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Born-again
sustainability |
Posted By Binyavanga
Wainaina
I am not a practising Christian or a
right-winger. But I’m not an ostrich
either, and that is the subject of
this column.
As the hordes of the World Social
Forum gathered in Nairobi to “end
poverty” and build “another
world”, two well-known
televangelists announced their plans
to run for president, prompting much
screaming in the local media.
When I got back to Kenya from Cape
Town in 2000, things in my hometown,
Nakuru, were very bad. The
hard-working meritocratic middle class
was finished. The working class was
broken. The informal sector was
booming and busting. The politically
connected were billionaires.
Those former headmasters and nurses
who got their children out of the
country came discreetly every week to
collect $50 from Western Union to buy
food. Interest rates had hit the mid
30s, and many hard-working small
business-owners had lost everything to
the banks.
A woman my family knew well had lost
her home and her business -- the first
black-owned supermarket in Nakuru --
which she had run for more than 20
years. She had lost the ability to
speak and communicated in hand
signals. She was a beautiful woman,
had never married, and lived what she
now saw as a decadent life. Now, she
spent her days fellowshipping in an
empty shop.
One day, driving down to town, I saw a
familiar figure. A woman I had known
since childhood was limping down the
road towards town, carrying a very
large bag on her back. She and her
husband owned a large Bata franchise,
which supplied school shoes to
thousands of kids, including me, in
the 1970s. I stopped to pick her up. I
noticed that one side of her face had
collapsed. She sat in the car and
updated me: her son had disappeared
while in Israel; her husband had left
her for a young woman; she had a
stroke. She lost all her money. She
had found God. She was born again!
Later I found a giant new suburb just
outside my hometown, built by primary
school teachers, some of the
worst-paid people in Kenya. They had
built a beautiful safe place -- small
brick homes, a cow for each home,
churches and safety. All of them Born
Again. They had their own bank and
sent their children to shiny new
“academies” that guaranteed God,
moral fibre and straight “A”s at
less than R2 000 a term.
All this was happening while Kenya was
slowly tearing itself apart: the
economy in freefall, ethnic clashes
looming and capital bailing out.
Safe civil space huddled around the
ecstatic churches. You could build a
network of people to live next to, to
invest with, to play with your
children -- as the venomous state made
it impossible for you to find safe
ground anywhere. There was no written
contract to trust, no government plan,
institution or programme that was not
gaseous; there was no ambition you
could manuacture that came with
step-ladder possibilities for the
future.
You needed two things: a belief in
possibilities that was intense enough
to make the chaos bearable and a
mechanism to allow you to trust and
build a community you could trust. And
who better to trust than somebody who
has shared ecstasy with you? This is a
thing you know how to measure.
And you start to build a “civil
society”.
The Bible has been translated into 680
African languages. Three million
copies are distributed in the
continent very year. Though many
people talk of “African culture”,
the truth is that the Bible has been a
widely used source of ethical and
practical guidance and cultural
reference in Africa since the turn of
the century. The safe civil structures
in cities like Kinshasa and Lagos now
revolve around the “Born Again”
movement.
There are many “Born Again”
churches started by corrupt pastors
who indulge in usury, and not
“development”. What is forgotten
is how mobile this phenomenon is.
Pastors rise and fall based on trust.
In the Catholic Church, a priest may
be venal or useless -- but his
institution remains solid and
self-assured, whether or not
parishioners are satisfied. Among the
Pentacostals, a church is only as good
as its ability to provide durable
rapture and trust. A church can last a
year. Or 20.
If the state is a comedy and a myth,
what bonds make you a good citizen?
What makes you an entrepreneur with
enthusiasm and hope for the future?
What do you see coming for your
children?
I do not see an African citizenry of
good liberals coming out of this
phenomenon. But I see a world being
built that appears more lucid, and
forward-looking, safe and reliable,
than the world outside it. And this
phenomenon is the fastest-growing
thing on the continent. More people
have come to invest in it than in
Sustainable Capacity Building and
Democratisation and all the plans and
talk and action of the other “civil
society”.
So. Should we go on playing ostrich?
Binyavanga Wainaina, the founding
editor of Kwani, a leading Kenyan
literary magazine (www.kwani.org)
based in Nairobi, is a member of
Concerned Writers for Kenya, a coalition
of Kenyan writers for peace and sanity. |
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