The Importance of the Catholic Church in Africa

I just finished reading an interesting article in the New York Times, and I thought it was "worthy to be shared":

Church Helps Fill a Void in Africa

By ADAM NOSSITER

LAGOS, Nigeria — The young woman slept soundly on the cool marble floor before the altar, a break from the chaos at home. In the courtyard, neighborhood teenagers filled giant jerrycans with purified water from a stone fountain. In an aisle, a rail-thin young woman from a nearby slum said she had not eaten since yesterday but was expecting sustenance here.

Behind its high spiked iron gates in this frenetic megalopolis of anywhere between 11 million and 21 million, the church of Christ the King is protector, feeder and healer.

In the 6 a.m. darkness, this working-class church is already filled with parishioners in shirt-sleeves and T-shirts, a pool of hymn-singing light in a blacked-out neighborhood. Six Masses are celebrated here each Sunday for up to 10,000 people, and 102 people were baptized last Saturday. The parish priest, the Rev. Ikenna Ikechi, dreams of building a multistory community center to accommodate his growing flock. “Our only limitation is space,” he said.

The Roman Catholic Church’s explosive growth here and across Africa has led to serious talk of the possibility of an African cardinal succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, and clerics from Nigeria, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has the continent’s largest Catholic population, have been mentioned as top contenders.

With 16 percent of the world’s Catholics now living in Africa, the church’s future, many say, is here. The Catholic population in Africa grew nearly 21 percent between 2005 and 2010, far outstripping other parts of the world. While the number of priests in North America and Europe declined during the same period, in Africa they grew by 16 percent. The seminaries, clerical officials here say, are bursting with candidates, and African priests are being sent to take over churches in former colonial powers.

Untainted by the child sexual abuse scandals, the church here draws parishioners, many in their 20s and 30s, who flock eagerly to services, which can last hours, with no complaints.

“After work, a lot of young people come to Mass,” said Chinedu Okani, 29, an engineer in Lagos who was attending a service at the Church of the Assumption in the Falomo neighborhood. “It provides a serene environment.”

He acknowledges another attraction, too: that the church is a functioning institution in a country that lacks them. “The welfare system is not working here,” Mr. Okani said. “We find a way to make up for it: the family, and the church.”

In Nigeria, at least 70 percent of the people live below the poverty line, and 80 percent of the country’s oil wealth goes to 1 percent of the population. The police do not respond to calls, and electricity is spotty.

Outside Christ the King, on the dirt streets of the Mushin neighborhood, there are armed robbers and no lights. It is little wonder that the priest must gently shoo away parishioners lingering to read or chat in the church’s arcaded meeting spaces under generator-powered lights.

“A lot of it is the challenge of living in Nigeria,” said Father Ikechi, who was educated at Fordham University in New York. “We can’t rely on the government for water, light, security. Whatever you want, you have to provide for yourself.”

For his parishioners, he said, “what they face is huge. So they tend to come to God as their last resort. You can’t go to the police. Who will you go to? You will go to God. Some of them, where they sleep is so bad, they just come to sleep here during the day.”

After a devastating bus accident recently the church paid parishioners’ hospital bills, the priest said. “Otherwise they would die,” he said.

In this way the church is fulfilling a role it played in its distant European past, providing for the people where the state cannot, but some question whether the African church’s growth and size can be sustained as the continent’s institutions develop.

“When people say Africa is the future, I say, ‘Oh, isn’t it the past?’ ” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “I see it as a repeat of the past, what happened in Europe centuries ago. What’s going to happen in Africa when everybody gets a television set, when modernity comes?”

For now, that question is largely academic here.

“Almost every system has collapsed,” said Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah of Sokoto, in northwestern Nigeria. “The entire architecture of governance has collapsed. The church remains the only moral force.

“The church offers the best schools, social services, medicine. The God talk in Africa is a mark of the failure of the economic, social and political system,” Bishop Kukah added, “We are being called left, right and center to mend the broken pieces of what are considered the failing states of Africa.”

In a continent rife with corruption, the church also provides a singular moral voice. Bishop Kukah, for example, has played a large role in good governance and human rights commissions, including the investigation into the 1990s military dictatorship.

In Congo, where the number of Catholics has more than tripled in the past 35 years, Archbishop Laurent Monsengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa has fiercely criticized the government, including the tainted election results that secured President Joseph Kabila’s re-election in 2011. The Catholic Church deployed an extensive network of independent observers during the December elections, and the bishops’ council later denounced the “culture of treachery, lies and terror.”

