Source: The East African Standard
What does faith have to do with identity? Nothing. This is what I said when I was invited to give a keynote lecture on September 18th 2025, at a workshop the Center for Interfaith Studies in Africa at the Hekima University College in Nairobi. The theme of the workshop was “Law, Education and Interfaith Relations in Kenya.”
I will begin my reflections with this question: what does faith have to do with identity? My answer today, although I might change my mind later on, is going to be provocative. I think faith has nothing to do with identity. In my presentation, I argue that if we are truly people of faith, the question of identity should not be anywhere near our faith. And I will anchor my argument on the stories of healing in the gospels.
I will begin my reflections with this question: what does faith have to do with identity? My answer today, although I might change my mind later on, is going to be provocative. I think faith has nothing to do with identity. In my presentation, I argue that if we are truly people of faith, the question of identity should not be anywhere near our faith. And I will anchor my argument on the stories of healing in the gospels.
When I received the invitation to give this lecture, the first story I thought of was that of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well, narrated in John 4.
The passage reveals an extended discussion of identity, in the worldly sense of identity as we know it today. We know identity as exclusion, boundaries and conflict, rather than as unity, love and sharing. But remember the political regime of the time of Jesus was the Roman empire, which the British empire mimicked when they came here in the late 1800s, and then left another mimicry called independence. We are therefore living under a mimicry of the same Roman empire under which Jesus lived.
The political logic that runs the Euro-American global empire, now in decline, was revived in Europe in the 17th century from the ruins of the Roman empire in a process that was baptized a Renaissance. As far as I'm concerned, there was no renaissance. It was a festival of exploring and excavating graves, just the way the colonialists did when they came to Africa in the early 1900s, and still do, in the name of verifying whether we were “civilized.” The Roman empire died in 476 of the Common Era, but when the wealthy of Europe, like the Medici family, wanted to impress the rest of Italy and Europe, they hired artists and scientists to excavate the graves and monuments of the dead empire and seek inspiration for something new. They essentially looked for the living among the dead. So ideas such as the state, senate, law, and even the management of people of multiple cultural backgrounds, were borrowed from the ruins of Rome.
Rome operated as a centralized government with a multicultural mix of people from many areas of its peripheral provinces of the empire. Not all people of the empire were considered Romans or citizens. Historians mark the reign of Augustus as the point at which citizenship transformed from being an active one about rights and duties, to a passive one about legal status and honor. Under Augustus, the Latin language gained more prominence as a marker of “Romanness,” and the empire continued to make a distinction between those who were born in Rome and those who were not. Later on, as Rome began to decline, it invited the Barbarians, whom they considered the Germanic peoples to be, to fight for the Roman empire but simultaneously not access the rights of citizens of Rome.
“Barbarians” received the name from the Romans who considered outsiders to the empire, by reference to the fact that their languages were incomprehensible to the Romans. While western epistemology has since clarified that the Germanic, Slavic, Croat, Turkish and other Europeans were those to whom the Romans attached the tag “Barbarian,” it has not done equal favor to North Africa, where “Berbers” and “Arabs” are still ethnically tied to the imperial term. Meanwhile, the expression “barbarians at the gate” became a popular one to capture the fear of the insiders that their city was facing imminent collapse at the hands of immigrants.
Back to John 4. As we see in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus, who had lived in that same Roman empire, rejected this imperial view of identity, where discrimination is unspoken yet real when it comes to human interactions. When he asks for water, he's speaking as a human being to another. But what does the Samaritan woman say? To paraphrase her, she says: “According to my ethnicity, I'm not worthy to give you water.” Then Jesus replies, “but the water I'm providing is of eternal life, meaning that even when I ask you for literal water, I reject this imperial idea of human hierarchy.”
Then Jesus tests her with another identity, which is that of gender. He asks her for a husband, and then reveals that he knows she has had several, and she is living with a man who is not her husband. According to today’s world, the Samaritan would be a failed woman because no man wants her. But in revealing that he knows her marital status, Jesus is saying, in so many words: “I spoke to you as a human being, rejecting the socially accepted category of seeing you by gender or as the wife of a man.”
