Secondly, memories of his own time in Migwani begin to flood into his mind. The frustrations with the work of which Michael has spoken have served to remind him of the days when he dealt with those same problems, those same contradictions every day. Though he is convinced that the difficulties he encountered and had to overcome in those early days were greater, more deep-rooted than now, his self-admission that he had probably lost touch with the day-to-day practicalities of parish work cause him to withhold the opinion. He does, however, have sympathy for Michael’s point of view, but doubts that Michael realises this. Thus he decides to offer Michael a respite from the tension of his self-analysis by relating some of his own experiences. It is an attempt to show solidarity.
As O’Hara begins to speak, Michael seems to be lost in hopelessness. He expects to have the final, inevitable details of the morning’s events prised from his unwilling memory. He is therefore surprised, pleasantly, when it becomes clear that for once this man he has always had to make an appointment to see, wishes to talk openly of himself, to discuss common experience without imposing conditions upon the dialogue.
“Michael, I understand everything - all the frustrations, the joys - I know them well. I think you have a tendency to assume those years ago in my time it was different, that someone like me did not experience the same things. Well that’s not true, because the problems then were just as difficult, just as unsolvable, just as frustrating.”
“But it was different, John. The Church was different and you saw your role in a fundamentally different way in those days.” Michael’s is the voice of a mind already made up.
O’Hara shakes his head. “No. It was just the same,” he says quietly.
Michael again is apparently unable to express the obvious truth he perceives. “But surely the whole emphasis was different. From my experience I can say that my greatest pressure, the greatest shortfall between desire and achievement, comes in the pastoral side of the work. In the furtherance of Christianity with a small ‘c’.”
“Oh come on, Michael, stop being trendy. There’s no such thing and you know that. Christianity means Christ. Let’s at least be clear about that.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not expressing myself very well.” He pauses to allow his ideas to re-form. “You see it’s not the Church itself or my place within it or the preaching or even the spiritual lives of myself or my parishioners... Somehow all these things seem to take care of themselves and what’s more they aren’t really measurable in any meaningful sense. Now there are some... no! … many priests who see the furtherance and promotion of those ends as paramount in their work. But I don’t. I put freedom, justice, human dignity and human development in the broadest possible sense and a host of other things on a plane way above the rest. The Church has survived - even bettered itself - for over a thousand years, and yet all around there are people, God’s people, denied not only betterment in their own lives, but also even the basics of human existence. They are being denied life, itself. Now as a priest, I follow Christ. It was his teaching that drew me to the Church, his example I resolved to try to emulate. The Church as an institution was never attractive to me. It has been home, but only a home in the institutional sense. It still remains at least tacitly responsible for some of the forces that oppress the very people it should be seeking to liberate. Christ said human suffering was unjust, and that we should all strive to eliminate it, to further just causes and it has always been this that I have seen as my mission. Now, after ten years of solid work - and I can honestly say I have done my best, John - I cannot cite a single success. I cannot claim that anything I have done has ever turned out to be more than cosmetic. In the meantime injustice has deepened and the poverty of people here has surely increased.”
“But Michael, one cannot expect as a mere individual to change the world.”
“I don’t want to change the world, John. For Christ’s sake, I might be unrealistic, but I’m not mad! If I could honestly say, though, that through my actions or my words that someone somewhere might have benefited, then I’d be satisfied. But it seems that whatever I try to accomplish, because I believe it to be right, either backfires on me or just withers away. Sometimes things are undone or nullified by external pressures beyond anyone’s control. I can live with that. But in the end, all I can see is failure. My failure.” Michael is almost shouting by the end. He stares wide-eyed and agitated at O’Hara, but the Bishop offers no reaction. He continues, “For a start my ideal is to further Christianity and with it the Church through example, through truly Christian work. The starving need food, not prayers. The sick need care, not promises of salvation. How can I teach by example? I must be suffering delusions if I think I can. I have nothing to offer.” His arms are outstretched in confession. He is pleading for O’Hara’s agreement. “I can dream up health schemes but I’m no doctor, agricultural projects but I’m not a farmer, literacy schemes but I’m not a teacher - what can I do? I can preach, but what good will that do by itself? Nothing, except encourage people falsely to be patient and tolerant of their lot. And what is happening on the other side of the coin in the meantime? People are being dispossessed of their land, their stock, and their entire livelihood. And because they’ve got to sell to survive, everything becomes devalued because the precious market is swamped. They simply have no choice. So what happens in the good years when the fortunes of the place improve? Who will benefit? The already rich, like Mulonzya, who have the means both to survive and even to profit in these hard times, they find that what they bought for a song during the drought is suddenly worth a fortune. They grow richer, while the poor find they are literally poorer. They have no hope of ever regaining their land, of ever regaining that security. If they sell their land now, they will never get any of it back. If they don’t sell, they starve - and still lose everything. Look at my maize growing scheme as an example.” John O’Hara nods to indicate that he remembers the case and acknowledges its relevance to Michael’s point. “A simple practical idea. Grain is cheaper in Nairobi. I have free access to a lorry. At home there are thousands without enough food. Even allowing for petrol I can provide maize in Migwani cheaper than people can buy it in the market. When people have nothing to begin with, a little more than their expectation can mean an awful lot to them. And what happens? The one man in the town with a licence to deal in wholesale grain bribes his powerful friends to threaten me with prosecution if I continue the scheme. I am told that I am trading without a licence. All right, I say, give me a licence and I’ll go into business. But my application is blocked by the same alliance, so our trader continues to profit from people’s hardship. He knows that grain is in short supply and he wants to be able to charge his own price for what he decides to offer for sale. And so I try to report him for overpricing. The same rules that grant him the licence in the first place set strict profit margins, and he is clearly exceeding them. I get told to keep out of politics. And anyway I later find that the trader is within the law. His transport charges are so high, he says, that the allowed margin then takes the price of the grain right up. He owns the transport, of course, and is charging himself an inflated figure for that so that he can then inflate the grain price.”
