From
the second floor of the Holy Cross congregation's McCauley Formation
House in Nairobi, Kenya, visitors have an unobstructed view down
into what appears to be a vast and impossibly crowded rail yard.
Weather-beaten boxcars extend to the horizon in three directions.
Except they aren't boxcars.
The grim reality is visible only at ground level. The "boxcars"
are actually rectangular shacks, their walls made of dried red-orange
mud squished into a latticework of bamboo sticks. Some of the
shacks have heavy rocks on their roofs, which keep the corrugated
metal from blowing off. Crooked paths of red clay run between
the fragile structures. The rutted surfaces are feathered everywhere
with embedded scraps of plastic bags. Planks lie across rivulets
carrying human and other waste down the hillside.
Welcome to Kibera, an obscenely photogenic warren of wretched
poverty where an estimated 1 million people live. Kenya's capital
has more than 130 such slums or "informal settlements" housing
more than half the city's population on less than 2 percent of
its land. Kibera is the largest such slum in Nairobi and, by some
estimates, the world.
Conditions here are what international aid agencies term "extreme
poverty," people living on less than a dollar a day. In this case,
a lot less. First-time visitors from developed countries -- like
the author of this article, part of a group of mostly faculty
from Notre Dame and two other Holy Cross universities that toured
the Holy Cross Missions in East Africa earlier this year -- can
hardly believe their eyes or imagine a more deprived existence.
But something about the place doesn't add up.
As we walk between rows of shacks on a sunny June afternoon,
the slum dwellers in general appear clean and neatly dressed and
even look contented. A herd of grinning dark-skinned boys begins
to tag along behind the line of visibly shaken wazungu
(Swahili for "white people"). "How are you?" one chirps, and then
another and another until they are chanting it in unison like
a cheer: "Howareyou. Howareyou. Howareyou. Howareyou."
"Fine, how are you?" I respond to silenced faces that have run
out of English.
Only later does it occur to me that the more accurate answer
would have been, "Very confused."
* * *
After nearly two weeks in Kenya and Uganda visiting Holy Cross-assisted
churches, schools, health clinics, family and youth centers, and
formation houses (where young Africans starting on the road to
becoming CSC priests, brothers or sisters live), we've grown accustomed
to the warmth of the East Africans, their impeccable manners,
the perpetual greeting of "You are most welcome." But
this is too much. Don't these people know how to register misery?
We know better than to expect a simple explanation from the
leader of our expedition, Father Paul Kollman, CSC, '84, '90M.Div.
The youthful 42-year-old Notre Dame assistant professor of theology
has studied, taught and served in pastoral capacities in Uganda,
Kenya and also in Tanzania, the third country that surrounds Lake
Victoria, the world's second-largest freshwater lake. He's also
written a history of origins of the Catholic Church in East Africa.
The book is due out this fall. Almost always when we ask about
Africa's enduring conflicts and contradictions, Father Paul begins
with a knowing and judicious, "It's complicated."
He's not one to exaggerate.
One clue to the dearth of distress among the people is their
heartfelt religious devotion. More than two-thirds of the populations
of both Kenya and Uganda are classified as Christians. That includes
mushrooming Pentecostal churches and similar charismatic movements
within other denominations, including Catholicism. After Christianity
comes Islam (16 percent and also growing), the remnants of indigenous
beliefs and hybrids of various traditions. In Uganda, Catholics
make up 45 percent of the population -- 10.4 million people --
which, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter,
makes it the fourth-largest Catholic country where English
is the dominant language. (The top three, in order, are India,
the United States and Canada.)
The Church's outsized influence is especially evident during
our visit. The morning after our descent into Kibera, Father Tom
Smith, CSC, '67, '70M.A., director of Holy Cross Missions, celebrates
Mass in the McCauley Formation House chapel. Smith has worked
out of an office in Moreau Seminary at Notre Dame since 2001 but
spent 23 of the last 35 years in East Africa. During Idi Amin's
reign of terror in the 1970s he smuggled Africans through military
checkpoints hidden under blankets in his car.