In between the conversation, Jesus reveals the principle of his engagement. In verse 23 and 24, Jesus announces a new way of approaching humanity that rejects the imperial categories that dominate his time:
The passage reveals an extended discussion of identity, in the worldly sense of identity as we know it today. We know identity as exclusion, boundaries and conflict, rather than as unity, love and sharing. But remember the political regime of the time of Jesus was the Roman empire, which the British empire mimicked when they came here in the late 1800s, and then left another mimicry called independence. We are therefore living under a mimicry of the same Roman empire under which Jesus lived.
The political logic that runs the Euro-American global empire, now in decline, was revived in Europe in the 17th century from the ruins of the Roman empire in a process that was baptized a Renaissance. As far as I'm concerned, there was no renaissance. It was a festival of exploring and excavating graves, just the way the colonialists did when they came to Africa in the early 1900s, and still do, in the name of verifying whether we were “civilized.” The Roman empire died in 476 of the Common Era, but when the wealthy of Europe, like the Medici family, wanted to impress the rest of Italy and Europe, they hired artists and scientists to excavate the graves and monuments of the dead empire and seek inspiration for something new. They essentially looked for the living among the dead. So ideas such as the state, senate, law, and even the management of people of multiple cultural backgrounds, were borrowed from the ruins of Rome.
Rome operated as a centralized government with a multicultural mix of people from many areas of its peripheral provinces of the empire. Not all people of the empire were considered Romans or citizens. Historians mark the reign of Augustus as the point at which citizenship transformed from being an active one about rights and duties, to a passive one about legal status and honor. Under Augustus, the Latin language gained more prominence as a marker of “Romanness,” and the empire continued to make a distinction between those who were born in Rome and those who were not. Later on, as Rome began to decline, it invited the Barbarians, whom they considered the Germanic peoples to be, to fight for the Roman empire but simultaneously not access the rights of citizens of Rome.
“Barbarians” received the name from the Romans who considered outsiders to the empire, by reference to the fact that their languages were incomprehensible to the Romans. While western epistemology has since clarified that the Germanic, Slavic, Croat, Turkish and other Europeans were those to whom the Romans attached the tag “Barbarian,” it has not done equal favor to North Africa, where “Berbers” and “Arabs” are still ethnically tied to the imperial term. Meanwhile, the expression “barbarians at the gate” became a popular one to capture the fear of the insiders that their city was facing imminent collapse at the hands of immigrants.
Back to John 4. As we see in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, Jesus, who had lived in that same Roman empire, rejected this imperial view of identity, where discrimination is unspoken yet real when it comes to human interactions. When he asks for water, he's speaking as a human being to another. But what does the Samaritan woman say? To paraphrase her, she says: “According to my ethnicity, I'm not worthy to give you water.” Then Jesus replies, “but the water I'm providing is of eternal life, meaning that even when I ask you for literal water, I reject this imperial idea of human hierarchy.”
Then Jesus tests her with another identity, which is that of gender. He asks her for a husband, and then reveals that he knows she has had several, and she is living with a man who is not her husband. According to today’s world, the Samaritan would be a failed woman because no man wants her. But in revealing that he knows her marital status, Jesus is saying, in so many words: “I spoke to you as a human being, rejecting the socially accepted category of seeing you by gender or as the wife of a man.”
In between the conversation, Jesus reveals the principle of his engagement. In verse 23 and 24, Jesus announces a new way of approaching humanity that rejects the imperial categories that dominate his time:
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship God in spirit and truth, for God is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”
Spirit and truth. There's no identity there.
Yet another story of a Samaritan comes with the world famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable begins with the trick question about what one must do to inherit eternal life. In the end, the question becomes “and who is my neighbor?” And Jesus, once again, tells the story of the insiders - a priest and a Levite - who walk past an injured man. The Samaritan, whose identity excluded him, is the one who showed mercy to the injured man. You could read this story as saying that we can get help from the most unexpected quarters, but I see it differently. The story shows that humanity is larger than identity. What matters is that we’re able to see the humanity in someone else, like the Good Samaritan did, not see laws or religion, like the priest and the Levite.
I think I’ve made the point that what matters is human values - love, mercy, and most of all, we worship of God in spirit and in truth. Because God is spirit and truth.
Thinking of the Samaritan stories made me notice that in many of the other stories of the gospels, Jesus heals those who have faith, even when many of those who seek his intervention fear that they are the wrong identity.
