After independence, a local war broke out. The Protestants built a primary school in Migwani, right in the middle of the Catholic patch. The Catholics responded with a new school at Kanyaa. People were happy with the results, however, for while the missionaries effectively competed, every town and village could realistically aspire to found its own local services. Now everyone might share the benefits of development. Schools, both primary and secondary, all with the blessing of the District Education Office grew up almost overnight all over the area. As Kenya seemed to grow richer, more school leavers found employment and there were thus renewed demands for yet more schools, and with them more churches.
And then something changed. The rain stopped. People’s crops failed. Migwani families could no longer afford to pay school fees, because what funds families had were needed for food. Interest in schools remained, but no longer was there any local money to fund them. Christianity, in whatever form, had always been associated with increasing prosperity and increasing material wealth. Now times were changing. Life for most people was becoming much more difficult, more of a struggle than anyone in the area could remember. The new youth, educated in post-independence Kenya, having grown up with this association between Christianity and wealth, began to question the Church’s role and the motives of the missionaries. They went to Nairobi and saw that there were many rich Europeans who neither attended church nor claimed to be Christian. They became, in effect, the Westernised sceptics, those who eventually came to respect neither the Christian Church nor traditional beliefs. It was a difficult time for everyone, a new age even. Rural society was still split between Church and tradition, and here in Kitui, because of the drought and the poverty it had brought, the traditional was again growing stronger as people sought out any insurance against suffering.
Among the rural educated population, there were some whom the system had rewarded. But by this time there were also many others who had remained unemployed and gained no benefit from their schooling. Some turned to crime and added weight to the arguments of the traditionalists who maintained that education and therefore, by association, Christianity also had harmed their youth.
The towns, on the other hand, were increasingly swelled by those people who had rejected everything traditional in favour of the Western world’s cult of the self. They respected neither tradition nor Christianity and for the most part had completely forgotten their rural roots, their families and farms. Many, however, had taken their hardships with them and merely translated these into urban currency.
Privately, O’Hara was afraid that the Church had been superseded by the results of its own work. Could they any longer maintain that personal salvation in the afterlife remained the goal of human existence? The spiritual side of the work had always been his prime concern, but allied with that had been a desire to help people materially, to transform their lives from the old subservience into what he saw as a new kind of freedom. This had proved highly selective, however, and those who had attained it had also forgotten the Church and the faith which had originally granted it, preferring to embrace those things he, himself, most hated about Western society. Privately, he believed that his Church must change its ways. It must no longer strive to build fine houses for its priests and impressive structures to house its congregation. It must no longer be seen to concern itself primarily with the material world, but should seek to redefine the nature of the spiritual kingdom. It must do this, however, as part of the community it was to serve. No longer should the Church deal in currency that fostered false aspirations. But then he became a Bishop.
***
“But that doesn’t change my views.” Michael seems sceptical of John O’Hara’s sincerity. Though he has never before heard such a detailed history of the Church’s involvement in the town which has been his home, he seems to regard it as unimportant, even irrelevant to his own analysis. O’Hara is immediately irritated. His expression hardens, recreating the attitude of disgust he displayed when he first entered the room to find Michael, apparently oblivious to the results of his own stupidity, dozing over a glass of whiskey. O’Hara, however, as is his habit, tries to hide his anger behind an expression of stolid silent defiance. “Don’t you see, John?” When there is no reaction Michael continues. “The fact that you see the establishment of Catholicism in Migwani in terms of the permanence of a mission house and a church... The fact that you see this as one of your greatest achievements whilst by any interpretation of Christian morality the state of most of the people has worsened beyond recall... That is why I say the Church is not serving its people. We expect people to give to us. We demand their attention and their resources and we receive both. But in my opinion we give nothing in return except a pat on the head and a thank you. Our Church, in these times, is as bad as any Mulonzya in the way it treats people. We are merely furthering our own interests.”
“Nonsense!” John O’Hara’s dismissal is immediately pounced upon by an angered Michael.
“Look at what we’ve done! Take John Mwangangi as an example.” Though John O’Hara maintains his almost defiant expression of disinterest, he is suddenly listening intently behind the mask. He cannot escape the parallel between himself and the young priest. Michael’s efforts saved the life of his catechist’s child. A year later that life had been taken in tragic circumstances. O’Hara had himself saved the life of the young John Mwangangi and though he had lived to maturity, his life too was cut tragically short in an event which had changed the lives of many who had been close to it.
