Postcolonial Space

We have gathered for the symposium in Brackenhurst Baptist Conference Center, a campus in Tigoni, thirty minutes from Naibori. It is green, cool, quiet, and beautiful here--a wonderful place for reflection, discussion, and prayer. We are here because our trip to Garissa was cancelled due to safety concerns. We are safe here in our walled compound. But this is a space of contradictions as well, and contains all of the tensions that exemplify the postcolonial space that we are interrogating.

For starters, this land used to be a British country club and was bought by Baptist missionaries when Kenya gained independence from Britain. So the land (and power) was transferred from the hands of white colonialists to white missionaries. (This is true of Catholic lands in the surrounding areas as well. Some members of our group when to Mass at a Benedictine monastery down the street this morning.) Land reform is a central issue in Kenyan politics today; in the disparities of land access you see the remaining privileges of the wealthy over the poor in ways that reflect the power dynamics of colonial Kenya. While our group has the funding to afford to hold our symposium here, I am told that this space would be too expensive for the average Christian church group or youth group in Kenya. This too reflects the tensions of a postcolonial space: the outsiders can afford the most luxurious hotels and conference centers, and can tromp through the National Parks as tourists, while these spaces are too expensive for many citizens of Kenya to afford.

So here we are, a group of ten women gathered to discuss radical inequalities, international health care disparities, and the oppression of women and children, and we are meeting in a space that is off-limits for most of the women and children we are talking about. Should I feel guilty when I enjoy my hot shower, or feast at the lunch buffet, or walk through the garden on my afternoon stroll? No, yes, maybe. I don't know. I tend to think that guilt is not productive. But it is important to think through the contradictions and tensions, to name them, and to think about ways that our group can transform them, even in part.