In Luke 7, the Roman officer, who should be looking down on a colonized subject, tells Jesus that the roles are reversed: he is not worthy of Jesus coming under his roof. In the passage, we read his words to Jesus:
Yet another story of a Samaritan comes with the world famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable begins with the trick question about what one must do to inherit eternal life. In the end, the question becomes “and who is my neighbor?” And Jesus, once again, tells the story of the insiders - a priest and a Levite - who walk past an injured man. The Samaritan, whose identity excluded him, is the one who showed mercy to the injured man. You could read this story as saying that we can get help from the most unexpected quarters, but I see it differently. The story shows that humanity is larger than identity. What matters is that we’re able to see the humanity in someone else, like the Good Samaritan did, not see laws or religion, like the priest and the Levite.
I think I’ve made the point that what matters is human values - love, mercy, and most of all, we worship of God in spirit and in truth. Because God is spirit and truth.
Thinking of the Samaritan stories made me notice that in many of the other stories of the gospels, Jesus heals those who have faith, even when many of those who seek his intervention fear that they are the wrong identity.
In Luke 7, the Roman officer, who should be looking down on a colonized subject, tells Jesus that the roles are reversed: he is not worthy of Jesus coming under his roof. In the passage, we read his words to Jesus:
“Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. Therefore, I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
When Jesus heard these things, he marveled at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.”
Again, the issue here is faith, not identity. This is a civil servant of the colonial government, whose colleagues would be crucifying Jesus later on. Personally, with my resentment of the colonial civil service of Kenya, and how we suffer under their harassment and corruption, I would rather Jesus didn't heal the Centurion’s servant. Moreover, we do not know if the Centurion would have sought such healing if the sick people was a Roman citizen.
But the Jesus understands that the relationship he is promoting knows no government. Just faith. And Jesus is amazed by the level of faith.
Let's try another story. This is in Mark 9, of a loving father who had pursued healing for his demon-possessed son for years. The story begins with a commotion caused by the fact that the disciples are not able to heal the young man. Let’s read from verse 21:
But the Jesus understands that the relationship he is promoting knows no government. Just faith. And Jesus is amazed by the level of faith.
Let's try another story. This is in Mark 9, of a loving father who had pursued healing for his demon-possessed son for years. The story begins with a commotion caused by the fact that the disciples are not able to heal the young man. Let’s read from verse 21:
And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’? All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit…
I love this story because many times I go to God with the prayer “help my unbelief,” because like the young man’s father, I’ve seen so much suffering and my faith is shaken. I don’t pretend my faith is strong. Often, when I am this vulnerable, I am rebuked for not trusting in the omnipotence of God. Yet I believe that admission of unbelief is, paradoxically, the deepest level of faith. It shows a deep confidence that with Jesus, that it is safe to be honest about being weak. This is in contrast to our current dispensation of motivational speaking bravado, where social obstacles are denied in the name of “positive thinking.”
We see another story in Luke 5, where some men who open the roof to a crowded room to let in their paralyzed friend, for Jesus to heal. The Bible tells us that Jesus was moved to act “when he saw their faith.”
In Luke 8, the story of the woman whose period had lasted for 12 years, we are dealing with someone excluded not on ethnicity, but on the double exclusion of gender, and the fact that under Jewish law, her constant menstruation made her unclean. In this case, when the woman identifies herself, Jesus says to her “your faith has made you well.”
In each case, Jesus doesn't ask the people whom he heals where they come from. He is moved by faith in God and love of the friends and relatives seeking healing on behalf of the patients. No matter their background, he affirms that what unites them is faith. And his healing is not just physical; it is also social and philosophical. He is breaking the chains, pun intended, that tie their social status to their imperial hierarchy of identity.
Jesus came to break boundaries so that we worship God in spirit and in truth, so that we are redeemed from the bondage of identity that freezes us in our bodily vessels. Yet here we are, people of faith, struggling to navigate identity. How did this happen?
Colonialism.
Europeans left their lands already having decided that humanity was split into two: the civilized and the barbarians. We must speak some uncomfortable truth here, which is about the document that Pope Francis repudiated, that is the doctrine of discovery. The doctrine of discovery dispossessed indigenous peoples and was still cited in legal judgements as late as 2005.