“It’s the church’s engagement on behalf of the Congolese people, the promotion of the whole man, you’ve got to bring forth bread and the Gospels,” said Bishop Bernard-Emmanuel Kasanda of Mbuji-Mayi in Congo. “We have to be with the people. Moral authority, yes. This is what pushes people towards us.”

In Nigeria, where over $5 billion was reported missing from a minerals ministry on Friday, the latest in a series of seemingly endless government scandals, the church offers an alternative to a life mired in corruption, poverty and hopelessness.

Laurence Emeka, 30, who sells telephone accessories at an open-air stall, rose at 5 a.m. last Sunday to attend Mass at Christ the King before going to work. The service gave him a kind of sanctuary. “Peace, satisfaction, confidence in God,” he said. “It helps me cope with the circumstances of daily life.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting from Rome.

Failing Students, Failing a Nation

Here is a recent report on the failure of the government educational system in Tanzania -- fully 60% of the Form 4 students failed the national examination (Form 4 is the last grade in the ordinary level ['"O level"] of secondary school; the college-bound students continue on to the advanced level ["A level"] for two years. Please take the time to read the report, and I'll catch you at its end:

The mass failure in the 2012 Form 4 examinations has triggered a national outcry, with educationists describing it as disastrous enough to shake the foundations of the government’s thinking on education.
The results announced two days ago pointed to a 60 percent failure rate. Now stakeholders are warning that the government should see this as a wake-up call and not imagine that doing more of what was done in the past decade will somehow improve future results.
“That would be sheer folly,” said the head of Twaweza, Mr Rakesh Rajani. “There is absolutely no other way to interpret it (the shocking results).”
On Monday, the government announced that nearly six out of every 10 students who sat last year’s National Form 4 examinations failed, with the number of students who scored Division Zero rising from 31.94 per cent in 2011.
A total of 240,903 students out of 397,126 students who sat the 2012 National Form 4 exams failed, according to the results announced by the minister of Education and Vocational Training, Dr Shukuru Kawambwa.
What was required, Mr Rajani said, was a complete rethink of the education agenda, adding: “Since 2002, we have been building classrooms and getting teachers certified. It has not worked. Examination results have got worse.”
Instead, he said, the government and education stakeholders needed to get a better grip on what drives quality and learning, considering that evidence from other countries suggests it is not inputs such as classrooms, formally certified teachers or even books that make the difference.
He added: “We need to get over our fixation with inputs. We need to innovate and think about incentives and experiment with new ideas based on solid evidence—for example, paying teachers a bonus for every child who passes with a Division I or II (cash on delivery).”
He commended the National Examinations Council of Tanzania (Necta), though, saying the results suggest that Necta is probably doing a good job of tightening the screws on cheating and in making sure that the results are not fiddled with even when they are a national embarrassment.
“If this is indeed the case, Necta deserves credit for not succumbing to pressure to cook the results to give a more positive picture,” he said.
Mr James Mbatia, the chairman of NCCR-Mageuzi, who early this month moved a private motion in Parliament asking the House to form a select committee to come up with recommendations that would save the education sector from further decline, yesterday appealed to President Jakaya Kikwete to form a commission of experts to look into the education crisis.
He told reporters that the President needed a quick and serious intervention, adding that he was ready to volunteer.
Mr Mbatia said the examination results proved right his recent private motion on education. “It is now an open secret that the country lacks an education curriculum to direct both the teachers and pupils,” he added.
In his private motion, which had the support of MPs from both the ruling CCM and the opposition, Mr Mbatia said the ministry of Education and Vocational Training does not have credible and cohesive school curricula.

Kawambwa ‘should resign’
Chama Cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (Chadema) shadow minister for Education and Vocational Training, Ms Susan Lyimo, termed the results a national disaster. Ms Lyimo told a news conference that it was high time Dr Kawambwa and his team resigned because they have shamed the nation.
Most leaders did not care about education in the country because their children are in prestigious schools overseas, she added, and the root of the mass failure could be a go-slow by teachers who are demanding payment of their outstanding arrears.
In Arusha, there were calls on Dr Kawambwa to resign while one of the civic leaders suggested that the results be scrapped and the exercise repeated.