***
Later, much later, Michael would come to look upon the case of John Mwangangi as one that had proved crucial in forming new attitudes to both his own faith and the way he chose to live it. At the time it was simply a tragedy. He was afraid that August morning, that Janet would never recover from the shock, so deeply had the experience appeared to scar her. Until that morning, Michael had judged that Janet saw life through a filter which categorized all experience into a set of limited types, assumptions which she had been taught by a culture she still thought was both rational and universal. Here was an event that contradicted those values and thus that day her world seemed to shatter. For once, she saw that neither she herself nor anyone else, for that matter, could claim to control what life would deliver. Not only do those who have grown up with the assumptions of Western materialism as the filters through which they sense all experience regard themselves as immortal, they also see themselves as the possessors of the only true reality. By reinforcing this naiveté, their society never allows them to mature. That August day, Janet was certainly confronted with experience that should have ended that false childhood. Later, much later, Michael would still not be sure whether as experience it had registered.
While Michael had been away on leave, she had grown close to John Mwangangi. That morning, so soon after his return to Migwani, he still had not fully understood the sequence of events that had conspired to bring John and Janet together in what was patently committed friendship. All he would remember later, much later, was that John had seen fit to drive the hundred miles of dust-trailing dirt road from Nairobi to attend Janet’s leaving party in Migwani’s secondary school. Privately, Michael had even been proud of her. Anyone, whoever it was, who received the unequivocal backing of John Mwangangi, as Janet seemed to have secured, was surely by virtue of simple proximity also worthy of respect. Later, much later, Michael would continually remind himself that here he had been using the word ‘respect’ in a sense that was devoid of fear, quite unlike the Kitui Akamba understanding of its meaning. It was an important distinction, because it was this word ‘respect’ which also labelled the relationship between a father and son.
He had never known the full story. John O’Hara certainly did, but he had always been reticent about it and had never once, despite Michael’s regular prompting, shown the slightest desire to reveal it. Mwangangi always had a problem relating to his family in Kamandiu. On the face of it, he was
the epitome of success for the mission school system. A poor boy, from a poor area given a chance in life, meaning of course a chance not to be what his birthright might have presumed, a chance that he had duly taken and used to massive and praiseworthy advantage. After secondary school and university, John had studied in London as one of his country’s identified achievers. Exactly what achievements were likely to be his, the country had never specified. In retrospect, what he had received was the ultimate training in individuality, the perfect mechanism to expunge the duties and responsibilities demanded by the collected assumptions of culture, family, nation, or the people, whoever they might be.
When, almost two years after the murder, Michael eventually and surprisingly once persuaded John O’Hara to talk about Mwangangi, the Bishop of Kitui played down the fact that the boy had adopted his own Christian name, but could not expel from his eyes a momentary twinge of sadness, regret, or was it conscience? It was a common enough name, he said, and clearly Michael could only agree. He had denied the fact any significance, because, as Migwani’s parish priest at the time, O’Hara had actually been responsible for the boy’s prior instruction, and wasn’t it very common indeed for those newly admitted to the Church to assume the name of whoever had prepared the path?
But Michael had already established that John O’Hara had been nothing else than Mwangangi’s mentor. As parish priest in Migwani throughout the period of the boy’s schooling and instruction in the teachings of the Church, he above any other was responsible for the boy’s attitudes, the assumptions through which he would continue to interpret life. And John O’Hara had undoubtedly spawned a radical. How radical had the old man himself been at that time? O’Hara was willing to offer not a word of judgment on that.
It was possible that Mwangangi was either in the wrong place or arrived at the wrong time or possibly both. Initially, Michael could not believe his luck, when he had met the newly appointed District Officer over dinner in his Mwingi home. He had arrived expecting a typically perfunctory session with yet another civil servant who would soon move on under the pretext of pursuing that strange latter-day euphemism for life, the career. At least careers merely end. They never die. Or perhaps in some cases they do just that, and not just once. Now that is serious. But Mwangangi was clearly different. Alone amongst all such products of the bureaucracy Michael had met, John had both ideas and a commitment to see them realised, a rare mix in a society which might on occasions choose to see either as subversive.
At that first meeting, John Mwangangi had described visions of exactly the kind of work that Michael for a decade or more had always felt should be the Church’s priority. What he was offering Michael was tantamount to a partnership, where he would handle politics, planning and official sanction. He would use his influence and position to help Michael lobby for whatever funds or permissions which might be needed for specific projects, whilst handing over completely to Michael all work related to local organising, day-to-day management and the crucial role of animator, who would canvas opinion and promote action wherever even a seed of interest might be found. But the plan was not merely altruistic. Michael saw that immediately. On the contrary, what Mwangangi described in ten minutes was the most sophisticated plan for political self-advancement he had ever heard, so impressive, in fact, that it might just have worked, had it not been for his own mistakes and his collaborator’s background.