Europe codified in its documents that non-civilized necessarily meant non-European. There is an element of dishonesty here in the use of words, because the word “civilization,” should ideally refer to a human endeavor, but it was instead used to impose a boundary and distinguish people rather than recognize their common humanity. In fact, the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire clarified in very powerful words that the problem with Europeans travelling to other continents was not that they were foreigners. It was that Europeans were hosted as equals in the lands they arrived, but instead responded to their hosts with violence. The problem was not contact. It was a lack of mutual, human interaction. I quote Cesaire:
We see another story in Luke 5, where some men who open the roof to a crowded room to let in their paralyzed friend, for Jesus to heal. The Bible tells us that Jesus was moved to act “when he saw their faith.”
In Luke 8, the story of the woman whose period had lasted for 12 years, we are dealing with someone excluded not on ethnicity, but on the double exclusion of gender, and the fact that under Jewish law, her constant menstruation made her unclean. In this case, when the woman identifies herself, Jesus says to her “your faith has made you well.”
In each case, Jesus doesn't ask the people whom he heals where they come from. He is moved by faith in God and love of the friends and relatives seeking healing on behalf of the patients. No matter their background, he affirms that what unites them is faith. And his healing is not just physical; it is also social and philosophical. He is breaking the chains, pun intended, that tie their social status to their imperial hierarchy of identity.
Jesus came to break boundaries so that we worship God in spirit and in truth, so that we are redeemed from the bondage of identity that freezes us in our bodily vessels. Yet here we are, people of faith, struggling to navigate identity. How did this happen?
Colonialism.
Europeans left their lands already having decided that humanity was split into two: the civilized and the barbarians. We must speak some uncomfortable truth here, which is about the document that Pope Francis repudiated, that is the doctrine of discovery. The doctrine of discovery dispossessed indigenous peoples and was still cited in legal judgements as late as 2005.
Europe codified in its documents that non-civilized necessarily meant non-European. There is an element of dishonesty here in the use of words, because the word “civilization,” should ideally refer to a human endeavor, but it was instead used to impose a boundary and distinguish people rather than recognize their common humanity. In fact, the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire clarified in very powerful words that the problem with Europeans travelling to other continents was not that they were foreigners. It was that Europeans were hosted as equals in the lands they arrived, but instead responded to their hosts with violence. The problem was not contact. It was a lack of mutual, human interaction. I quote Cesaire:
I admit that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other; that it is an excellent thing to blend different worlds; that whatever its own particular genius may be, a civilization that withdraws into itself atrophies; that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen….that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another…
The goal of this civilization, from the European sense, was not to affirm common humanity. It was to fragment, create division and conflict. It is to do the opposite of what Jesus did in the stories I have cited, which was to look for the common denominator that united all the people, which is faith, spirit and truth.
If identity is not central to our humanity and our faith, how did it become so important, and why is it so divisive? Why does identity make people feel ashamed, rather than confident? Hostile, rather than friendly?
The answer to that question lies in understanding the nature of knowledge, and what the state does to knowledge and identity. The state creates identity based on a narrow, truncated view of knowledge, in contrast to the knowledge on which faith is based. As James C Scott says, the state is interested in simplifying human beings to make them uncomplicated and easy to read. That is because the state’s only interest in people is three things: taxing the people; using the people for labor and war; and from ensuring that the people do not rebel. This means that the state’s only interest in human beings is
The state, therefore, imposes knowledge that is narrow and restricted, and that makes people know so little, and that makes people base extraordinarily heavy decisions on so little knowledge. And the Kenya government announced its hostility to knowledge when it openly told Kenyans that Competency Based Education is all skills and no knowledge. It was a small statement that escaped the attention of most Kenyans, because the media has misled Kenyans to believe that knowledge, theory, cramming and examinations all mean the same thing. We were openly told that all we were good for was conscription as labor and war.
And the church, the promoters of faith, faith that is supposed to see people beyond their social circumstances and in their complexity, had only one reply: make morality control the people more. They simply continued to play same role of the missionaries in the colonial era, which was to police Africans through morality, like the Pharisees in John 9 who were bothering the man who had been born blind after Jesus healed him. For the Pharisees in the story, it was more important to protect old beliefs than to welcome this new reality of a man who was born blind and could now see.