“Michael, the Church has too much to lose. We have to be careful. We have to be selective in the battles we choose to fight.”
“What have we to lose? We can only gain, unless of course our relationship with the trader is more important than that with the rest of the people. Either we win our case and thereby reduce the burden on people, or we lose and so enable people to see just who benefits from their suffering.”
“But the problems were no different in my day.” O’Hara’s reply is quick and impatient this time.
“Probably not, but less acute.”
“You’re wrong, Michael. Different, yes, but just as difficult to manage. Now be quiet Michael, it’s my turn.” O’Hara averts Michael’s interruption with a wave of the hand. “You cite
the fire in Migwani as an example of your dissatisfaction with the job. To rebuild the mission you had to divert funds and effort from what you considered to be more deserving causes. ‘One step forward and two back’ is how you described it. What do you think I felt that morning? After all, I built the place. It’s about the only tangible result of a near-lifetime’s work. What do you think I felt when I saw it virtually destroyed? Do you think that the frustrations which demoralise you don’t affect me, don’t apply to me? You seem to assume that you are a special case.”
***
Permanence had been his mission. When he arrived in Kenya as a young priest, he came to work among a people who had already been converted to Christianity, already been efficiently evangelised, saved from themselves by their paternalistic colonisers. The majority, of course, were Protestants because their Church had been granted a head start by the country’s all-powerful but, in this unwanted area, largely unseen rulers. Catholicism arrived much later and at an apparent disadvantage. Missions could be established, said the administrators, but they must not be built within two miles of an existing church. Their motives might have been worthy, but in the end the result was just bigotry. They had wanted as many locations as possible to be developed by the efforts of the missionaries, whom they saw as an essential catalyst in the ‘civilisation’ of the country. They drafted laws, therefore, designed to avoid what they saw as duplication of effort. Catholics, however, saw it merely as discrimination, and nothing less than true to type, an export of the home country’s tradition. Through their shortsightedness, they set a pattern for the future development of the country that would set one town against another.
The Roman Catholic Church in Kenya, as in many other countries, had embarked upon a policy of development from inside, a response to an indigenous movement, not an imposition from outside. The Protestant Churches, on the other hand, encouraged individual allegiance to themselves first, before the community at large. Service to the Church would itself promote material change, but the nature and extent of those changes would be controlled by the Bible’s teaching.
Migwani location was a wonderful example of this dichotomy. O’Hara had chosen Migwani market - later to become the administrative centre of the location - as the place to build his church, just over two miles from Kyome rock, beneath whose stark slopes Baptists had long before established themselves. Before Kyome was by-passed by a new road from Kabati to Mwingi, it had been the centre of the location’s activity. Higher and more fertile than the rest of the area, it was still the place where the best farming land and hence the largest density of population was to be found. Here the protestants built their church, a mission house and a school in that order, all funded from overseas money collected in the churches, jumble sales and coffee evenings of Middle America. As the facilities took on an air of permanence, powerful people from Europe and America came to visit the place and were impressed. At home, their reports persuaded others, more powerful and richer than themselves, that they could make a true Christian gesture by donating money to the missions and thereby help the poor and underprivileged in Africa and also promote ‘civilisation’ of the natives. A better school, a bigger church and a finer mission were what the assistance built, an island of overt relative riches amid an unchanging land.
Students scrambled to get into the fine new school, better than anything the government could then provide in the area. In return for their education they learned to embrace the church with an unquestioning belief, to reject utterly the ways of their parents, to dismiss them as primitive and pagan, to condemn their elders for drinking mawa or uki, or for smoking bhang. Kyome was still a town without a bar, without a whore, where a boy would be expelled from school for being seen out of doors after dark.
