"Religion and Politics in Kenya"by John LonsdaleTrinity College, CambridgeLECTURE 3: Wednesday 9th Feb 2005QUESTIONSTo set the agenda of this last lecture I want to re-phrase two questions withwhich I started my first, and ask:-1 Why did clerical criticism of unjust rule have so much effect in promoting andprotecting political dissidence in the 1990s and yet have so little effect onKenya's ruling culture and practice?As in much of the rest of Africa, Kenya's 'second independence' in the early1990s, with the return of Multi-Party Democracy, owed much to a growing Christiancritique-or clerical critique, and remember, theology is not enough-ofauthoritarian, corrupt, and inefficient one-party rule that condemned ever moreKenyans to poverty and misery-especially disturbing after nearly two decades ofeconomic growth, and political stability had given rise to talk of 'Kenyanexceptionalism'.The 'mainstream' churches were important-Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican-heirs ofchurches which were more or less 'established' in their western homes. So wastheir incarnational theology: which argued that while the realms of God and Caesarmay be autonomous, and may both be argued to be divinely authorised, nonethelessthere are Biblical and Christian justifications for insisting on* consultative government (Isaiah 18: 1: 'come, let us reason together')* the protection of the human rights of God's children,* and that the more abundant life that Christ said he had come to bringrequires the individual exercise of greater personal moral responsibility (thatis, liberty) than an authoritarian state permits, especially if, as in Kenya,autocracy was associated with kleptocracy and even, as some feared, with the life-sucking powers of the Devil.Kenya's charismatic and more conservative evangelical churches, were morepreoccupied with a call for the personal brokenness of being born again to asalvation that did not depend upon political activism but upon faith.Coincidentally, thanks to the accidents of the missionary politics that carved out'spheres of influence' for evangelism in the early 20th century that I referred toin my first lecture, these conservative evangelical churches, heirs to Americancongregationalist and baptist nonconformity, happen to be strongest among those'pastoralist' peoples who provided the core political geography of what was until2002 the ruling party, KANU. By contrast, the Presbyterians are confined almostentirely to Kikuyuland, the core of the then opposition, while the Anglicans tooare a largely Kikuyu and Luo church, although in recent years they, like theCatholics before them, have become a much more 'Kenyan' church. The regionalcharacter of Christian denominationalism in Kenya-as also of Islam-makes itpeculiarly difficult to distinguish between theological principle and ethnic orregional frustration as spurs to clerical pronouncements on political matters, aconfusion that politicians under pressure became very well skilled in exploiting.While many other civil society interests were mobilised, while politicalrivals had their own self-interest in more open political competition, whileinternational pressure from donor states was also important, perhaps decisive,nonetheless the mainstream churches can indeed claim to have acted as defenders ofthe people of God against dictatorship. Still more, the Christian critique of

unjust rule and efforts at voter education could be said to have raised thepeople's hopes of just governance and constitutional reform that brought thelandslide victory of the Rainbow Coalition in 2002 that ended 41 years ofincreasingly kleptocratic KANU rule.And yet there is today a great feeling of disillusion among Kenyans. Notmuch seems to have changed. Taxi-drivers admit that they are no longer shaken downby the police; all are grateful that the pestering of street children in centralNairobi is no more, as approved schools have been revived; many corrupt judgeshave been dismissed; many previously fat senior policemen have been givenpunishment postings to remote districts; indeed such is the effectiveness of thepolice, who cleared all sunbathing tourists forcibly from the beaches when wordwas heard from Sri Lanka of the approaching Tsunami on Boxing Day that only oneperson in Kenya was killed, a local fisherman, by contrast with the hundreds inSomalia and, so I am told, in Tz. Kenya may once have been a state on the verge ofcollapse but no longer feels like that. Still more, free primary education was notonly promised but remains to-day; the KCC plundered by the previous regime, hasbeen revived and has resumed its free milk supplies to primary schools; thegovernment is no longer shamefacedly silent about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and istaking the sort of preventative action that it should have done years ago. The'Rainbow' Coalition government is certainly not to be altogether despised.But the disillusion persists, principally because the Kenya political classappears to be as corrupt as ever. Direct pillage of the state coffers such as wenton under Moi has probably stopped. But high-corruption, as John Githongo the anti-corruption commissioner calls it, continues, in the manipulation of ministerialbudgets, the demand for commissions in return for contracts, and so on. And thepromised constitutional reform, promised before the 2002 election, that woulddilute and redistribute executive power seems as far off as ever.So the British High Commissioner, Edward Clay, became a popular