And this attitude has implications for education. It means that the state has little interest in Kenyans being knowledgeable despite knowledge evolving and despite the people performing political “democracy.”
Take for example, the vote. Millions of Kenyans put a tick on a small piece of paper, to make a huge decision about their governance for the following 5 years. But how much do Kenyans know when they are making that decision? So little. The media hardly offers any enlightening conversation. The campaigns are full of stupidity. I encourage you to read the article by Dan Ojwang on the post-election violence of 2007-2008. So many lies were told, not questioned by people with the education to do so, and not noticed by the Kenyan public because of the war on knowledge, and especially on history and memory.
Right now, our children are going to school under a system which Ministry of Education officials declared was good because it had no knowledge; only skills. And our president declared that there is no need to study history because learning when Vasco da Gama landed in Malindi cannot fix a sewer or a tap.
In such an environment, anti-intellectualism narrows people to their geography and parentage of birth. The state is basically saying that it does not need to know much about an individual, as long as that individual is paying taxes and not challenging the state. The state plasters this truncated identity on a card, and even decides from that kipande how one will vote, as if the person doesn’t have a brain.
Joyce Nyairo recounts her experience of trying to get the correct details of her birthplace on her ID card. Government officials kept getting the details wrong because of assumptions about her gender and ethnicity. She remarks that at the ID office, the government officials were engaged in banter about the identity of married women, of which the most alarming aspect “was the ease with which the records entered on the ID were connected to the vote - as if the mere act of transferring one’s district guaranteed a transfer of one’s political affiliations.”
What is really at stake here is intellectual rigidity and laziness. We have just decided not to know people beyond what we see and assume. Not too long ago, Kenyans liked to say “your name explains everything,” which was another way of saying “you have no brain, no life, no ideas, no history, nothing, except what your ID card says.” Dr. Nyairo calls it the “anthropology of fixed identities” where people are assigned to static characteristics and geographies defined not even by us, but by poorly informed Western researchers who were often missionaries or explorers. “And so, Nyairo says, “right from that colonial moment, the question of tribe was sealed in stasis. Once a tribe was named and described there could be no suggestion of deviations, change or revision.”
In other words, if we must keep being told that there are parts of our lives that we must keep leaving out for us to be considered citizens, then we essentially do not belong. And so, we’re back to the Roman empire, where the people who were considered non-Romans were called “barbarians.”
Faith, by contrast, requires a breadth of knowledge. As we see in the stories in the gospels, faith entails knowledge of people’s personal circumstances, empathy with their situation, and most of all, acknowledgement of one’s humanity that transcends one's place of birth or social circumstances, and seeing them from their humanity, or from their status as children of God who can worship in spirit and in truth. And knowledge sits at the heart of faith, because one cannot have faith without knowledge.
This means that the church must abandon its complacency with the truncated, narrow conception of knowledge and education where Kenyans are reduced to what they can do for institutions, be it the state, business or the church. Faith calls us to see people in their totality, independent of the institutional benefits, whether they are thirsty, sick or powerful, as members of this large community that worships God in spirit and in truth. That is why faith contradicts identity as defined by the state.
So what we need to be talking about is not identity. It's to what we belong. With the state as it is currently constructed, we will always be barbarians outside the gate. And we will never belong, because the state does not see us as human beings. And as we know from the history of the Roman empire, Rome fell because it did not want the Barbarians to belong and yet, at the same time, it wanted to use the Barbarians to maintain the empire. That contradiction was not sustainable in Rome, nor is it in Africa. And we have proof from how much pain and suffering we have witnessed on the African continent for the last five centuries. Our labor and our resources have been used by places to which we are not allowed to be full, human beings. We have fought and killed each other for the same reason since our mimicry of empire otherwise called “independence.”
But Rome fell, and when the state falls in Africa, because it eventually will, we should have taught our children not to seek a remedy in excavating graves of the past, but to build a new political logic where people worship in spirit and in truth.
It's time we faced reality and dumped identity as our primary preoccupation. But to do so, we need knowledge that empowers the people to accommodate knowledge of others beyond where and to whom they were born. Without that knowledge, people cannot have faith, and cannot worship God in spirit and in truth. And if we cannot worship God in spirit and in truth, we are going to fight over boundaries, identities and customs.
