The Pope is going to Africa, as this magazine reports. He will visit Kenya, Uganda and the Central African Republic in November. This is not the first visit of a Pope to Africa, of course, but it will be the first time that Pope Francis has been to Africa. It is not in the least bit surprising that he is going; the only surprise is that it has taken him so long.
The Pope is not going to spend very long in any of the countries he is visiting, but given the reach of social media and television, both of which are widely diffused in Africa, even in the less developed countries, his message should permeate the entire continent very quickly. The lingua franca in Kenya is Swahili or English, in Uganda it is English, and French in the Central African Republic. Presumably these are the languages he will use. French and English are widely understood in most of sub-Saharan Africa, even in lusophone countries such as Mozambique and Angola. By visiting these three countries, the Pope will be making an impact on an entire continent, I am sure.
One wonders what impact it will make on him?
Africa is markedly different from his home continent of South America, and this is seen is the way that Liberation Theology has never really caught on in Africa in the same way that it has in Latin America. This is not to say that Africa has not developed its own particular theology. Far from it. There is a strong communitarian streak in African theological writing, which is excellent, and an important corrective to the individualism of the West, and the sin of egotism. The African experience stresses the importance of belonging, to the land, to the family, to the tradition of the tribe. Initiation rites remain important.
Because of this, being part of the Church, and having what we sometimes rather lamely call “a sense of community”, comes naturally. Whereas in Europe, it remains a rather false-sounding slogan, in Africa, people really do believe and act as if they are all in it together. Go to any church in Kenya and you get a wonderful and uplifting sense of Harambee – the Swahili word which is the national motto, and which translates as something like “pulling together” or “unity”. Because this unity is reality for Africans rather than an aspiration for something they have not got, as it is for us, people do actually participate in the liturgy in Africa in a way they do not in Europe.
The other thing that has emerged in Africa is a consistent ethic of life. Marriage is for children, and the denial of life is seen as a serious sin. Here the message of the Church is warmly welcomed. Suicide is unknown among Africans (or so I was always told, and I have no difficulty believing). The Africans I knew would have been astounded by the Marris Bill, just as they were dismayed by the way Europeans exile their elders to nursing homes rather than looking after them at home themselves. Here, I think, the Pope and the Africans are on the same wavelength.
Finally, the Pope has of course written a book, or rather an encyclical, about the environment, and ecological questions are of pressing urgency in Africa. The countries he will visit are industrialising after quite a few fits and starts, and this is important for them, given their growing (though still modest) populations. More and more people are moving to cities, where they live in often squalid conditions. The Pope might well visit the notorious slum of Kibera in Nairobi (it is served by missionaries from Mexico) but if he does, he should see Kibera as in part at least as a success story.
People come together to live in such places because there are jobs nearby, and they can live cheaply there; large and dense urban populations are the engine of economic and social development. Kibera, for example, is packed full of schools, traders, craftsmen, service-providers, churches and bars. It is filthy, but it gives opportunities the countryside does not offer, just as London did in the nineteenth century. London then was as packed and squalid as Kibera is today.
I am not, needless to say, setting myself up as an apologist for slum-dwelling, and much could be done to help people in Kibera. In particular they could do with proper title to their properties and grants to improve them. But I do hope that in championing environmental causes the Pope does not allow himself to be seen as someone against industrialisation.
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