Last week the moment I had been dreading for months finally arrived: a colleague asked me, "are you religious?". Heart sink.
I had been operating on a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy on religion. Kenya is a profoundly religious country, with a majority of Christians (78% of the population, from every denomination under the sun) and then a substantial minority of Muslims. Going to Church on Sunday for at least several hours is an integral part of most people's lives and prayers are an assumed part not just of family and home life but also of the workplace. Even the most hardened scoundrel of a matatu driver is likely to cover his Nissan in Bible quote stickers or slogans like "Relax, Jesus is driving" (quite frankly, nothing is likely to relax me less - I'd rather put my faith in brakes and so forth - but more on that another time).
To the vast majority of Kenyans the idea that I might not believe in God is unthinkable: God's existence is entirely axiomatic and unquestionable. So I have kept my own views private, joined in the prayers in a spirit of "when in Rome..." and done my best to quietly fit in with a very faith-centred society.
But of course the flaw in my "don't ask, don't tell" policy was all too obvious: what if someone asks? The inevitability of my own exposure was always lurking. Very early in my placement our chairman at KAIH had asked me if I was a member of the Church of England and, on the spur of the moment and unwilling to alienate an important person in our organisation so soon, I mumbled something about having gone to a Church school and sometimes going to Church (in reality, I sometimes take my Gran to Church on Christmas Eve to keep her sweet and because I love carols). I didn't feel very good about this cop out and promised myself that if the question ever came up again I would tell the truth.
And now it had.
Colleague [collecting something from the printer]: Are you religious?
Me: No, I'm not.
C: Ah, then this will not be for you.
[Colleague leaves office but returns a few minutes later].
C: So you do not go to Church?
Me: No.
C: Why?
Me [willing to evade the crux of the matter of possible]: I think the Bible says many wise and good things, but I also think it can be used by evil people for their own ends. I don't disagree with the basic ethics of Christianity.
C: So why do you not go to Church?
Me [steeling myself for impact]: Because I do not believe in God.
Colleague [frowns and looks sad]: You do not believe in God?
[Leaves office but returns again a few minutes later]
Colleague: Will you allow me to prove to you that God exists?
Me: I respect your opinions and would not try to persuade you that God does not exist. I think you should give me the same courtesy.
[Colleague looks disappointed but, to his credit, leaves it there. I also think it important to say that our conversation has not changed his behaviour towards me at all and that he's a thoroughly good egg].
Part of me would have enjoyed a proper debate about religion but I knew it was likely to end badly, in part because our cultural terms of reference are completely at odds. Western liberal notions of individualism and pluralism just aren't really, well, Kenyan.
Both my colleague and I are products of our societies. My parents always did their best to leave me to make my own decisions about religion; as a child I asked them once why I had never been baptised and they said it was because they thought it was a decision I should make for myself as an adult. But of course their own attitudes rub off: neither of them have much time for authority, rule books or tradition. They are of the generation that campaigned against Vietnam, marched at CND rallies and boycotted South African fruit. These are values I love and respect, partly because of the very fact that they come from my parents, and they have profoundly shaped my own attitudes to the world. How could they not?
Beyond that, England sat at the heart of the Enlightenment; produced Darwin and Richard Dawkins, William Blake and The Bloomsbury Group; cradled Sid Vicious and Kate Bush. A willingness to embrace diversity and challenge accepted truths is part of our cultural heritage just as much as baked beans on toast and a nice cup of tea.
My Kenyan colleague, meanwhile, was brought up in a society where adults know best, where the education system relies on rote learning and where the Bible is the unquestioned word of God. It is also a much more communal society, where the extended family, the clan and the village shape people's interactions and beliefs: while I might feel uncomfortable about people "prying" into my personal beliefs, in Kenyan culture privacy doesn't seem to mean much.
In the UK our social lives tend to be shaped by work; here your Church is the centre for much of your social life and religion is exuberant, noisy and public - preachers shout and rant in the markets and on the buses, and any self-respecting Church, while it might be made of tin, will have a loud speaker and some serious singing. Our friends who live next door to a Church need ear plugs to attempt a Sunday lie-in and dread the monthly 24 hour pray-athons.
With these societal differences I find it hard to explain that I have a strong code of ethics, even though it is not attached to a particular religion. It's even harder to explain that my atheism is not laziness or ignorance: I have thought long and hard about God (when I was seven I decided the Bible needed improvement and wrote my own version) [Ed: Allys is a tough critic!] and hold my beliefs just as sincerely as a devoutly religious person.
The circle of influence flows both ways, and religion hugely shapes people's ideas about their world. In particular, attitudes to death are very different. Partly because there is a lot more of it, and because with much larger families it tends to touch people more often, but also because it is taken as an unquestioned truth that there is an after life. As an example, in one week my colleague lost two close relatives, one in a serious road accident. She took the news of this second death at work and didn't cry - in fact barely mentioned it. She calmly finished the day's work, attended the funeral and never brought it up again. Death is a stage of life here and, while people do mourn, it lacks the finality it has for me: "As God wills it."
Religion also coexists with people's feelings of powerlessness. The sense of agency we have back home is very strong: partly because we have much more control over our lives (or at least the illusion of it), and partly because our intellectual heritage focuses very much on the individual and personal accomplishment - from the liberal ideology of "the great man" shaping history, to the bastardised-post-modern notion that being able to chose between 26 different brands of organic yoghurt is in some way empowering.
Here poverty means that people often don't have much sway over their lives. But faith also takes a strong stance of things "being in God's hands". In some ways this, so it seems to me, helps Kenyan's to cope with the unpredictability of life and to maintain optimism in the face of some terrifying odds. Sometimes it angers my ingrained Western liberalism, and makes me desperate to say: "Just take ownership! This is a democracy! You can sack your leaders, challenge their decisions and question authority!" But that's not quite how things work.
The complex interplay between religion and society twists ever further. A colleague once explained to me that some Churches are only for rich people, because wealth is seen as a sign of God's favour. And the Church is heavily implicated in attitudes on gender and - even more destructively - on homosexuality, which leave me regularly seething. On the other hand faith seems to give a social focus, charity and a sense of purpose in an erratic world.
Moreover, there is an intellectual undercurrent that says that a religious state is part of a distinctively African identity, while secular western societies are spiraling into decadent decline. So having imported Christianity through zealous western missionaries it is now what some Africans see as distinguishing them from the "colonial masters" (as the Kenyan press regularly refers to us).
A pastor I met through work once said to me: "In England I know that they are making all the Churches into factories: I think that once you came to Africa to teach us, but now we must return to evangelise you." How to explain the intricacies of England? How to convey the polite tea drinking, Sunday Schools and jumble sales that define the Church of England for most of us? The very notion of "evangelism" seems a little uncouth - a little too American. We have never had much time for busy-bodies, after all. And then how to explain that - far from being turned into factories - converted Churches are mostly two-bed flats and Pitcher and Pianos? How to explain Westminster Abbey and Tesco Metro?
Religion here is like trying to untangle cold spaghetti - pull one end and a starchy clump of society comes with it. So despite my tendencies towards being a nosy cultural tourist, unless someone asks, I'm not telling.
