Email from Ngeti by James H. Smith & Ngeti Mwadime

Author:James H. Smith & Ngeti Mwadime
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520281103
Publisher: University of California Press

ENTER THE PENTECOSTALS

They were like a heavy cloud that threatened to darken the earth, yet promised rain. Their coming was like dawn in a land that had been in darkness for eons. Their voice opened prisons and dungeons, and their words loosed chains and shackles, and the fetters on the prisoners’ feet were broken, and they came out singing and rejoicing. Then the sun rose over the horizon of ignorance, and its beams of wisdom, knowledge, and understanding illuminated the earth below. As the sun rose higher, those that had dwelt in the land of gloom began to see. They heard and understood that which had been hidden from before the beginning of the earth. But as the sun rose higher and higher, its heat scorched the seed and the tender shoots and they began to shrivel and droop. Some died and some were on the verge of dying.

After the events at Lunga-Lunga, I went to live in Nakuru [in the Rift Valley] with my paternal uncle with the intention of getting a job so I could start fending for myself. I had tried getting a job in Mombasa but to no avail. I recall this time of my life as a period of searching for myself and carving out an identity all my own, moving away from what had been inculcated into me as a boy. Things like going to church were matters for those who did not appreciate the hallucinatory effects of bhang and qat. Church was for those who pretended not to appreciate the joys of screwing and all the other forbidden fruits. I had stopped going to church altogether coz deep down I had decided that no one who fucked like me and used highs like me was gonna tell me anything about the God above. I read the Bible only when I was high and listened to reggae music coz I considered its philosophical message about emancipation from mental slavery very appropriate during this particular time, when I wanted to free myself from the shackles of religion and tradition. Anything that did not go down well with me or crossed my path was outright Babylonian.

I managed to get a job as a booking clerk in Kisumu [a city on the shore of Lake Victoria, in Luoland]. It was when I was working in this town that I received a letter from Taita (from my mother) telling me that they, that is my mother and my three sisters, had found a new religion—that is, they had become “born-again” Christians. They told me how the Catholic Church was not ready to mingle with those that had been caught in this wave of Protestantism and that they had been ostracized. This took place after the parish priest had written my father (who was in Mombasa) a letter informing him that his wife and three daughters were at risk of being excommunicated on account of what the Catholic Church deemed an outright act of repudiation. Several other women were

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