In his homily he mentions that he learned all about the saints
while growing up but says they have never been present for him
in the way the Ugandan Martyrs are present in the lives of East
Africans. He's talking about some of the first natives of the
East African interior to convert to Christianity after the arrival
of a wave of Anglican and then Catholic missionaries in the 1870s.
When the Anglicans and Catholics came to Buganda, the largest
kingdom in what would become Uganda, the local king gave them
a warm reception. Many converts even became pages in the royal
court. But the next king didn't like his authority being relegated
to second place behind a deity. He eventually began executing
converts. A total of 45 Christians were made examples of in a
variety of grisly ways, including decapitation and ravaging by
wild dogs. On one particular day, June 3, 1886, 22 were burned
alive in the village of Namugongo, east of the present-day Ugandan
capital, Kampala.
June 3 is now a national holiday in Uganda, Uganda Martyrs Day.
And that's the occasion for Father Tom's homily. The priest imagines
the tens of thousands of pilgrims who will be in Namugongo today
at the Catholic martyrs shrine. Some will have walked hundreds
of miles to get there. It's that sort of organic devotion, he
says, that the Church has tried to tap into in Africa. And has
tapped into successfully.
To the first-time visitor to Africa, Catholicism East African-style
seems like a familiar piece of furniture upholstered in a different
pattern and color. In every church or chapel our group visited,
the tabernacle was a miniature banda, the traditional
round African hut with a thatched roof. A mural dominating the
sanctuary of the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Dandora -- a poor,
but not as poor as Kibera, neighborhood in eastern Nairobi --
depicts the holy family as black Africans. Even a dark-skin hand
reaches down from heaven.
On the second Sunday of our excursion we join the Christians
of Kyarusozi, a rural parish in hilly western Uganda, for Mass
in a simple meeting hall labeled Saint Joseph's Church of Kyembogo.
The place is packed, and we're escorted to seats of honor on a
platform flanking the altar. The liturgy is spoken entirely in
the local language of the district, Rutoro, but we can easily
pick out gestures common to any Mass.
The front rank of the church choir thumps drums and rattles
small box-shaped percussion instruments filled with beans. Young
women wearing hula-skirt-like decorations over their brightly
colored clothing saunter down the aisle and then shake their hips
energetically. Behind them other dancers wearing maraca-like balls,
called orunyege, on their ankles stomp and rattle in
time with the music.
After Mass I ask the white-haired celebrant, Father Richard
Potthast, CSC, '63, if this exuberant singing and dancing is regulation,
liturgically speaking. The South Bend native, who has served in
the parish since 1966, looks at me impatiently.
"Have you ever read the Psalms?" he asks. I sheepishly realize
he's talking about the psalmist's exhortation to praise God with
singing and dancing.
Kyarusozi Parish is about 50 miles northeast of the Ugandan
town of Fort Portal, the original location of Holy Cross missionaries
in Africa. Three newly ordained priests arrived there in 1958.
They'd originally prepared to go to the order's mission in Bengal
(of Bengal Bouts fame) India, now part of Bangladesh. Their luggage
had already been shipped there. But at the last minute they were
redirected to Uganda. One of the three, Father Robert Hesse, CSC,
who turns 79 in December, still lives in Uganda. Though technically
retired, he continues to assist in pastoral work in the parish
of Bugembe near the small city of Jinja in eastern Uganda.
In his history of Holy Cross in East Africa, Father William
Blum, CSC, '60, writes that the Holy See and early Catholic missionaries
to Africa wanted to make sure the Church was on a solid footing
when African countries gained independence from European colonial
powers in the early 1960s. Missionary groups not already in Africa
were encouraged to come help. Enter Holy Cross.
For the next 20-some years, that's mainly what the CSCs did
-- help build up the local Church. It wasn't until 1980 that the
order began accepting Africans as candidates for religious formation.
Today, 23 East Africans have become CSC priests and brothers.
The area also has produced eight Sisters of the Holy Cross; three
more are in Ghana in West Africa.
