warmth and generosity is genuine, not pretended. You will not regret the time you spend in conversation, and you will learn as much from strangers you encounter on the streets as from any number of books you read about contemporary African society.

Rule 3A: But they will probably still ask you for money.

Rule 3B: Both rule 3 and rule 3A apply to police officers. Mostly 3A.

Rule 4: Prices quoted by vendors in tourist markets are a starting point for conversation. Contrary to appearances, they are usually not intended to be humorous. Guidelines offered confidently by drivers and guidebooks (e.g., to offer 10% or 25% or 50% of the initial price) are best ignored, because the initial price is a function with two variables: (a) the value of the object and (b) the estimated gullibility and perceived wealth of the inquirer. Proceed with this in mind, and you may eventually be able to diminish, but not eliminate, the effect of the second variable.

Rule 4A: Prices on menus in upmarket hotels are not intended to provoke laughter either, though that is their principal effect on long-term residents. Unfortunately the second variable mentioned above is predominant in this instance, and a counter offer (“380 shillings for a cup of tea? I will give you 50”) will not be received courteously. (This is the actual price, in May 2010, of a cup of tea at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Nairobi--more than $5 US.)

Rule 5: Traffic signals and markings are advisory, not obligatory.

Rule 6: Schedule two Sundays in each week, because there are so many churches to visit and each is uplifting and inspiring in its own way.

Rule 7: Arrange to stay as long as you can; and then stay twice as long. Many of your most valuable contacts will emerge in the last few weeks of your stay, and many of your most informative conversations will be cut off because you need to catch your plane home.

(Drafted on 7 April by David Hoekema, for reasons we won’t go into, and revised on 26 May; rule 2 was suggested by Mark Fackler.)

“And now Keziah will give a vote of thanks . . .”

That’s how the informal discussions we’ve been hosting each Tuesday afternoon at our flat have often ended. The “Philosophy Students’ Tea,” open to any philosophy student at Daystar and not just the 53 in my section, runs from 3:30 to 4:30, according to my poster. In reality, the first students once showed up as early as 3:30 (that was a shock—we weren’t ready), more often 15 or 20 minutes later, usually in small groups that meet on campus and arrive together. Others drop in after other commitments a half-hour or an hour later, and they usually stay till 5:30—any later and they would be traveling home in the dark, which is riskier and more costly. So far as I know we haven’t had participants from the other sections, but some guests interested in philosophy have accompanied their friends.

These discussions have been a highlight of my semester. Invariably the students come with a number of questions already formulated. Numbers have varied from 7 or 8 to 15. They shake my hand and Susan’s if we are standing near the door, then shake everyone else’s. But if we are already sitting, they often take a seat without any formal greeting—rather brash of them by Kenyan standards, but also a sign that they have come to feel at home here. No one takes a cup of tea or a glass of iced tea til invited, but then they help themselves and go back for more. No matter how few are present, two large plates of biscuits disappear rapidly, the men taking them by the fistful.

I still remember the three questions that began our very first session, months ago:

Student #1: “Sir, I received a zero in my first written essay because it was copied from the Internet, but is it true that I will have an opportunity to submit a fifth essay in order to make up for that one?” (This was indeed what I had announced.) I was stunned: I can’t imagine an American student ever owning up to being caught cheating in front of a group of other students, making no excuses, and simply asking for clarification of the penalty imposed.

Plagiarism in assigned essays has been a persistent and perplexing problem for me and for others at Daystar, I’m sorry to say. I’m doing some consulting with the Deputy Vice Chancellor, who gave faculty photocopies of relevant sections of my book, Campus Rules and Moral Community, as a basis for discussion. Its sources are complex: not just laziness but also pressure from parents to perform well, astronomical unemployment levels even for university graduates, and an academic culture in which exams containing rote repetition of dictated lectures often get top marks. (One interesting contrast: I don’t think I’ve ever confronted an American student about cheating without eliciting a string of elaborate explanations and excuses; but each time I’ve personally confronted one of my Kenyan students, he or she has responded either with respectful silence or with an apology.)

