Back in Africa

[I had hoped to post this earlier, but the internet has been down here and only came back today.]

I arrived in Nairobi late on Tuesday, October 7th. The flights went smoothly, thank God, and all my luggage arrived with me. On the second leg of the journey (from London to Nairobi) three tall, robust looking men all wearing kilts sat across the aisle from me. I commented to the one sitting nearest to me that my habit was longer, and he smiled. Somehow I felt as though I stuck out of the crowd a little less since there were additional men on the plane wearing something other than pants. As it turns out, they’re part of a group who is going to scale Mount Kilimanjaro in kilts to raise money for an organization fighting leukemia.

On many newer planes that fly long international routes, it’s common to have individual video screens for each of the seats with a selection of films and programs from which one can choose. Two of the films in the selection on my flight offered an interesting glimpse into the mindset of contemporary westerners. The plot of one revolved around group of resistance fighters battling against the machines that have taken over the world. The other followed a story line in which a man surprisingly meets an identical double of himself, and both discover that they are clones being exploited by an energy corporation. The substratum of both seems to be a fear about the direction in which information and biological technology seem to be racing without much guidance other than what’s possible and profitable. Both play off the intuition that these areas of scientific development could easily get out of control and turn against humanity. Is it possible that Hollywood imagination is more in touch with the potentially threatening trajectory in which technology seems to be heading than many of the politicians and intellectuals who debate things like human and chimeric (human-animal hybrid) cloning? Perhaps some of these dramatic extrapolated cinemagraphic images could be used to demonstrate the danger involved in amoral scientific research and development, especially that which tries to manipulate life itself.

In a paper I picked up as we were passing through London, I saw the first reporting on the Synod of Bishops meeting in Rome this month to discuss the Church in Africa. It quoted some forceful lines from the Pope: “There is absolutely no doubt that the so-called ‘First World’ has exported up to now and continues to export its spiritual toxic waste that contaminates the peoples of other continents, particularly those of Africa… In this sense colonialism, which is over at a political level, has never really entirely come to an end.” More to come on the African Synod!

The morning after I arrived I had the privilege of concelebrating Mass with Bishop Emeritus Paride Taban; it was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Bishop Taban shared how during the war the soldiers – even though some were not Catholic – all asked for rosaries. They prayed constantly for God’s protection and believed that it was through His power, and the prayers of the Virgin Mary, that they were kept safe.