In addition to Kyarosozi in western Uganda and Bugembe in the
east, the order is responsible for parishes in Nairobi (Dandora)
and its most recently acquired outpost, Saint Brendan's Parish
in Kitete in north-central Tanzania, added in 2000. Holy Cross
members also continue to assist with various Church activities
in Fort Portal.
In each location the CSCs have helped found and operate churches,
medical facilities, schools and even colleges that educate seminarians
of their own and those in formation for other religious orders.
School officials proudly show off their new computer labs and
libraries and recite statistics on test scores and growing enrollments.
Father Potthast tells us that seven years ago the Catholic high
school in Kyembogo had five students; now the enrollment surpasses
300.
The visitor comes away with the impression that things are not
so bad here in this corner of the Third World. The Church is making
a difference, a big difference. Not every problem has been solved,
for sure, but with special offerings from well-heeled parishes
back home, platoons more missionaries, an injection of management
skill. . . .
And then you climb down into Kibera, see the sewerless and malnourished
multitudes, and the scale of the problem seems monumental.
If only it were that small.
* * *
Africa is the poorest continent on Earth. Of the 700 million
people living in the sub-Saharan part, nearly half -- a number
greater than the entire population of the United States -- subsist
on 65 cents or less a day.
It's also the only continent to have grown poorer in the last
20 years. According to a United Nations report, the percentage
of people living on less than a dollar a day dropped worldwide
from 40 percent to 20 percent between 1980 and 2003. But in Africa
it actually edged up, from 45 to 46 percent. To put in perspective
how bad off Africa is, in the second-poorest area of the globe,
South Asia, the poverty rate is 17 percentage points lower.
How the continent came to be such a basket case is a long story,
and, as Father Paul would say, "It's complicated."
Those familiar with physiologist Jared Diamond's book Guns,
Germs and Steel and the PBS series based on it that aired
earlier this year know his theory that European societies advanced
faster than those elsewhere because of an early advantage they
enjoyed at the dawn of man's switch from hunter/gatherer to farmer.
Namely, the Europeans had native species of animals that could
be domesticated. Goats and sheep could feed off the stubble from
harvested fields and later be eaten to provide high-protein food
or shorn or skinned to provide clothing. Larger animals like horses
and cattle could be harnessed to do the grunt work of farming.
Diamond speculates that draft animals increased crop productivity
so much that it freed individuals to develop new technologies.
That led to the production of weaponry, which gave European explorers
and fortune-seekers the firepower to conquer and exploit.
As was the case almost everywhere else in the world, Africa
was saddled with native animal species such as zebra and rhinoceros
that proved impossible to domesticate. Without animal help, the
theory goes, the Africans had to work all day just to feed themselves.
Many still do. Uganda is lucky compared with such famine-prone
African countries as Ethiopia. What it lacks in easily exportable
energy resources like coal or oil, it makes up for in fertile
soils. The country's lush, green countryside led Winston Churchill
to dub it the Pearl of Africa. So even during violent conflicts
and disease pandemics, Kollman says, Uganda's rural poor can usually
grow enough to survive.
In Bugembe Parish, 55-year-old Godfrey Waswa, his wife, Alice
Apolote, and 10 children subsist on corn, avocados and papaya
they cultivate on a small plot of land surrounding their mud hut.
It's a labor-intensive existence and not helped by the fact that
they, like most rural poor, have no running water. They have to
buy it from a neighbor with a standpipe or from a business in
town and then lug home however much they need that day in a jerry
can.
Many of Africa's rural poor flock to the city in search of a
better life, but few find it. A short story published in The
New Yorker earlier this year by a Jesuit priest from Nigeria,
Uwem Akpan, describes the day-to-day existence of an imaginary
family evicted from Kibera for failing to pay their rent. Rooms
sans electricity and flooring rent for as little as $5 a month
in Kibera, so you have to be awfully poor not to keep up.
In the story the family is now living in a shack with a tarp
for a roof at the end of an alley. Their main source of income
is the wages of their daughter, a street prostitute at 12. In
lieu of food, the mother spoons out shoe glue into a plastic bottle
for her younger children to sniff. The fumes anesthetize their
hunger pangs.