Student #2: “Professor, you said that philosophy should not be seen as an enemy of Christian faith but as a means to understand more fully what we believe. But isn’t Gnosticism an example of philosophy leading Christians into error?” I was equally surprised, for quite different reasons: this was a thoughtful and sophisticated response to our first few weeks’ discussion of ancient Greek and early Christian traditions.

Student #3: “Excuse me, but can you tell me your recipe for this iced tea? It’s so much better than the iced tea my mother makes at home.” Not quite what I was expecting either. In fact Susan had spotted a brand-new product on the Kenyan market, a Nestea powdered flavored tea that we find far too sweet but that evidently appeals to the Kenyan palate. Hot tea here is invariably served with hot milk, in the English fashion, and many of our Kenyan friends dump in several teaspoons of sugar as well.

In the first few weeks, many of the questions centered on theological and cultural issues. Homosexuality is much on the minds of my students—I never brought it up, but students had lots of questions. What most of them hear in church and from parents and other authorities is straightforward: this is a scourge on society that Christians must condemn and root out, and all homosexuals must forsake their wickedness and become heterosexual to escape God’s wrath. Students aren’t satisfied with this, however, and were very interested in hearing more about the range of positions taken by Christians in Europe and North America.

Evolution came up repeatedly too. Can a Christian affirm the evolution of new species without rubbishing the message of the Bible (in the vivid Kenyan phrase)? When I asked what they had been taught in their secondary school biology classes, nearly all said, “We never talked about evolution,” whether they had attended government or private Christian schools. (None of the students at that session had taken a biology course at Daystar, so I didn’t get a clear reading on how such matters are handled here.) We tried to press them gently: Doesn’t God work through natural processes, both now and in the past? Why are there several stories of creation in the Bible (in Genesis, the Psalms, the epistles), and what is each intended to tell us?

This would often get us into issues of Biblical hermeneutics. One week several students argued forcefully that, if you buy the secular notion that part of Isaiah is post-exilic, you are treating the Bible as nothing more than a human creation—one containing “prophecies” of events already past in order to trick the reader. Susan and I, and a few students as well, challenged them. Shouldn’t we use all the tools we have—historical and cultural and linguistic—to understand the Bible more fully? If both content and style suggest that some of the pastoral epistles attributed to Paul were written after his death, can they still speak God’s Word to us? (One of the books I brought with me to read and leave behind is Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament, and I had just read his overview of Pauline authorship issues.) The students who raised the issue yielded little ground but engaged in a lively debate.

On another occasion, one student arrived with a whole series of direct challenges to Christian belief, some of them adapted from our Hume and Nietzsche readings, and set them off one after another like firecrackers. The students were so quick to respond, and so eloquent in their testimony to the presence of God in their lives, that Susan and I sat back and listened in admiration. It was never clear whether the critic was speaking for himself or just trying out positions he did not affirm. What was abundantly clear is that, for most of these students, Christian faith is not a matter of superficial affirmation but the energizing core of their lives.

These discussions drew students out into territory that they haven’t been encouraged to explore, it appears. Most of them have grown up in something of a cultural and religious bubble. When I went around the room asking “where do you worship?” about four out of five named a Pentecostal fellowship; one was an Anglican, one a Presbyterian. One admitted, with some embarrassment, “It’s been quite a while since I went to church.” They all value the Christian environment at Daystar, but some chafe at its restrictions: a very strict drinking policy (first offense means suspension), little toleration of challenges by many lecturers, a dress code that imposes a few restrictions on men and lots of rules on women.

