My Kenyan friends confronted escalating violence, crime, corruption, and poverty- and yet did not despair. I wanted to find out why.
Our 13-year-old daughter was born in Africa, but before last summer she had no memories of that continent, since we left when she was one year old. My wife and I remembered blue skies and rampant bougainvillea, warm-hearted friends, and fascinating intercultural experiences. We wanted our daughter and our two sons to share such memories, so we thought about an extended visit back.
Yet we had fears. For the 12 years we had been gone, Africa had gone from bad to worse. Kenyan friends had written terrible news. Some had been imprisoned on political charges. Some had been beaten and robbed, their lives threatened. All had witnessed a violent coup attempt and had participated in an election characterized by tribal divisions and fraud. One friend’s boss, a cabinet minister, was savagely murdered by political opponents. Another friend had witnessed his boss, an Anglican bishop, killed in a traffic accident that most people believe was arranged. A third friend had nearly died in prison, where he was held in solitary confinement on political charges.
I suppose most Americans barely notice the few African items that make the newspaper, but I follow them closely. They portray a place of war, savagery, disease, poverty, and corrupt government. Kenya is very much affected.
War.
Kenya borders on Sudan, which has had unceasing civil war for 20 years; on Somalia, with its murderous clans; on Ethiopia, where rebel armies recently overthrew a repressive Marxist government and split the country; on Uganda, where Idi Amin and Milton Obote slaughtered thousands of tribal opponents before the present, more benign government took power. Of Kenya’s immediate neighbors, only poverty-stricken Tanzania, to the south, has been free from internal war. Kenya is just a skip and a jump from murderous Rwanda and Burundi.
No one in Kenya says, “It can’t happen here.” The last several years the government has (depending on who you believe) at best permitted, and at worst instigated, ethnic cleansing in the Great Rift Valley. Thousands of Kenyans have been driven from their farms. Many have died—no one can say how many, because the government has made the area off—limits to observers. Those cast out now live in refugee camps, while their lands lie fallow. Since many of the victims are from Kenya’s largest and most influential tribe, the Kikuyu, the potential for more violence is great.
Disease.
AIDS is rampant in Kenya. Blood screening and disposable needles are not used universally or effectively, so everyone is at risk. At the same time, historic killers like malaria and sleeping sickness have come back with a vengeance, having acquired resistance to the medicines that target them.
Poverty.
Economically, Africa has gone wrong in every way conceivable. World Bank projections suggest that, even if African economies were to grow as well as hoped, it would take an entire generation to gain the level they enjoyed 20 years ago.
In Kenya, the economy has been stagnant while the population has been booming. Theft has become common, as the poor swarm out of their growing slums, and the well-off (meaning anyone who has a home, a car, even a stereo) protect their property with a small army of hired guards, with security alarms, walls, and barred windows. Women are warned never to wear jewelry in public places. (My wife, forgetting the admonitions, had an earring snatched off on Nairobi’s main boulevard.) You cannot insure your car, I was told, unless it has at least two security systems protecting it.
Corrupt government.
Perhaps the most fundamentally discouraging aspect of African life is its near-complete political failure. There are 52 countries in Africa. Not one of them has a government anyone could admire. (South Africa is a new and hopeful exception, but it is far too soon to know how this will turn out.) Most African nations are run by dictatorial, greedy rulers who know best how to steal money (sometimes directly, sometimes by taking bribes, sometimes by granting themselves or their family members special economic privileges) and how to torture and imprison opponents.
In 1992, under extreme pressure from donors (whose aid props up the Kenyan government), President Daniel arap Moi grudgingly allowed the first multiparty elections since Kenya’s independence. Many of my friends were involved in trying to bring a new government to power. They began with high hopes, but their attempts failed, mainly because they splintered along ethnic lines. Tribal loyalties—there are about 60 different languages in Kenya—have become the only reliable political force.
