Evangelizing gone awry: the church in Kenya has fostered the tribalism it now deplores

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In early 1985, with the oil of ordination barely dry on my hands, I arrived in Kenya's Ngong diocese to serve as a missionary among the nomadic Maasai. I was quickly introduced to the "Maasai Apostolate," the ministerial priority of reaching out to these unevangelized pastoralists while affording the Catholic members of other ethnic communities who had migrated into the area the pastoral crumbs that fell from this table.

I witnessed efforts at inculturation, which, for example, saw the abandonment of white altar linen (white being the color the Maasai associate with death) in favor of black drapes that were intended to be redolent of the sacred Maasai color: the hue of thunderclouds. The thunderclouds brought the rain that caused the grass to spring up and upon which the Maasai's cattle grazed. The cattle provided the Maasai food, wealth and prestige. Black was the color the Maasai were understood to associate with their god, E'Ngai.

Bead-encrusted liturgical vestments served as a badge of honor and conferred status. The wearer was understood to be exempt from the daily drudge of pastoral care to the non-Maasai Catholic community and committed, instead, to the rarefied task of planting a Maasai church. The Bible and liturgical texts were being translated into Maasai; hymns composed that respected Maasai musical sensibilities; development projects initiated for the exclusive benefit of the Maasai.

Twenty-two years later, Kenya erupts into bloodshed after an election that is widely considered to have been fundamentally flawed. Ethnic violence spills onto the streets of Nairobi and other towns and cities across the country. Church leaders wring their hands and pastoral letters are hurriedly written condemning the violence and calling for peace. But how far have the pastoral policies of the church in Kenya, the legacy of the missionary enterprise and the interference of Rome contributed to the current crisis?

In his book Africa: A Biography of a Continent, John Reader posits that "tribalism is the most pernicious of the traditions which the colonial period bequeathed to Africa." Tribalism has a distinctly African flavor (the conflagration in the Balkans was never expressed in terms of a "tribal" conflict, nor that between the Israelis and the Palestinians) and was used by the colonial authorities as part of their divide-and-rule policy. Previously, boundaries had been porous, and languages and identities shaded into one another. The new narrative saw communities such as the Maasai and Kikuyu, which had a long history of trade, intermarriage and shared social and religious practice, fictionalized in the colonial discourse as sworn enemies.

Subsequent colonial administrations acquiesced in this construct, identifying clearly demarcated and discrete boundaries between various ethnic communities even if the situation on the ground did not warrant such a concise definition or was more fluid than the line on a map would suggest. In his book Swahili Origins: Swahili Culture and the Shungwaya Phenomenon, James Der Vere Allen points out that the British administrators "liked their Africans to be racially 'pure'" and the construction of "native reserves" facilitated such a conceit. However, as Daniel Stiles makes clear in his article "The Past and Present of Hunter-Gatherers in Kenya" in the journal Kenya Past and Present.

   There is no such thing as a "pure" tribe.
   Except for the most recent immigrants, it is safe
   to say that all tribes in Kenya contain a mixture
   of Bantu, Kalenjin, Eastern Nilotic and Eastern
   Cushitic elements, with a small amount of
   Southern Cushitic and Hadzan thrown in.

One of the consequences of independence in many African countries was the effort on the part of the newly installed government to try to instill a sense of national identity in the face of the "tribal" motif advanced by the colonial authorities. In countries crying out for money to be spent on the better provision of health care and education, vast sums were earmarked annually to celebrate Independence Day and other national commemorations in the hope of forging an identity that transcended the tribal appellations designated during European rule. However, although the church interpreted independence as a need for white missionaries to assume a somewhat lower profile and consequently elevated a few black persons to the ranks of the ecclesial hierarchy, for the most part it was business as usual and the church experienced great numerical growth within the tribal mindset.

Indeed, it is true to say that the church had taken "tribal" identities to heart. (Alfons Eppink's otherwise excellent piece, "Kenya's Great Rift" in the Jan. 12 issue of The Tablet, is still couched in the language of "tribalism.") Missionaries were appointed to a given tribe, and with them they frequently worked for years, learning the local tongue and often being the first to commit the languages to paper, writing the histories of the local communities, introducing a regional flavor into their religious practice.