There were also interesting questions on other matters, from the practical to the abstract. Do you really have a hundred philosophy majors at your university? What jobs will they find when they graduate? Were all your philosophy teachers Christian? Did we hear you correctly when you said in class that Christian philosophers and Moslem philosophers used to study each other’s writings? How can there be Moslem philosophers—isn’t their religion just a strict set of rules? Do American students really own their own cars? Do you ever have post-election violence like Kenya’s in America? How do you keep from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero (Celsius)? Are there any African-Americans in Michigan? And so forth.

Most of my students are urban Kenyans whose daily lives are now rather distant from the villages of their grandparents. My only non-African student, a Korean, dropped the course early on. I know of a couple of Ugandans and Tanzanians, and one Sudanese refugee, and there may be a few more. There are a few American exchange students out at Athi River, but I’ve never seen any on the Nairobi campus.

One day as we prepared to discuss African philosophy I asked how many are fluent in their grandparents’ mother tongue. Only one hand in ten went up. Then I asked how many had lived for several years of their lives in a village without electricity or piped water, and the number was about the same. But one student asked, “Does it have to be several years continuously?” OK, I said: how many have lived in such a village for a month or more, on several different occasions? This time about one-third said yes.

I’ve heard comments from other visiting faculty that university students in Nairobi have an ambivalent attitude toward their roots. Life in the village was beautiful and harmonious and happy—for grandpa and grandma. But you’ll never find me living in such poverty and filth. There are cars in my future, not cows. I want a salary, not a shamba (a plot for crops). The wisdom and the ways of traditional Africa have nothing of value for me.

But my students didn’t conform to this pattern at all. I had asked them to identify philosophical ideas or insights from their African community that they had learned from family members or others in their assigned essays, then to compare notes in small groups during class and share what they learned. Each designated reporter spoke passionately about how much importance the members of the group place on central elements of their African heritage—its understanding of God, of morality, of fellowship with the ancestors, of initiation and marriage and elderhood, of how we should care for each other. Students who are Luo described their own customs, then those of classmates who are Kikuyu or Pokuot or Kalenjin or Kamba or Luhya. One reporter took a contrarian view: her group decided that African wisdom isn’t at all philosophical, she said, because there’s no tradition of dialogue and critique, only preservation of the past. Her group members agree that they have learned a great deal from their ethnic traditions, but they don’t want to call any of it philosophy.

From time to time a remark would spark a quick response. “Well, you see, the Kamba are rather promiscuous,” said one student, to which another responded immediately: “No, we are not promiscuous! But unlike other tribes we allow couples to live together and have children if they have their families’ permission, then pay the cows and hold the marriage ceremony later. That’s why people say we are promiscuous.”

I had told the students at the beginning of class that this week they would be my teachers, and as they spoke I made lists on the board of common themes, areas of difference, and links to philosophers we had studied. 
Soon I had a list of common elements that approximated the chapter headings of any number of books on traditional African thought. The dissenting group, on the other hand, spoke for some contemporary African philosophers (Paulin Houtondji, Kwasi Wiredu) who draw a sharp line between folk morality and philosophical reflection.

The links that students made to Western philosophers we had studied were often insightful. Some quoted proverbs that, they thought, echoed Hume’s advice to make judgments based on evidence and not on what others say. Others noted the parallel between Augustine’s observation that all human hearts long to know God and the universal African recognition of a supreme God. Several compared their traditions’ standard of morality—not a set of rules, but a sense for what is proper that requires both wisdom and long experience—to Aristotle’s account of practical reason and moral virtue.

After that class I was exhilarated, and I felt as if all my work in the class had borne fruit. I knew I was asking much more of students than they were expecting to do, demanding that they not just learn about philosophy but also think philosophically, but they rose to the challenge. (I won’t get into any details about the other Philosophy 111 sections here, but my students told me they could not believe how different they are from ours.) And the discussion at tea that afternoon offered more of the same, which Susan could enjoy along with me: perceptive and candid explorations of what it means to hold onto one’s African identity while facing new challenges.