However, our people are starved of knowledge because knowledge is being crushed by the state. Our people need philosophy, they need access to the metaphysical, and since I'm in a Catholic institution, we can also talk about philosophy as an academic subject being dominated by the church and not taught in our schools. Teaching philosophy is one way for us to reduce our conflict over identity.
The challenge facing the people of faith is therefore to abandon its alliance with the state in state’s delusions that it must keep people ignorant to govern them. There is no way to avoid faith leading to conflict without faith being embedded in knowledge. To avoid conflict over faith and identity, we must grow in knowledge and in so doing, grow in spirit and truth. That is the new political imagination that Jesus gave to counter that of faith and identity as the basis of the imperialism, terrorism and settler colonialism promoted by the state.
If identity is not central to our humanity and our faith, how did it become so important, and why is it so divisive? Why does identity make people feel ashamed, rather than confident? Hostile, rather than friendly?
The answer to that question lies in understanding the nature of knowledge, and what the state does to knowledge and identity. The state creates identity based on a narrow, truncated view of knowledge, in contrast to the knowledge on which faith is based. As James C Scott says, the state is interested in simplifying human beings to make them uncomplicated and easy to read. That is because the state’s only interest in people is three things: taxing the people; using the people for labor and war; and from ensuring that the people do not rebel. This means that the state’s only interest in human beings is
- how much tax can you pay?
- when are you going to work or fight for the state? And
- are you still going to comply with the state?
The state, therefore, imposes knowledge that is narrow and restricted, and that makes people know so little, and that makes people base extraordinarily heavy decisions on so little knowledge. And the Kenya government announced its hostility to knowledge when it openly told Kenyans that Competency Based Education is all skills and no knowledge. It was a small statement that escaped the attention of most Kenyans, because the media has misled Kenyans to believe that knowledge, theory, cramming and examinations all mean the same thing. We were openly told that all we were good for was conscription as labor and war.
And the church, the promoters of faith, faith that is supposed to see people beyond their social circumstances and in their complexity, had only one reply: make morality control the people more. They simply continued to play same role of the missionaries in the colonial era, which was to police Africans through morality, like the Pharisees in John 9 who were bothering the man who had been born blind after Jesus healed him. For the Pharisees in the story, it was more important to protect old beliefs than to welcome this new reality of a man who was born blind and could now see.
And this attitude has implications for education. It means that the state has little interest in Kenyans being knowledgeable despite knowledge evolving and despite the people performing political “democracy.”
Take for example, the vote. Millions of Kenyans put a tick on a small piece of paper, to make a huge decision about their governance for the following 5 years. But how much do Kenyans know when they are making that decision? So little. The media hardly offers any enlightening conversation. The campaigns are full of stupidity. I encourage you to read the article by Dan Ojwang on the post-election violence of 2007-2008. So many lies were told, not questioned by people with the education to do so, and not noticed by the Kenyan public because of the war on knowledge, and especially on history and memory.
Right now, our children are going to school under a system which Ministry of Education officials declared was good because it had no knowledge; only skills. And our president declared that there is no need to study history because learning when Vasco da Gama landed in Malindi cannot fix a sewer or a tap.
In such an environment, anti-intellectualism narrows people to their geography and parentage of birth. The state is basically saying that it does not need to know much about an individual, as long as that individual is paying taxes and not challenging the state. The state plasters this truncated identity on a card, and even decides from that kipande how one will vote, as if the person doesn’t have a brain.
Joyce Nyairo recounts her experience of trying to get the correct details of her birthplace on her ID card. Government officials kept getting the details wrong because of assumptions about her gender and ethnicity. She remarks that at the ID office, the government officials were engaged in banter about the identity of married women, of which the most alarming aspect “was the ease with which the records entered on the ID were connected to the vote - as if the mere act of transferring one’s district guaranteed a transfer of one’s political affiliations.”
What is really at stake here is intellectual rigidity and laziness. We have just decided not to know people beyond what we see and assume. Not too long ago, Kenyans liked to say “your name explains everything,” which was another way of saying “you have no brain, no life, no ideas, no history, nothing, except what your ID card says.” Dr. Nyairo calls it the “anthropology of fixed identities” where people are assigned to static characteristics and geographies defined not even by us, but by poorly informed Western researchers who were often missionaries or explorers. “And so, Nyairo says, “right from that colonial moment, the question of tribe was sealed in stasis. Once a tribe was named and described there could be no suggestion of deviations, change or revision.”