But, in a pragmatic mechanistic way, the system worked. It produced results. It provided opportunities that people wanted to take. With the qualifications they gained from school, young men became teachers, administrators and pastors. They travelled to Nairobi to earn salaries. They were sent to study overseas on scholarships provided by the Church. Above all else, they lived this new life successfully and their families, though caused much pain in the process, eventually began to benefit materially. These young men in employment sent a proportion of their money home so that the whole family might benefit from investing in the farm. The money paid school fees for other children, bought fertiliser and good seed, more goats and then more land and so the family would prosper in the market capitalist manner of self-advancement, much to the satisfaction of those missionaries who had set the ideological transformation in motion. No self-doubt allowed here, because religious belief and political philosophy were merely different aspects of the same persona for these people. They truly believed in all they did.
Others, who had spurned the Church and its claims - or who had been spurned by it - were made to see the power of this new religion. Soon criticisms of its rejection of the traditional were silenced by the growing desire to share its adherents’ prosperity. All wanted a part of this good fortune, but to attain it they must know the Church and its teaching or remain ignored. In the early days after independence, when even an unqualified secondary school leaver could walk into a white-collar job, the prestige of this church and its workers blossomed. It represented people’s aspirations in terms all could understand. Membership was a passport to visit the riches of the Western world and later to share them, those same riches which had built the church and which were embodied in its teaching.
When John O’Hara chose Migwani market as the site for his church, he had no idea that after independence it would become the administrative centre of the location. In those days it was a small group of mud-walled shops on an insignificant track along the top of a ridge. The main market centre was elsewhere, Migwani being host only to occasional trading in cattle and goats. The main trading centre was a mile or so to the south, where several Arabs and Asians had established shops in a place still known as the Arab dukas. These people controlled local commerce and so Migwani proper was not much more than a crossroads and meeting place on the way to watering livestock at the nearby dam.
It served, however, a number of social functions for those who remained non-Christian. O’Hara knew that and had tried to exploit it. Without much external finance, he relied on the efforts of Migwani’s own people and he encouraged them to fund their new kanisa. It was important, he told them, that they should contribute as much as possible to the building of their church. If they were poor and could not give money, then they could offer their labour to carry stones and sand or make bricks. When the people of Migwani presented him with the results of their collections, he was able to match it with a similar amount from outside, thus making the project a truly cooperative effort.
He negotiated with the Chief and an old man called Nzou, who was willing to sell a part of his land. When complete, the deal was blessed by the Chief, and O’Hara, with his early converts, was able to start building a church. A complication arose when a stranger appeared just a week into the project and claimed that the plot of land in question had never belonged to Nzou, but to himself. Work had to stop for almost a year while the dispute was taken to court in Nairobi.
Since the area never had land titles recorded on paper, the court could not find in favour of any party, however, and left the matter unresolved. It did recommend, though, that the parties should employ an oath taker. The men who laid claim to the land should take the oath of the seven sticks. To lie under this oath meant certain death. With some reluctance - not least on the part of O’Hara, who, though he professed personal respect for traditional beliefs, was not keen to found his church on them - all parties agreed on a place, date and time where the oath would be taken. And then, next day, Nzou disappeared and was never again seen in Migwani.
O’Hara’s initial relief that all appeared to be settled was soon forced to admit more disappointment. On a visit to the Chief to begin negotiations with the rightful
owner of the land, he found that the price, unfortunately, had more than doubled and O’Hara was forced to start looking elsewhere. His original second choice was a plot a hundred metres from the market, at the junction of the track that led from the main road down to Thitani. Though no more than an overgrown cattle track, it would allow sufficient access once it had been cleared.
The owner of this land was willing to sell, or so he said, and so O’Hara finally had his plot. The fact that the man was a crook working in collusion with the Chief became apparent when O’Hara’s helpers turned up to begin clearing the land for foundations. “But we cannot build here,” they said. “This is a sacred place. It is owned by no one, so no one can sell it and no one can buy it. It cannot be owned.”
However, with the help of Catholics from nearby towns, O’Hara began and finished his church. Though made of earth bricks and sisal poles, and therefore appearing like a poor relation of Protestant Kyome, the structure gave great service and his congregation grew. The fact that it had been built on communal land was never forgotten, but it was simply assumed by all that Europeans would ride roughshod over any tradition, so it was hardly out of character.
But the Catholic Church too came to build schools. It encouraged people to improve their lot through their own community efforts and so the process was slow and the results second rate compared to Kyome’s market system and foreign money. The real difference, though, was that O’Hara went out of his way to work personally with people. He did not stay at home waiting to receive his rightful respect, quite the opposite, in fact. O’Hara went out of his way to canvass opinion, to find out what people wanted and so people grew to like him. Migwani’s mission house was to make the establishment permanent. Again built by the sweat and contributions of only local people, it was the finest house in the town. It boasted concrete walls, a tin roof and iron-framed windows with glass. This surely was what ‘development’ meant and people were very proud of it. Now Migwani could stand alongside Kyome.
Mission Page 8