From week to week I’ve seen the students becoming more enthusiastic about what they are learning, more active in raising questions and challenges in class, more eager to throw their questions into the afternoon discussions. At our first few “philosophy teas” there were some silences that I filled by asking students leading questions. At the last few, the students were talking constantly—over each other, sometimes, though they are usually very courteous to me and to each other. Often things got so lively that I had to ask students to slow down and speak one at a time.

I’ve learned so much about the challenges they face—the way that their lives, even if more sheltered in some ways than those of my Calvin students, are far more difficult in others. To begin with, nearly all of the students here in Nairobi (unlike those at the remote Athi River campus) live at home with their parents, and possibly grandparents and cousins as well. Travel to campus means catching a bus or matatu, perhaps several in succession, a journey that can take several hours each way. One always cheerful woman student, very faithful in attendance and insightful in her essays, lives on her own with her two young children. (She appears to be the same age as most other students, on either side of 20, but I don’t trust my age estimates very much here.) For each student who catches a bus from a well-appointed Nairobi flat, I suspect, another walks half an hour on a muddy track from a slum dwelling to the nearest tarred road where she can catch a matatu.

One student with a West African and a Kenyan parent told our very last afternoon group this week about her experiences after, at age 13, she moved with her family to escape a simmering civil war back home in West Africa, where her father had an important political appointment. One afternoon two years after the move, while she and her parents and siblings were in their car on Ngong Road (the road that runs past our flat), some men jumped out of a car that was following them and murdered her father in front of his family, settling some sort of political grievance from back home. Five years later, her oldest brother met the very same fate, also at midday, on a nearby road. The first murder, she said, was reported in the newspapers. But the second was never in the news, for fear that any announcement would simply trigger more killings in the civil war that is still being waged thousands of miles from its origin.

I wish I could somehow capture in words the irrepressibly warm and joyful spirit of the young woman who related this horrifying tale. From the start she’s been eager and engaged in class, responsive to others, and fascinated by the unfamiliar ideas we have discussed. And there are so many like her! By no means all, of course: of the 53 students currently enrolled, perhaps a quarter have done consistently mediocre work on essays and tests, and they sat mutely in class and dutifully taking notes when they weren’t slipping out to take (or make) a mobile phone call. They often arrived late, often left early, but always made sure they signed the attendance record (required by Daystar policy). These students are not putting much into the class and not getting much out of it. But unlike their American counterparts, they are invariably respectful and attentive, and if I meet them on the campus or after chapel they smile and extend a hand in greeting. (I’ve managed to learn most of my students’ names, which is a challenge, not only because of the large class but because most students have three or more names and use different ones in different circumstances. Not to mention that there are four Elizabeths and three Lawrences and two Keziahs.)

But the students at the other end of the Bell curve are a delight to teach and to interact with outside class. They evidently talk together in groups before coming to tea, often with questions they have divided up among themselves. And often, as our discussion comes to an end, it becomes clear that one of them has volunteered to give the “vote of thanks” mentioned in my heading. He or she will speak rather formally on behalf of all the students, thanking the professor and Mrs. Hoekema for the tea and biscuits, the conversation, and the hospitality. And then the same student, or another, sometimes volunteers to lead in a closing prayer.

I’ve come to love these students, and after giving my last lecture this week each remaining Tuesday will seem empty. I wish I could take ten or fifteen back with me to Calvin—what fun it would be to teach a 200-level course with half Kenyan and half American students enrolled! And many of them want to take another philosophy course, even though they cannot do so at Daystar. One of them had a solution to suggest: “Professor, you must come back next year and teach a different philosophy course! At the beginning of term I was very afraid of philosophy, and I thought this would be my worst class, but it has turned out to be my best, and I am sorry it is finished!”

On days like that, teaching philosophy is about the best job I can imagine having.