In both Kenya and Uganda, more than three-fourths of people
work in agriculture because they don't have much choice. Crisscrossing
the lush countryside of Uganda in a mini-bus, our group sees but
one structure that resembles a factory: a Coca-Cola bottling plant.
Coke is said to be the largest private employer in Africa.
What most countries in sub-Saharan Africa desperately desire
is foreign investment, and they wouldn't be especially picky.
An athletic shoe factory paying what we would consider "slave"
wages of $2 a day would still be double the earnings of the average
African worker. So why don't foreign manufacturers swoop in and
exploit this desperate labor pool?
One reason is competition. As cheap as labor is in Africa, there
are places where people will work for just as little and factories
already exist. Says Father Paul Kollman, "The Chinese can export
anything cheaper to here than the Ugandans can make it."
Father David Kashangaki, CSC, '05M.A., assistant director of
the CSC's Saint Andre Formation House in Bugembe, says the Ugandan
government is trying to entice foreign investment, "but until
they solve the basic issues, it's hard to get companies to come
in."
He means infrastructure. Roads, reliable electrical service,
medical care -- all are lacking in East Africa. For instance,
Uganda, which is slightly smaller than Oregon, has about 17,000
miles of roads, but less than 7 percent are paved. And many are
crumbling. A country with more than 26 million people has only
one CAT scanner, says Makerere University Chaplain Father Lawrence
Kanyike, CSC, '78Ph.D., who was in need of one after suffering
a stroke a few years ago.
Another major deterrent to foreign investors has been government
instability. When European colonists arrived in the 19th century,
the African continent consisted of several thousand kingdoms and
chieftaincies. As a special report in The Economist magazine
put it, by the time the colonial powers left in the mid-20th century,
they had "squeezed the whole lot into a few dozen nation states
whose borders cut some tribes in half and lumped others together
with neighbors they did not much like." The resulting countries
were rife with ethnic tensions, which often led to civil wars.
Also, Africans were hardly prepared for the kind of parliamentary
democracy bequeathed to them by the Europeans. A bureaucracy needs
educated people to function. But as The Economist report
notes, when Tanzania gained independence from Great Britain in
1961, its population included a grand total of 16 university graduates.
(Ironically, Tanzania has turned out to be one of Africa's most
stable countries.)
The result has been a long series of brutal dictatorships punctuated
by bloody coups and revolutions. From the early 1960s to the late
1980s the continent saw more than 70 coups and 13 presidential
assassinations. The joke in Africa is that each country gets one
free election -- the first one following independence. After that,
you get an army together.
Some such transitions take longer than others. The present leader
of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, led a rebellion that in 1985 toppled
the brutal dictator Milton Obote, successor to Idi Amin. Museveni
generally receives high marks for restoring stability to the country.
But nearly 20 years after he came to power, government forces
still don't control every square mile of Uganda. An armed rebellion
now led by a madman (see "The Army of Kidnapped
Children") continues to churn in the northern part of the
country.
That rebellion by the Lord's Resistance Army has resulted in
more than a million people being displaced from their homes. These
people are categorized as Internally Displaced People or IDPs.
Uganda is also the temporary (maybe) home to 150,000 refugees
from conflicts in other countries, including neighboring Sudan.
None of this makes Uganda special. Africa is the refugee capital
of the world, hosting 30 percent of all refugees and 50 percent
of the world's IDPs.
In 1999 the Law School of Makerere University founded the Refugee
Law Project to protect and promote the rights of refugees in Uganda.
Peter Ekayu, a lawyer with the organization, describes the tribulations
of one client, a Rwandan:
The man's father, a Hutu, was a top official in government during
the 1994 genocide committed by Hutus against the Tutsis. More
than a half-million people, 8 percent of Rwanda's population,
were slaughtered in just three months. The man's mother was Tutsi.