hero to manyKenyans when he complained last summer that the greedy and despairing over-eatingof the new government was causing it to vomit over the shoes of its donor partnersoverseas. The motive of desparation that he saw behind ministerial greed showedacute insight, and it is a question to which I shall return.So I repeat my question: why is it that a religious, or at least clericalcritique of governance in Kenya can be said to have both so much effect, in thehectic years of the 1990s and yet, now, apparently, so little?There are many layers to an answer. I shall take them in turn:1. the oscillations in Kenya's theology of state-centred liberation2. radical changes in relations between local society and the state,which has greatly complicated, indeed entangled, church and state relations;3. the quintessentially Kenyan questions of who precisely were thechildren of God on whose behalf the churches were demanding a life of moreabundance?4. the machinations of the Devil and the Gospel of Prosperity.5. Christianity, Islam, and the impasse of constitutional reform.1) Kenya's theology of liberationIn my second lecture I suggested that this had obvious colonial origins inthe sense, felt by many missionaries, and white officials, and settlers, thattheirs was a providential civilising mssion, rescuing Africans from Islamicslavery, and from backwardness and idleness, and, especially in the view ofmissionaries, from ignorance of a loving God. Missionaries were in consequencereluctance to criticise colonial rule and its bias towards the white settlers,

except where support for the settlers, in the way of land, tax, and labour tooclearly put power in the hands of African chiefs-many of whom seemed opposed toChristianity-or so subverted the energies of African peasant society that itceased to be able to support the growth of local churches.I then suggested that this tension was much relieved when the colonialgovernment responded to African discontent between the wars by conceding toKenyans the most progressive form of local government to be found in Britishcolonial Africa, local governments that went into partnership with the missionchurches over school funding; but that tension between local church and centralpolitics returned before independence-as Kenya's nationalists, all children of themission churches, acquired more power, more sophistication, more importantexternal contacts, and seemed to attract more popular allegiance, than the nowrather pauper-looking churches they had left behind. Mission paternalism had beenovertaken, and was for a time affronted, by African nationalism.But what of church and state relations since independence in 1963? This Ithink has gone through two cycles and has perhaps embarked on a third, withreference to the theology of Kenya's liberation.a) The mission churches Africanised their leaderships fairly soon atindependence. They often acquired close links with the hiearchy of the state. TheAnglican bishopp Obadiah Kariuki was brother-in-law to Kenya's first president,Jomo Kenyatta. One of Mrs Kenyatta's close relatives was Catholic chaplain at theUniversity of Nairobi. More generally there was obvious hope for the children ofGod in an independent government committed to liberation from the humiliations ofcolonialism. Kenyatta's own chief criticism of colonial rule was that it attacked'the spirit of manhood' by removing from Africans the self-educationalresponsibility of choice in their lives. The churches also found greatevangelistic opportunities in co-operating as local experts in the work of'development', often funded from overseas. So Kenya's churches were very slow tocriticise increasing authoritarianism. None questioned Kenyatta's decision to banthe sole opposition party, the Kenya People's Union in 1968. Opposition didhowever stir when in 1969-in the wake of the assassination of Tom Mboya (at theinstigation of people still unknown but widely believed to be close to Kenyatta)that caused great popular anger against Kenyatta's Kikuyu kitchen cabinet-Kikuyuwere coerced into taking an oath of loyalty to the continued Kikuyu domination ofKenya. This was far too reminiscent of Mau Mau and its supposed opposition toChristianity, and made many Christians, forcibly oathed, feel that they had beenexposed to the power of the Devil. I think Kenyatta's authority with the churchesnever quite recovered from that shock of confrontation between the saving blood ofChrist and the demonic blood of goats intrinsic to the Kikuyu oath of politicalloyalty.(b)So it was something of a relief for the churches when Kenyatta was in1978 succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, a born-again Christian, and from the relativelyweak Kalenjin people, naturally antagonistic to the concentration of wealth andpower in Kikuyu hands. He released political prisoners, he set limits to theaccumulation of land, he appeared to set the Kenyan state, once again, on the pathof liberation for its citizens.And, again, it took the churches some time to realise that there was onceagain a need to prophesy against unjust power. And when they did, their spokesmenwere largely Presbyterians and Anglicans, either Kikuyu or Luo, both peoples, asthey felt, unjustly excluded from power, not speaking for the Kenyan people of Godas a whole although that was of course their claim. Initially government was tooeasily able to discredit them by reason of their ethnic partiality (and for theirpeddling of 'foreign' ideas). But in the 1990s almost all of civil society, the