Thinking of taking my children into such an environment made me nervous. I knew, of course, that day-to-day realities could never be as bad as the headlines, but still … We could have rented a cabin at a lake. Or we could have gone to Europe, to let our children see the glories of French cathedrals and taste the glories of Italian pasta.
The fact is, Kenya meant something more to us than such places. What it meant was bound up in the very factors that made me nervous. In Kenya, when we lived there, we had learned that life does not consist in an abundance of possessions, that God’s glory can be demonstrated without flawless managerial skill, that people are splendid and brimful of personality under very awkward circumstances. We had found something surprising in the Kenyan air: a sense of humor. I wanted my children to know something about that liveliness and humor. I wanted, myself, to learn about it again if it was still there.
We flew into Nairobi on a chilly June evening. (Yes, chilly—Nairobi is at 5,000 feet, and our summer is their cool season.) We were met at the airport by a number of friends who took us to the Anglican guest house for the night. The next morning we got up to walk to church. The pastor, a dear friend named John Gichinga, invited us home to lunch.
We talked about the realities of Kenyan politics and the way in which it had adversely affected his church. (Divisions over his church’s role in the election had severely strained unity.) We talked about the problems of daily life in a Nairobi that is crowded, dirty, and undermaintained.
John and his wife, Emi, had recently returned from two years of study in America. They spoke candidly about their difficulties in readjusting to a place where garbage is never collected, where bribes are often expected, where road repair is so hopeless that unemployed volunteers have taken to the streets, chipping rocks to fill potholes while hoping for tips to be flung from the windows of passing cars. My friends had gone from shopping at an Eagle supermarket, with its thousands of bright choices, to shopping in an open-air market where staples like flour were sometimes unavailable and often out of reach for ordinary citizens. As we talked, all the troubles I had read about—poverty, corruption, tribalism—were illuminated.
Yet it was obvious that such troubles did not determine their lives nearly so much as some other realities. John’s life was formed more by his family and his church. While both family and church offered struggles and worries (familiar to any pastor and any parent), both also had great satisfactions, which I could read in the glow on his face as he spoke of them.
John’s wife, Emi, leads a crisis-pregnancy center. When she spoke of the broad problems of society, which her work engaged intensely, she painted a very bleak picture. Yet it was hard to keep her conversation squarely on these; she was far more engaged in talking about the individuals who came to the center. These were often desperate, and helping them was extremely chancy. But she loved them.
John and Emi were intimately aware of the terrible problems I read about in newspapers. They lived with them every day. Yet the possibility of despair did not seem, really, to have occurred to them.
What gives you hope?” I asked a great variety of people I met during six weeks in Kenya. The conversations proved to be persistently like my talk with John and Emi. People were intrigued by the question. They would recognize its relevance immediately. They would smile and puzzle over it. But clearly, they had not pondered it before, and they did not have a clear answer.
It was obvious that they were not hopeless. They saw their situation clearly and realistically, but they were not engulfed in gloom.
Most of my friends are Christians, who would say that their ultimate hope is in God. Even if nothing in their circumstances ever turned for the better, they would believe that God will triumph over evil and bring in his kingdom. Ultimately, hope means just that to a Christian: Jesus Christ has conquered evil and death through the Cross.
But I was asking about a more proximate hope. Here and now, every day, what enables you to care about politics, when by all the evidence the system is crooked? What makes you invest such care in helping your children with their homework, when the odds of getting a decent job will be stacked against them? How do you keep working in a government office (a school, a hospital) when nothing seems likely to get better? Such daily hopes are no doubt linked to one’s eschatology, but not directly. God’s kingdom will come regardless of how your children do in school, or which government is elected, or whether the garbage is ever picked up.
One of my friends, Haron Wachira, is a particularly buoyant personality, always seeing the bright side. He had put a great deal of effort into the 1992 election, working as an aide for the candidate who came in second. He told me that just before the election he had begun to believe, incredibly, that they would actually win. But then his hopes all unraveled.