The Tutsis eventually killed the man's father, and then the Hutus
wanted to kill his mother in revenge. The son fled with his mother
and four siblings to the Democratic Republic of Congo. After the
situation stabilized in his home country they returned, only to
find the family home occupied, so they went to a second home.
That home was set ablaze and everyone in it burned to death except
Ekayu's client.
Several years, relocations, misunderstandings and narrow escapes
later, the man lives in fear for his life in Kampala. The Refugee
Law Project is continuing to advocate for his permanent resettlement,
Ekayu says.
The lack of peaceful transfers of power isn't the only reason
repressive governments have dominated Africa so long. During the
Cold War the United States and Soviet Union, both seeking strategic
advantage, showered money on various African countries. They didn't
seem to care how the money was spent. Aid dispensed in the form
of loans often ended up in Swiss bank accounts of brutal dictators.
By one published estimate, for every $1 lent to Africa between
1970 and 1996, 80 cents flowed out of the country.
Years later the embezzling dictators may be gone, but their
debts have been inherited by current governments. Even relaxed
repayment schedules are bleeding developing countries out of revenues
desperately needed to educate people and improve infrastructure.
Some organizations promoting debt forgiveness for African countries,
like the American Friends Service Committee, say it's a matter
of simple justice. "According to international law," states one
of the Quaker group's publications, "people should not be forced
to pay debts that did not benefit them and that were contracted
and used to suppress, jail and kill them."
Another enduring roadblock to African development has been disease.
Malaria alone kills more than a million African children a year.
Then there's AIDS. Ten percent of the world's population lives
in Africa, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the 38 million
people infected with HIV/AIDS. In some places a third of African
adults are HIV-positive.
One reason AIDS has spread so fast is poverty. People who can't
afford antibiotics to treat other sexually transmitted diseases
end up with open sores, which provide freeways for transmission
of the virus. Soldiers and migrant workers help expand the reach
of the disease, especially men having sex with prostitutes while
away from home. More than 85 percent of Nairobi's sex workers
are thought to be HIV-positive. When the men return home, they're
likely to infect their wives because African women generally don't
feel they have the right to refuse to have sex with their husbands
or force them to wear condoms. In some parts of Africa, widows
are even expected to undergo a purification rite that involves
sleeping with their late husband's nearest male relative, who
may himself be infected.
When both parents in a poor family succumb to AIDS, their children
typically end up with grandparents or other relatives who may
themselves already be destitute.
Uganda has been held up as a model success story in the battle
against AIDS. Through aggressive educational programs promoting
abstinence, fidelity and use of condoms, the country's infection
rate has fallen to 5 percent, the government says. But the progress
may be exaggerated. At Fort Portal's Catholic Virika Hospital,
where patients are charged $1 a day for medical care, a nurse
tells us that on a typical day if 15 patients come in, 10 will
turn out to be HIV-positive.
"Through the naked eye," says the hospital's CEO, Father Paschal
Kabura, "I don't see [the infection rate] going down."
Africa once seemed doomed to annihilation by AIDS because people
couldn't afford the anti-retroviral drugs to control the disease.
Drug prices have reportedly declined by 95 percent. Nevertheless,
it's estimated that only one HIV-positive African in 400 receives
the medication. One reason: Empty stomachs can't absorb the toxicity
of the anti-retroviral drugs. People suffering from lack of food
either vomit up the medicine or won't take it because they know
the effect it will have, says Margaret Ogola, a pediatrician who
heads the Kenyan bishops' Commission for Health and Family Life.
Whether it's because of AIDS, malnutrition or other maladies,
dying young is nothing special in sub-Saharan Africa. The infant
mortality rate in Uganda is 88 per 1,000 live births, nearly 12
times that of the United States. Due in large part to AIDS, average
life expectancy has fallen to 47 in Kenya and less than 45 in
Uganda. In the United States it's above 77.
On average, Ugandan families have seven children. Parents know
they'll need children to take care of them when (if) they grow
old. But they also know they're likely to lose two or three children
along the way.So they procreate accordingly.
* * *
Continued
Ed Cohen is an associate editor of this magazine.
(October 2005)
