Easter is a major holiday in Kenya, and although Kenya’s population is about 80% Christian, the holiday seems to have become as much secular as religious. Here’s a telling example: a newspaper story reported that a court had issued a ruling in the controversy over recognition of Moslem traditional courts as an option in family law matters. The court’s ruling reaffirmed that Kenya favors no religion over another and guarantees equality under law to all. This ruling, noted the newspaper writer without comment, “was handed down on the court’s last sitting before the Easter holiday.” Another sign of the strange ways religious holidays take cultural form is the full page of ads from bars and hotels in today’s Daily Nation announcing a busy weekend of bands and dance competitions on Good Friday and Saturday and Easter Sunday. Some of them add that the Good Friday party will last til dawn, with special beer prices as well as inflatable castles and children’s dance competitions. I suppose we should really go out and observe Kenyan holiday culture at its most exuberant, but I’m not sure we could handle the volume levels. Instead, we will see a performance tonight of a Good Friday/Easter drama that our next-door neighbor is directing at the Baptist church across the street and will celebrate the great paschal feast at the Anglican cathedral in town.
The Easter holiday for most schoolchildren began on Monday and runs until May, and the roads are clogged with traffic heading out of town, as we learned to our dismay yesterday when our 20-25 minute trip to the US Embassy took more than an hour each way. At home we used to find it difficult to cope with a one-week school holiday that didn’t coincide with Calvin’s spring break. A month-long school recess while university classes remain in session would be quite a challenge. Daystar has only a brief Easter recess (Friday and Monday).
I’ve been spending a lot of time with the faculty and students of Daystar’s graduate programs in Communications, which are among its most highly regarded programs. Last week I joined Levi Obonyo for coffee with his MA students and heard about their research projects, and then last night Faith Nguru invited me to be the guest speaker in the seminar she leads for ten students recently admitted to Daystar’s new Ph.D. in Communications. It’s an impressive group of students, especially for a newly created program: highly placed editors and administrators in print and broadcast media, Daystar instructors (in Communications and Community Development), the editor of a Christian magazine, an official of the education ministry responsible for curriculum development and technology use, and a veterinarian now working as a pastor and in media consulting are among them. Faith introduced me—far too generously—as an expert in Christian scholarship and in African philosophy, and then she asked me to describe my own educational journey and some features of American Ph.D. programs. We had a very interesting conversation on the ways in which African culture shapes contemporary life even in a highly urban setting. I kept protesting that, on questions of African culture, I was the least qualified person in the room, but Faith and her students ignored that and kept firing good questions at me, til I began firing them back.
It’s good to get acquainted with some of Daystar’s strongest students, who will surely have a significant impact on Kenyan society in the decades to come. Among my goals while I am here is to encourage Daystar to strengthen its core offerings in the liberal arts and to map out some ways in which this could be done, not just in philosophy but in other areas as well, since that is a real weakness of its programs right now. But interacting with the graduate students in a program like Communications reminds me that, even when the focus is primarily professional, an outstanding program will attract outstanding students.
My colleagues in Communication have been on my case for not having seen a bit of Kenyan television yet. We have a TV set, which at first got no signal at all even though it was connected by cable to a rooftop antenna. After Daystar maintenance staff poked around on the roof and made repairs, we were able just barely to discern some very grainy images on three channels, only one of which got audio. Yesterday a young man came over—dispatched by a colleague—to see what he could to do improve the situation, and we ended up splicing into our neighbor’s antenna cable, with his permission. Now we get six channels, some very clear and some less so: a Nation Group news channel, C-NBC (which looks like a CNN wannabe in content and style), “Citizen TV” with lots of community involvement and public affairs, al-Jazeera news, “Family Channel” with all the worst of American Christian TV, and an MTV-like youth entertainment channel.
So now we have TV available. Whether we will make time in our day to watch it (which we never do at home) remains to be seen.
What we do not have, alas, is reliable water. The mains water supply was just a trickle for more than a week, but then last weekend it seemed to have come back, with enough pressure to keep our attic tank full. Then over the past few days it got worse again: not only was the supply just a slow trickle, but the water that came through the pipes had so much sediment that when you collected a few inches in a pitcher it was burnt umber and nearly opaque.
Fortunately we have a big jug full of water we set aside for such occasions, but it’s now mostly gone. For a while today the water was clearer, but now it’s muddy again, and the pressure has hardly been above zero. The newspaper today mentions a strike by workers at Nairobi’s water utility, and perhaps that’s what’s behind our problems.
This doesn’t seem unusual to our Kenyan friends, however. The prevailing attitude seems to be: be thankful for electricity and water when you have it, and don’t get upset when you don’t.