Poorly equipped schools
“There is nothing surprising in the results,” lamented Elibariki Mangi from Babati. “The schools are poorly equipped and don’t have enough teachers. Moreover, we have lowered the secondary school entry marks.” He said many secondary schools lacked teaching equipment and laboratories. Some have only a few teachers, with some subjects not being taught at all.
Business consultant Simon Mapolu said everyone should be concerned because the results reflected a host of problems facing the education sector, including a skewed student/teacher ratio and shortage of books and other teaching aids.
A tourism sector official, Cyrill Akko, said the poor Form 4 results were the result of teacher strikes over the poor working environment and apparent neglect by society. “The government has no option but to sit down with the teachers and seek a solution to the education crisis,” he said on the phone.
Mr Gesso Bajuta, a councillor from Endamillay ward in Mbulu district, Manyara region, said the situation was worse in ward secondary schools and pleaded with the authorities to salvage them.
According to the executive director of Sikika, Mr Irenei Kiria, trends showed that Tanzania was likely to have an uneducated workforce unable to cope with the competitive job market and education should not be politicised. He added: “If the education system is not overhauled, the nation will have a large number of uneducated citizens.”
The Tanzania Teachers Union President, Mr Gratian Mukoba, dismissed the idea that the recent teachers’ strike had something to do with the poor examination results. He put the blame squarely with the government which, he said, did not have a competent monitoring system.
Ms Mary Kitunga, the director of Soma, a non-governmental organisation, said the problem started in primary schools, where there was “overpopulation of pupils” in classrooms.
According to Mr Bonas Ndimbo, the president of the Tanzania Heads of Schools Association, the examination results have left thousands of Form 4 leavers with an uncertain future. HakiElimu said in a statement that the results were a clear indication of weaknesses in the education system.
Reported by Fariji Msonsa, Mulemwa Mulemwa, Raymond Kaminyoge and Alex Bitekeye in Dar es Slaam and Zephania Ubwani in Arusha

I am so proud of the performance of St. Peter Claver High School. The school is not old enough to have Form 4 test-takers (the oldest students are presently in their first semester of Form 3), but I can report that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE STUDENTS PASSED THE NATIONAL FORM 2 EXAMINATIONS.

The school was founded neither to be a school for the elite nor only for the poor. Rather, the dream has always been that it would be a school where -- as I often said -- "the children of parliamentarians would study next to the children of peasants." In order for those poor children to have a place, however, we continue to need your help. Please consider making a donation by using the link on the upper right of this page. You can click on "international missions" and then write either my name or St. Peter Claver HS in the comment section.

Thanks!

The Pizzeria!

Those who visited me in Dodoma will recall eating at the pizzeria, featured in this article. Honestly, some of the best pizza anywhere!

"I've Always Dreamt of Visiting Africa..."

I hear that line so often when I speak to people about my own time in Tanzania.

Have you dreamt of visiting Africa? There is a possibility of an organized trip to Tanzania during July of 2014. The tentative arrangement looks something like this:

• Fly into KIA (Kilimanjaro International Airport);
• Spend some days in the Kilimanjaro/Arusha Area. After a visit to the Jesuit novitiate head to Karatu, only 90 miles from Arusha. Karatu would be our staging point for visits to Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a UNESCO world heritage site, and Lake Manyara, a wonderful national park not very far from Ngorongoro with animals like giraffes that are not at Ngornongoro (the paths are too steep for giraffes!);
• Travel to Dodoma via Singida, a 290-mile scenic drive along the western side of the Rift Valley -- 95% on paved roads;
• In Dodoma, visit the Jesuit apostolates in Dodoma (parish, primary school, youth centre, and St. Peter Claver High School) along with a chance to experience village life in Tanzania;
• Travel to Dar es Salaam, a 280-mile drive -- 100% on paved roads with views of the Uluguru Mountains along the way;
• Visit the Jesuit apostolates in Dar es Salaam (parish, elementary school, and high school);
• Complete the visit at an oceanside resort before flying out of Dar es Salaam.

View Larger Map

It would be about a 10 day trip, not including travel to and from TZ. Contact me if you rare interested in the possibility.

A Shout Out to my Family & Friends from Dodoma

Recently Fr. Sossy wrote the following in the newsletter of the Eastern Africa Jesuits:  

We are currently working on the bakery – as an addition to the school projects, others projects being the farming, a piggery and milk cows. Thanks to the family and friends of Fr. Marty Connell who have been supporting these initiatives!

 The assistance included some other gifts beyond my family and friends' -- that's not quite true: Anyone who supports the work of St. Peter Claver High School is a friend of mine, a very good friend!

Asanteni sana!  I''ll post some photo updates in the coming days.