For the present, Wachira has given up on politics. He believes the government is too entrenched and too dishonest ever to surrender power. He has lost hope for political change. (So have many of my friends.) Yet the habit of hoping persists. He has transferred his hopes to the economic sector, starting a computer business, and he is full of hope that the economic climate is changing for the better. One could argue about that. I have the sense that Wachira would hope in some thing, no matter what. Hope is his habit.
Another friend, Kimani wa Nyoike, is a veteran politician. He is the friend who nearly died in prison while he was in solitary confinement and inadequately treated for malaria. He believes the government let him out because they did not want him to die on their hands.
His imprisonment was meant, I think, as a warning to him: get out of politics and stay out. Nevertheless, when I visited him on his farm near Nairobi, he was planning to run for president. I asked about the danger to his life, and he did not deny that it was real, especially if he enjoyed any degree of success. Yet his hopes were irrepressible.
Other Kenyan friends had told me Kenya could never overcome its tribal divisions—a necessity if the government is to change. But Kimani was resolutely optimistic. “We can’t stop hoping,” he said.
I cannot imagine circumstances in which Kimani would stop pursuing his deepest instinct to rally people to himself and to a cause. Politics is his calling. To follow his calling he has to hope.
Jean Lorenz is a Roman Catholic nun. Though well past retirement age, she stays on in Kenya visiting the national mental hospital. This is surely the most hopeless institution I have ever encountered: hundreds of psychotic men and women warehoused in old barracks-like buildings, lacking not only such amenities as drugs, but even basics like food and soap. Before our visit we had sent Sister Jean $50, hoping she would spend it on herself. She gleefully reported that she had gone out and purchased a huge cooking pot so that the mental hospital would be able to cook the corn mush that is often the only food provided the patients. Without that $50 pot, they might have gone hungry.
There is really no prospect of the mental hospital improving, nor is there any real prospect of its patients, malnourished and untreated, getting better. Jean admits that she finds it difficult sometimes to enter the hospital compound, it is so dreary and desperate. When the rains come, the grounds become a sea of mud, and there is no soap with which to wash nor are there enough blankets to shield patients from the cold. Nothing can be more miserable than a mentally ill person who is hungry and cold, and utterly helpless in the face of it. Yet among hundreds of such people, Jean carries on with great kindness, visiting, cheering, helping where she can. This cannot be because she hopes to make things better, really. It is nothing as calculated as that. It can only be love.
Hope, it seems, is not based on an assessment of material conditions. It is, in fact, deeply personal, fundamentally spiritual, and not really dependent on circumstance at all. Life comes in a checkered pattern; hope is the faculty that works to expand the brighter side.
I do not think Kenyans have some special quality of hope. I suspect that we Americans would, under conditions like Kenya’s, behave in much the same way that Kenyans do.
I read recently Russell Baker’s memoir, Growing Up. He poignantly describes life during the Depression, his father dying when Baker was eight, his mother unable to find work. She had to give up one child; a brother took her and Russell into his small apartment. At one point, Russell’s mother hoped to escape poverty through marriage to a happy-go-lucky Norwegian baker named Olaf. In fractured but colorful English, Olaf wrote her a series of love letters as he looked for work all over America. In the letters, you can hear Olaf’s persistent cheer slowly erode into despair, until he writes to cut off contact. He gave up. He went back to Norway, leaving the woman he had hoped to marry.
They were desperate times. Yet the people Baker describes were hardly hopeless. Olaf, who lost hope, was the exception. Baker’s people were variously full of gumption, determination, conversation, and stories, full of love, often enough, for each other. They are, in short, much like the Kenyans I know in their many ways of hoping.
I have had to question, though, why the faculty of hope seems so little present in American public life today. It was disorienting to leave Africa and return to America where people seem relentlessly bitter and complaining about a government that would be the dream of any African, about an economy that would be the dream of any African, about a justice system that would be the dream of any African, about a medical system that would be the dream of any African.