The appointment of Boniface Mutisya in Thitani had clearly been a mistake and Michael shouldered all the blame for it. His teaching methods in the literacy classes had definitely gone too far and he should have known better, but in the final analysis it was Michael’s fault for not offering the young man adequate advice on how to cope with the instruction technique he was being asked to employ. Overall, his method was perfectly acceptable, but his choice of target was impolitic and it had created entirely the wrong enemy for John too early in the plan he had devised. Michael took complete responsibility for the error, however, because the monitoring of Boniface’s work remained his province throughout. He would never be sure how much the eventual battle over Boniface’s work contributed to John Mwangangi’s move from his civil servant’s position in Mwingi to his later highly lucrative position in a Nairobi legal firm, but on balance he would conclude that in the final analysis it had been Mwangangi’s self-interest that had prompted the change. He was certainly a man with ideas, Michael had concluded, but without staying power. Perhaps that stated commitment of his had been mere words. Perhaps his initial assessment of the man had been too generous?
Because that was before he knew anything about the man’s domestic problems. On that first meeting, which had been quite soon after the Mwangangi’s appointment to Mwingi, Michael saw only a happy family life with John more than adequately adopting the role of husband and father. He was husband to Lesley, who generally remained quite silent whenever he spoke, which perhaps had always been an indication of how much John always dominated family life, and a father to Anna, a vivacious young girl whom Michael saw only that once before she went away to boarding school in Nairobi. But what lay beneath this becalmed surface, though, was a web of problems that was soon to bind him to a course of action that could only lead to tragedy.
O’Hara knew why John Mwangangi, right from being a boy, had been virtually at war with his father. By the time he returned to Kenya already a rich man after several successful years in London, he had neither seen nor spoken to his father for at least a decade, whilst some estimated it might have been as long as fifteen or more years. Behind everything John had done, including returning to Kenya to take a job at a fraction of the salary he had commanded in London, seemed to be aimed at reconciliation, between himself and his ideals, himself and his father, perhaps himself and what he saw as his lost identity. His British wife, however, could share none of her husband’s ideals and simply did not understand what he was trying to do. What was more, she hated living out of the city. She never coped with the dirt, the bugs, the isolation or, more importantly, the claustrophobia of a small town. John and Lesley had grown apart, but had kept their public face content for the sake of John’s career. And was that word here a euphemism for life? There were some nasty rumours, though, that John had been seen with prostitutes in Kitui town on those evenings when his visits demanded that he stay overnight. Worse than this was the assertion that the girls were under age, merely schoolgirls to whom he would pay enormous sums of money to keep quiet. Not many people, however, believed those rumours, but, guilty or not, they hurt John and damaged him politically. In some places his name had become dirt.
But what really proved to be his undoing was his relationship with his father. The old man was about as traditional as it was possible to be. Perhaps even more so, in fact, because it became increasingly impossible for the son to satisfy the ever more demanding tests of loyalty and commitment which the father set. The final split came when father asked son to see his daughter initiated into womanhood in the traditional manner. Now, not even all the girls in bush places like Migwani undertook that treatment. Not for some considerable number of years had the practice, which always involved the girl’s circumcision as well as instruction on a wife’s duties, been at all widespread, or at least not many people would openly admit it was widespread.
Of course Lesley Mwangangi would not begin to discuss anything of the kind being done to her daughter. She began to wonder if John had gone quite mad when he revealed that he actually wanted her to undertake the initiation, because that would reconcile himself and his father. It had seemed to her that her husband was fast becoming a stranger again. Lesley suggested that even if they did go through with it the old man would just create some new demand and she was probably right about that. And then she would grow angry because she would then realise she had spoken of the suggestion as if it were possible that she might countenance it. The split effectively left John alone, unable to comply with his father’s wishes and alienated from his wife and daughter.
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Whether he and his father had been discussing Anna Mwangangi’s initiation in that room behind the Safari bar after Janet’s leaving party no one would ever know. It was widely assumed, though, that they had and that John had come from Nairobi to tell his father that his marriage and daughter were more important to him than his father’s respect. Anna would not become a Kamba girl in the manner the father had demanded. The old man, people believed, had interpreted this as complete rejection by his only son and in a fit of anger had hit him with an axe. Every room had one at that time of year to cut wood for the stove the bar always provided to take the chill off the cool August nights. And so collective conscience put it down to a chance act, a moment of madness, rather than born of alienation, something much harder to explain, which, however, was closer to the truth.
In the morning, to say one final goodbye to her friend, Janet had gone early to the bar to make sure she would not miss him. And so it was she who first saw the corpse, on the floor behind the bed, the side of its head smashed by repeated blows from the father’s axe. Not only Janet but also the whole community was in shock. Janet, of course, was to leave that day and leave she did, carrying that devastating experience with her as the final memory of the town. In Nairobi, Michael and Janet had gone to find Lesley, taking it upon themselves to carry the news of her husband’s death, but she was strangely passive when they told her, almost disinterested. Janet would never understand that reaction, no matter how many times she tried to replay it in her memory during the long hours of her flight to London, or, indeed, the decades that followed.
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