FOURTH NIGHT » Kenya

Orthodoxy in Kenya (Part II)

Constantine Markides — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:45:34 +0000

The following photos constitute the second and final part of my photo essay on Kenyan Orthodoxy (for Part I click here). They were all taken in Western Kenya, mostly in remote Luo villages in the tropical forests around Lake Victoria. Although Western Kenya’s principal city, Kisumu, had a reputation even then for being unsafe at night, and although the Lake Victoria region of Western Kenya is hardly prosperous, the region’s slow paced village life, rolling tea fields, tracts of fertile farmland, and tropical lushness all conveyed a sense of peace and relative abundance (although the same cannot be said of Western Kenya’s Rift Valley, a vast flat arid plain dotted with Masai communities living in abject dirt-and-flies poverty). This bucolic impression may have been exaggerated by the fact that I had spent so much time in the Nairobi shantytowns, which make for miserable living from any perspective. Nevertheless, whatever truth there may have been to the idyllic picture of Western Kenya was shattered in recent months when the region, especially Kisumu and the Rift Valley, experienced some of Kenya’s goriest bloodletting in the post-election bedlam. There was no hint then of what was to come, at least not to the transient visitor’s eye. The only violence I had experienced was from an Anopheles mosquito, which injected me with a dose of malaria and soon had me curled up in a trembling, feverish heap just in time for the seven-hour potholed drive back to Nairobi.

SLIDESHOW OF PHOTO ESSAY (part II)

-Constantine Markides

Orthodoxy in Kenya (Part I)

Constantine Markides — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:16:51 +0000

IN 1922, a young woman named Hadley Richardson thought she would surprise her husband, who at the time was in Switzerland on assignment as a war correspondent, by bringing to him almost all of his fiction-all unpublished-from their Paris apartment. It turned out a surprise all right, but not the sort she intended. While her train was still stationed in the Gare de Lyon, she briefly left the compartment to buy some mineral water. On returning she found that the valise-which contained not only the manuscripts, but also the carbon copies, duplicates, etc.-was gone. In hindsight the traumatic loss seems only appropriate, even fortuitous, for that young writer-Ernest Hemingway-who would develop a ‘less is more’ credo and whose mascot, if we might ascribe him one posthumously, may as well have been a scalpel.

For this month’s essay I had intended to write about my experiences shadowing the Orthodox Archbishop of Kenya as a journalist for two weeks last July through Nairobi and Western Kenya as he toured a group of Cypriots (on their yearly “Holy Mission” to Kenya) around Orthodox churches, schools, orphanages and clinics that they had helped finance. But when I sat down to write I realized I’d unwittingly discarded or lost all of my notes. No traumatic loss of the young Hemingway variety, but still a downer.

I could of course have made a pastiche of my newspaper and magazine articles. But the very reason I wanted to write an essay was because my reporting seemed to me inadequate-although this was partly due to limitations on content, style, tone, etc. that the newspaper form imposes-at conveying even a small fraction of my impressions and of my conflicted feelings over missionary enterprises.

All missionary work inevitably carries with it an unsavory load of historical baggage. In numerous novels the renowned Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has described with unsentimental but scorching starkness the destructive effect of Christian missionaries upon tribal culture, while the Western practice of “Christianizing the savages” through invasion and bloodshed will not soon be forgotten by those being Christianized (to take one example, President McKinley justified the bloody 1899 US invasion of the Philippines by explaining that the Filipinos were “unfit for government… and there was nothing left… to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them”).

Of course, none of the sword-wielding Crusaders, the rifle-toting converters or the hooded dungeon-thugs of the Inquisition belonged to the Orthodox tradition, but one might still reasonably imagine that the Orthodox Church, with its unshakeable adherence to ancient Byzantine customs, would oppose the ‘polluting’ of its ceremonies by foreign rituals and practices.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v4sYSoRl3I

But in Kenya, at least, that does not seem to be the case. “Actually we as a church are the ones who are keeping and encouraging the culture of the people,” Archbishop Makarios said, pointing out that even within Orthodoxy, millennia old practices from the pre-Christian era are still maintained. Archbishop Makarios of Kenya also chants in the tribal dialects as well as Greek, and he oversees the translation of the texts of the Orthodox services from Greek into the local dialect. ”For some of these tribes, this is the first time that written texts are circulating in their languages.”