Daily Life in Nairobi

My email was hijacked yesterday and many of you got a scam email asking for money.  I’m sorry for the hassle it caused and also sorry because, while I have my email account back under my control and protected with a new password, I’ve lost all of my contact information.  Please write me if you’d like to get your email back in my system.  David and I are leaving for Mombasa tonight on the overnight bus, and I have sworn off the use of internet cafes (which is probably where the scammer got temporary access to my gmail account) so don’t worry if you don’t hear from me until next week.

Unlike short term visitors, we’ve had to create a daily life for ourselves. We cannot rely on a guesthouse to feed us and provide all of our needs while we focus on sights, travels, or work.  As we started our 5 months in Nairobi, much of my time was spent figuring out how to get groceries, cook, clean up, set up work spaces, and do laundry.  Now that we have less than 2 months remaining here, I find that daily life still takes up a lot of time.

Fortunately, the laundry and house cleaning part came easy.  With the help of a Daystar contact we hired a young woman who is an off-again-on-again student at Daystar.  She is currently trying to raise the money for more classes and could not find an office job.  Loretta is great—efficient, thorough, and lots of fun to have around.  She comes twice a week to wash our clothes by hand, mop the hard surface floors, polish the dark wood floor in the living room and dining room, dust, and clean the kitchen and bathrooms.  I make our lunch and we eat together.  Tiny Loretta puts away almost as much food as David and I between us, and at lunch she is eager to talk and share her thoughts.  At first we talked about food.  She told us that Kenyans consider a sandwich a very light lunch and was quite skeptical of soup.  But she has generally appreciated my cooking, spent quite a bit of time reading over the DeBruyn Family Cookbook that Mom mailed me when I discovered there were no cookbooks in the flat, and she has suggested that she should take cooking lessons from me. 

Recently, the main topic of our lunch conversations has been her idea for a small business she is starting as an event planner. She has been busy organizing her brother’s wedding and is planning to market her skills and experience (this is her third good-sized event) through her church and other networks.  We think she’ll be great at it.  It does not require a lot of capital to start—just a phone and a lot of good, reliable contacts.  And it is the sort of work that would allow her to finish school and graduate with marketable skills as well as a degree.  A persistent problem in Nairobi is that it is extremely difficult for young people to get jobs, even if they are college grads.

Setting up work spaces involved soliciting a desk from Daystar, buying a work table from a furniture maker on the side of Ngong Road, and then moving the desk and the table from room to room until we found the right set-up.  Determining factors included temperature, air flow, and access to internet, which comes to us via two long Ethernet cables running from the neighbor’s flat through our closest upstairs window.  The front bedroom that we thought at first would be best for the study turned out to get very hot every afternoon because it faced west and had no shade.  Moreover, it did not cool down very quickly in the evening.  Now it is serving as our indoor laundry room.  We moved the ironing board (which served as an inadequate excuse for a study table for a short time) from the small bedroom and strung a clothesline that we use when it is raining or when it is cloudy and the clothes hung outside still aren’t dry at nightfall. We moved the Ngong Road table into the small bedroom, which also faces west but is shaded by trees and it has become my study.  The beat-up Daystar desk moved from the front bedroom to our bedroom and then moved downstairs, where David has access to both the internet and the small stereo system we brought along.  A week after we moved the big, heavy desk downstairs, Daystar workers showed up with a much bigger brand new desk.  They were glad to see that the desk they were switching out was on the main floor and we were glad to have a desk that was a handsome addition to the livingroom instead of an eyesore.

We still do not have an easy routine for buying food.  There are four grocery stores within a couple of kilometers of our house.  One of them would give Meijer a run for its money.  But shopping for basics presents challenges.  The biggest grocery store, and the farthest walk, is the Nakumatt at Prestige Plaza on Ngong Road.  It has groceries, cosmetics and stationery on the first floor; appliances, paint, clothing, sports equipment, dry goods, household items, bikes and motorcycles on the second floor; and a huge furniture store on the third level.  But its stock of grocery items is not consistent.  After about a month of trying different brands, I found a plain yogurt that tasted good and was not full of additives.  Two weeks later, that yogurt disappeared from the shelves.  Nakumatt reportedly operates largely on a consignment basis.  It does not buy the stock on its shelves; it pays for items only if they are purchased by customers.  It is hard to imagine that policy extending all the way from motorcycles and sofas to containers of yogurt, but it would help explain the ever changing inventory.