In other words, if we must keep being told that there are parts of our lives that we must keep leaving out for us to be considered citizens, then we essentially do not belong. And so, we’re back to the Roman empire, where the people who were considered non-Romans were called “barbarians.”
Faith, by contrast, requires a breadth of knowledge. As we see in the stories in the gospels, faith entails knowledge of people’s personal circumstances, empathy with their situation, and most of all, acknowledgement of one’s humanity that transcends one's place of birth or social circumstances, and seeing them from their humanity, or from their status as children of God who can worship in spirit and in truth. And knowledge sits at the heart of faith, because one cannot have faith without knowledge.
This means that the church must abandon its complacency with the truncated, narrow conception of knowledge and education where Kenyans are reduced to what they can do for institutions, be it the state, business or the church. Faith calls us to see people in their totality, independent of the institutional benefits, whether they are thirsty, sick or powerful, as members of this large community that worships God in spirit and in truth. That is why faith contradicts identity as defined by the state.
So what we need to be talking about is not identity. It's to what we belong. With the state as it is currently constructed, we will always be barbarians outside the gate. And we will never belong, because the state does not see us as human beings. And as we know from the history of the Roman empire, Rome fell because it did not want the Barbarians to belong and yet, at the same time, it wanted to use the Barbarians to maintain the empire. That contradiction was not sustainable in Rome, nor is it in Africa. And we have proof from how much pain and suffering we have witnessed on the African continent for the last five centuries. Our labor and our resources have been used by places to which we are not allowed to be full, human beings. We have fought and killed each other for the same reason since our mimicry of empire otherwise called “independence.”
But Rome fell, and when the state falls in Africa, because it eventually will, we should have taught our children not to seek a remedy in excavating graves of the past, but to build a new political logic where people worship in spirit and in truth.
It's time we faced reality and dumped identity as our primary preoccupation. But to do so, we need knowledge that empowers the people to accommodate knowledge of others beyond where and to whom they were born. Without that knowledge, people cannot have faith, and cannot worship God in spirit and in truth. And if we cannot worship God in spirit and in truth, we are going to fight over boundaries, identities and customs.
However, our people are starved of knowledge because knowledge is being crushed by the state. Our people need philosophy, they need access to the metaphysical, and since I'm in a Catholic institution, we can also talk about philosophy as an academic subject being dominated by the church and not taught in our schools. Teaching philosophy is one way for us to reduce our conflict over identity.
The challenge facing the people of faith is therefore to abandon its alliance with the state in state’s delusions that it must keep people ignorant to govern them. There is no way to avoid faith leading to conflict without faith being embedded in knowledge. To avoid conflict over faith and identity, we must grow in knowledge and in so doing, grow in spirit and truth. That is the new political imagination that Jesus gave to counter that of faith and identity as the basis of the imperialism, terrorism and settler colonialism promoted by the state.
Select bibliography
Eberle, Lisa Pilar. “Making Roman Subjects: Citizenship and Empire before and after Augustus.” TAPA 147, no. 2 (2017): 321–70.
James, Edward. Europe’s Barbarians AD 200-600. Routledge, 2014.
Nyairo, Joyce. Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. Contact Zones, 2015.
Ojwang, Dan. "Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm Responsibilities and complicities." Africa insight 39.1 (2009): 22-38.
Owuor, Yvonne A. “Reading our ruins: Postcolonial stories that float from afar.” The Elephant. https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2018/03/22/reading-our-ruins-post-colonial-stories-that-float-from-afar/
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
James, Edward. Europe’s Barbarians AD 200-600. Routledge, 2014.
Nyairo, Joyce. Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging. Contact Zones, 2015.
Ojwang, Dan. "Kenyan intellectuals and the political realm Responsibilities and complicities." Africa insight 39.1 (2009): 22-38.
Owuor, Yvonne A. “Reading our ruins: Postcolonial stories that float from afar.” The Elephant. https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2018/03/22/reading-our-ruins-post-colonial-stories-that-float-from-afar/
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
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