Americans today seem disheartened. Abortion, teenage pregnancy, government regulation, inner-city chaos, AIDS, crime, racial hatred, failing schools, pornography, broken families, enfranchised antireligious prejudices-we have a long list of troubles. It is not merely that we have leisure time to think and formulate complaints; the Africans I talked with are educated men and women who have time, too. But they have a different spirit.
I would not want to overdraw the contrast, portraying Africans as ideal exemplars of hope. There is plenty in African life not to admire, plenty of ingratitude and complaining.
Also, Americans remain hopeful people, by and large, over our children, our jobs, our churches. It is in our public life that we seem most discouraged. Perhaps we have good reason: the “naked public square” of the modern secularist era leaves few ideals to hope in.
If we are to rekindle hope, however, we will need more than righteous anger. Human anger, as James reminds us, “does not bring about the righteous life that God desires” (James 1:20). Love does.
I have a friend, Samuel Mwaria, who lives on the slopes of Mount Kenya. After a long career as teacher and secondary-school headmaster, he became a hospital administrator, working to revive the almost-defunct Tumutumu Presbyterian Hospital. We went to visit him in the house he had built just outside the town of Nyeri.
I asked him about hope. He smiled knowingly, looked thoughtful, chuckled, and did not really answer me. He took me on a tour of Nyeri town, describing how, as a youth, he had been arrested for lacking proper papers (the area was designated for whites only; Africans could enter only if they had a pass). He told me about his trial, his fear of being flogged, and his relief at being released by a surprisingly forgiving court. I asked his memories of Independence Day, and he described the extraordinary happiness and hope of that day in 1963 when black Kenyans finally, after years of battle against the British, won control of their own country.
I thought, what a lot of disappointment he has had. Surely the Kenya he imagined that day has not come to fruition, and no one can say when and whether it will. The kind of disfranchisement that made the Kikuyu (his tribe) fight the British goes on today, now black against black rather than white against black.
Yet he did not seem to taste the ashes. Sam told me about the nightly prayer meetings held in his home during the elections, prayers that peace would somehow be preserved. It was prayer, he thought, that had prevented civil war. With quiet excitement he showed me a plan for a community center to be based in his church; as a very active layman, he is heading it up. We walked through the Nyeri market. “You can see there is no shortage of food,” he said with genuine excitement (such as I never feel in my neighborhood Safeway), exulting in the profusion of corn and peas and beans set in baskets for buyers to see.
He is most certainly a man of hope, and I thought the reason obvious when I considered it later: he is a man of love. He is in love with, and fiercely loyal to, his family, his church, his community, his nation.
Love such as Samuel Mwaria displays, or even as a mother shows for a child, cannot be commanded. It is a gift from God; it comes to us unbidden from his loving heart. Those who love become hopeful in the highest and most unselfish way, but who can teach us how to love? Only God. Hopeful people will be those who absorb his heart in their prayers, in their reading of Scripture, in their fellowship with his family, in their taking of the sacraments.
Perhaps it is here that Christians have most to offer in American public life. I doubt we are the most penetrating social analysts on the scene. Where we are most distinctive (or ought to be) is in our ability to love. God grant us love for our enemies, love for our country, love for the poor, love for the ignorant. This, far better than anger, will sustain our hope.
I was glad, in the end, that I took my children to Kenya (and glad I went myself). They saw poverty and beggars such as they will never see in America. They breathed the fumes of garbage burning on the streets around our home, day after day. They rode in buses so crowded you could probably not fall down if you tried. They ate chapatis and irio, snorkeled in the Indian Ocean, watched elephants move freely across a vast rolling savannah. But as their world expanded, I think it also shrank. Of all the sights, they saw none more significant than the one most prosaic: ordinary people serving in love. Love is what gives us hope, here and there. Love is the most transportable of all powers.
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