Bonuses of a visit to Prestige Plaza are 1) good lunch place that sells Swahili specialties like whole fish in a coconut milk sauce, and 2) a small craft market on the weekends.  David had sandals custom made for his big feet from a vendor there.  Our favorite vendor is Mama Fatumah (above), who sells baskets and placemats on behalf of a women weavers’ cooperative.  Also, while the walk is long, it is pleasant for the most part because I can walk on a service road and then a path that has a fair amount of shade rather than right along busy Ngong Road.

The next best supermarket, Uchumi Hypermart, is on Ngong road a little closer to Daystar.  It has better prices than Nakumatt, better produce, and the best bakery for chapati and rock buns (like scones, but bigger and cheaper).  But I don’t shop there much since our credit card number was stolen from Uchumi about three weeks ago.  Uchumi prints the entire credit card number on the receipt and stores the receipt in its system, so any one of a number of employees could have lifted the number and created a fake credit card.  I checked the status of that card on the web the day that three transactions totaling over $2,000 in fraudulent charges were posted and reported it immediately.  It’s complicated getting such things sorted out across the ocean but our new cards arrived by mail this past week.

In between Nakumatt and Uchumi is an open air market that sells produce and shoes from rickety bamboo and scrap wood stalls.  I often walk all the way to Nakumatt to get some things only it carries, stop for greens at the open air market (10 shillings--$0.13 for a bunch picked that morning), and then stop at Uchumi for baked goods.

The supermarket at the Yaya Shopping Center has the best name—Chandarana.   It’s almost as far as Nakumatt and is much smaller, but I go there a lot because it is easy to catch a bus home and to stop at the closest shopping area, Hurlingham, if I don’t find everything I need at Chandarana.  As the name suggests, it’s strong on Indian food, but its stock moves fast and it is often out of some of the basics.  Last weekend, it was milk.  I got the second to the last carton of fresh milk and the bins that usually hold heaping piles of bagged milk were empty.   Bonuses of shopping at Yaya:  A great Indian-run fresh produce store, a bank machine that recognizes our ATM card, 3 coffee shops, and a good Indian lunch spot.

The Hurlingham shopping area is a series of small shops—butcher, hardware, at least 3 pharmacies, stationery and books, computer and phone services, housewares, Barclays Bank, barber, small grocery—and open air stands selling fruit, vegetables and flowers a 10 minute walk from our flat.  If this shopping area were located anywhere near our house in Ghana, where choices were limited even in the downtown stores, we would have thought it had everything we needed, and it probably does.  But we use it mainly for backup.  And for buying bouquets of 20 long-stemmed roses for a few dollars.

If any of these shopping centers had been near our house in Ghana in 2004 or 2005, we would have been thrilled.  Here our enthusiasm about the local shopping options is met with skepticism because they are among the older, less up-scale spots in Nairobi.  The US embassy and UN crowd and most wealthy Kenyans in Nairobi live north of the center, not southwest like we do, and have much fancier grocery stores and malls.  But I really like our location.  Not only do we have many choices within walking distance, it is also easy to catch a bus and get downtown.  


(I had hoped to put together a photo album of Nairobi scenes to go with this blog post, but here in Nairobi people are quite negative about having others take photos of buildings, streets, neighborhoods, etc.  A few weeks ago we read about an Iranian visitor detained by the police for taking pictures of a hotel.  This week we read that a gang of youth trashed a photo exhibition of scenes of post-election violence.  I decided to stop lurking around the neighborhood with a camera after being chastised by a guard at the church across the street from our house for taking pictures of the glorious flowering trees in the church parking lot.)