Berkley Center

“Child, have you been saved?” cried an approaching elderly man. His crazed, bloodshot eyes and disheveled appearance led me to mistake him for a homeless man, or possibly the town drunk. I was briefly on my own in the bustling Kenyan market, and admittedly scared and confused. Looking for the easy way out, I replied, “Yes… indiyo, I’ve been saved.” He came closer and cried louder, “But by who, child?” I paused, falling back on my knowledge that this particular village of Katangi was predominantly Catholic, and replied confidently “My priest.” Wrong answer. The man instantly exploded into a tirade of Kikamba, the local dialect, exclaiming “Jesus!” between foreign phrases. To my relief, my Kenyan host mother arrived a moment later with a glowing smile and said warmly, “I see you’ve met our priest.”

Catholicism is the bread and butter of life in Ukambani, an impoverished, desertous region in southern Kenya where I stayed for the past week. Ukambani lies directly on the equator and resembles New Mexico, but its hardy tribe of Kamba inhabitants is plagued by a host of problems stemming from lack of water, governmental neglect, and debilitating crop failures. Catholic missionaries infiltrated this thirsty region by the mid 1800s, making inroads for the colonial administration and European cultural imperialism to take root. Yet the Kamba tribe in Ukambani has been largely neglected by Kenyan administrations, both colonial and post-colonial, despite being only two hours drive from the capital. Consequently, the relative political and social isolation from Kenya’s majority Protestant population has allowed Ukambani to develop a uniquely devout brand of Catholicism.

Most of my time in Kenya has been spent in Nairobi, a chaotic microcosm of modernity and secularism within Eastern Africa. Its physical contrast with Ukambani’s beautifully placid and desolate landscape was startling. Even starker, however, were the social contrasts between Ukambani’s Kamba inhabitants and their more metropolitan cousins in Nairobi. In place of Nairobi’s dangerous tin slums and second-hand Western attire, Ukambani’s thatch huts, homemade rosaries, and colorful cloth kang’aas wrapped conservatively around every Kamba woman announced a wholly different culture and set of values distinct to Ukambani and the Kamba tribe.

Amongst all of these sources of the Kamba’s distinct identity, Catholicism is easily the most visible, uniting force. In my travels by motorbike through the region, I noticed that every house, school, shop, and motorbike itself displayed an image of Jesus or religious bumper sticker. Psalms were displayed like sports’ team paraphernalia on t-shirts and vehicles, signs of reassurance to their society that this individual played for the same team. While traditional witch doctors still existed (I lived next door to one), they are increasingly stigmatized and shunned by the most devout Kambas.

Although I missed Sunday Mass during my weeklong homestay in Ukambani, church groups gathered everyday of the week. The church was easily the most active part of Ukambani’s civil society; youth groups met to dance and sing, womens’ groups met to pray and sew, and church harambees, or financial merry-go-rounds, gathered weekly to bless a different member with a pooled endowment. I had the privilege of joining my host family’s daughter, Grace, to her youth group’s performance of soulful gospel songs at a village party. Sung in a mixture of English and Kikamba, the Kamba children learned from the time they could talk how to be a devout Catholic.

I searched throughout my week in Ukambani to discover the force driving this passionate, ubiquitous Catholicism. The simple answer is that faith in Catholicism’s savior and eventual salvation offers a wellspring of hope to Ukambani’s intensely impoverished, hard-working people. But looking deeper, I realized that allowing the Catholic Church to be the axis of Ukambani society provided this hard-pressed community of subsistence farmers with social and spiritual gatherings, occurring with comforting regularity. Through these gatherings, the Kamba’s Catholicism provided structure and security to their harsh, volatile climate. Its scriptures and sermons provided the community with universal rules and norms, a vital service in a land so untouched by modern Kenya’s laws and courts.

As my week in Ukambani ended, the other 11 Americans and I were barraged with requests for “blessings,” or foreign aid handouts. This unabashed begging left me with doubts about the Kamba’s misguided perception of development as externally driven, and led me to question religion’s roll in their stagnant development. I was left with the provocative question of whether the Kamba’s deep Catholic faith is positive overall for its impact on social unity and order, or whether it is negative, deterring self-driven development in the present by assuring the Kambas a better life in the afterlife?