End-Month News May 2024   

Reports from Jim Harries, now in Babati (between Arusha and Dodoma) in Tanzania.

Promoting Development in Africa
‘Wow, that is it’! I thought, when I came across this suggestion. The suggestion was, that the difference between ‘developed’ and ‘not actually developing’ people these days, is not primarily technology, political system, ideologies, education, etc. It is – on what basis people relate to their fellow (brother, sister, neighbour, older-person, child, … etc.). It is how relationship between two, and more, people works!

Edinburgh University
It not being politically correct, many educational institutions these days do not have (Christian) mission departments. What has taken their place, to some extent, is World Christianity departments. I am in touch with a number of these in the UK. Give thanks for particularly close links to Edinburgh University, who frequently invite me to participate in their research seminars, at which I often give comment. A PhD student from Edinburgh is due to visit me here in Tanzania for a few days at the start of June. Give thanks for this anticipated visit, and God willing the associated impact on missions’ education in the UK.

Pax-Americana
This part of Tanzania is very fertile. The agricultural potential of Tanzania is enormous. Tanzania itself is vast – it is roughly the size of Kenya and Uganda together – and much of the land seems to be suitable for farming!
The Tanzanian people in many ways, meanwhile, are in a different world to those of us from the UK. It’s like their revolving cogs hardly overlap with ‘ours’ at all. Yes, they run their economy, in a fashion – if we can call it an economy. People marry and get married, reproduce, work, eat, live, indeed. Yet the economic level of things is so low compared with what ‘might be’, while they sit on gold dust …
‘Pax-America’ is what keeps things as they are, I say to myself. If it weren’t that anyone who was aggressive to Tanzania would have to face American wrath, one wonders how many days this country could survive! China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, many other countries are relatively speaking industrial and intellectual hotbeds, and they need land. Unless Tanzania’s people ‘wake up’, one does wonder what is it’s tomorrow? Meanwhile, though, the very America who is keeping Tanzania safe from invasion, is in so many ways (inadvertently) preventing it from progressing, maintaining instead always dependency on foreign aid … perpetuating unhealthy dependency, not allowing a ‘waking up’ perhaps.
In other words, what I am proposing for Africa, is that instead of making it dependent on ever more charity, there need to be efforts made to help African people to stand on their own two feet so as to be more competitive and stronger in today’s world.

‘It is very Dirty’
The above phrase, ‘it is very dirty’, is my translation of ‘ni chafu sana’, a phrase used by a colleague to describe the lives of young people in Tanzania today. His being a secondary school teacher, so having his finger on the pulse of what young people are doing, seems to qualify him to know something. His implication is that, sexual morality is rapidly falling apart in Tanzania. Village youth were strictly monitored a few years ago. Now, school education has made that impossible. The rise of the mobile phone makes it easy to access pornography. I guess video shows also. (Videos shown on long-distance buses verge on the pornographic.) This implies that we are seeing an uncontrollable recent massive rise in premarital and extra-marital sex amongst the young in Tanzania.

Greeting Strangers
Almost wherever I go, here in Tanzania as well as in Kenya, choruses of children shout ‘Mzungu’ (the term used to refer to white people) at me as I pass. Many run after me, call their friends and tell them that there is a Mzungu in the vicinity, and jump up and down laughing. My African friends are always amazed by this kind of behaviour whenever they walk or cycle somewhere together with me.
A whole variety of people constantly make a beeline for me. Like: old ladies who are begging, young men addicted to alcohol (including when they are sober), old men who are disoriented and confused, mad people, drunkards, business-owners wanting me to buy goods from them, entrepreneurs, people high on drugs of all sorts, prostitutes on the lookout for men, people of all ages wanting to practice their English who laugh at themselves as they do so, … often just ‘ordinary’ people, incredulous that a white man has appeared in their midst, wondering what he is about, and hoping that I may turn around and suddenly give them a lot of money.
The above arises because of the ongoing ‘terrible’ reputation of the White man in Africa. Ironically the ‘terrible’ that I describe in that relationship, is often things that ‘we’ in the West do intentionally, and are proud of! That is; we are apt to be generous even to strangers, we rejoice when people thousands of miles away want to learn our language, we believe drunkards, old ladies, children running around in rags, and beggars, all have inalienable RIGHTS, and we may have convinced ourselves as long as we are helping them to get their ‘rights’ (e.g. by giving them money) we cannot be doing wrong. ‘We’ never listen to people anyway … unless they are telling us basically what we want to hear, which they must say to us in our own language(s).
Underlying all this, today’s globalising world runs on the basis that White Europeans are normal people. To treat anyone, or even to describe anyone, as if they are fundamentally not-like a European, is considered terrible. Ironically then, underlying our charity, compassion, generosity, fight against ethnocentrism, and promotion of education (and much more) is a putting ourselves forward as the global model – what a proper and normal human being ought to be and do.
‘Make friends easily’, ‘chat to people freely’, and ‘encourage one another’ … are therefore things that I try NOT to do! I am sure this requirement for my behaviour with Africans will also impact my relationship with Westerners. That is, every day I meet 1000 people who would all like to be my ‘special friend’, and would consider that status a breakthrough that is likely to change their lives. If I chat to people too freely, I raise hopes that I’ll become their sponsor. ‘Encouraging people’ implies that I will fund them for what they are doing … etc.

Tanzania so Far
I have now been in Tanzania over 3 weeks. I am over half way through my teaching at a pastoral training school in Babati. The time is going very well – both ‘in class’, and in my involvement with many churches and visiting of many pastors. Often I am just ‘there for’ people; a friend from afar. (This is possible for those of my colleagues who know I do not give out money.) I am to go on to teach at another pastoral training school for 2 weeks, God willing, till the end of June, then to participate in a seminar at a large church for the first week of July. Then from there back to Kenya.

For an online version of this news go to jim-mission.org.uk
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