(Yes, I lifted the last three paragraphs verbatim from one of my magazine pieces. It is probably as close as I got at expressing any of my ‘conflicted feelings over missionary enterprises,’ and it does not seem to me to be very close at all.)

My notes for Kenya were gone, but I did still possess hundreds of photographs. I thought at first they might serve as cannons to fire marooned neurons across the otherwise impassable synaptic gaps of my memory, but it wasn’t until I sat through a digital slideshow that I realized that-like an adult and armored Athena springing unexpectedly from Zeus’ head-my essay was already fully formed in those images that were fading in and out before my eyes.

Any photograph to some extent reflects the photographer’s way of seeing the world. It can tell as much about the subject who is taking it as of the object being photographed. They do not speak with the unequivocal forthrightness of an essay in words but it is precisely their amenability to multiple interpretations that makes them all the more appropriate here. I will try to keep commentary to a minimum, and not merely because I share hopes with that museum curator who, in Susan Sontag’s words, “in order to turn a photojournalist’s work into art, shows the photographs without their original captions.”

Before the images, a few last words on the Archbishop of Kenya, Makarios Tillyrides, who defies the all-too-easy contemptuous stereotype of the missionary as parasitic hypocrite. It is a testament to his authenticity that he has remained in Kenya, working without respite in its most impoverished and dangerous regions, despite enduring a near fatal case of cerebral malaria and despite having been the victim of numerous assaults from robbers, one of which even left him unconscious. That he has not temporarily fled the country now that Kenya is wracked by ethnic violence and slipping towards civil war but instead stayed on, offering up his seminary as a temporary housing refuge for dozens of women and children who had to evacuate the Kibera slum, does not surprise me at all.

SLIDESHOW OF PHOTO ESSAY

Constantine Markides

*You can see Part II of Orthodoxy in Kenya here

From Kibera to Mara

Constantine Markides — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 03:10:01 +0000

IN JULY I flew into Nairobi to write a series of newspaper and magazine articles on the Orthodox Archbishop of Kenya. Towards the end of my three weeks there, I accompanied the Archbishop to a church service in Kibera—the largest slum in Africa with an estimated population of one million, all living in an area the size of New York’s Central Park. During the liturgy I set off with some locals on a walk through the shantytown. There is something unavoidably repugnant about a white man wandering through an African slum with a camera, even if he can claim a journalistic motive. Nonetheless, it didn’t dissuade me from taking plenty of photos, though I did try to be discreet (my mid-grade ‘prosumer’ camera cannot approach an SLR in depth of field and image quality, but one of its advantages is that the detachable LCD monitor and powerful optimal zoom allows for photographing on the sly). A few days later I went on a three-day camping safari in the Masai Mara game reserve in hopes of witnessing the annual wildebeest migration. Initially I intended to post a photo essay from either Kibera or the safari, but I’ve decided to include both, with alternating photos. One might argue that juxtaposing images of wild beasts side by side with slum kids shares something in spirit with the khaki-clad imperial good old boys of the early 1900s who traveled into Africa to hunt big game and ‘encounter the curious naked savages.’ That may be so. The white man’s burden remains with us, not as Kipling conceived of it, but as an inescapable historical baggage of racism and upturned-nose colonialism that every white bears with him every time he steps onto African soil. It seemed especially appropriate, for cynical reasons, to juxtapose the two sets of photos after I read that there is now a tour guide outfit in Nairobi that offers “slum tours,” or as they also put it with alliterative and wordplayish flair, “Pro Poor Tourism” (doublespeak in structure as well as content). For a compassionate fee, the adventurer can tour some of the most impoverished areas of Africa and snap photos of the bipedal wildlife through the detachable roof. On its website, the company gushes on about how it “came up with the new noble idea of Kenya slum tourism” and assures its readers that “through tourism business” it wants to help make real its dream of “an Africa without slums.” Of course, one could argue that all this is in keeping with, or even an improvement on, the essence of the African safari. After all, normally on a game drive you hope to see predators in action; on a slum tour you have the chance to actually become one.

To see the photo essay click here: PHOTOS: From Kibera to Mara

Constantine Markides