End-month news June 2025
End-month news June 2025
jimoharries@gmail.com
Grooming Gangs in the UK
I have just been reading of Baroness Casey’s report on the grooming gangs that were (and perhaps still are) creating havoc with British girls in many parts of the UK. I welcome what she has to say. I encourage interested people to have a look at the book I published in 2021. Entitled: How Western Anti-racism Harms Africa, and how we can do Better, this book expands considerably on the fact that ignoring cultural differences because they are correlated to racial features can be folly! This absolutely massive theme extends beyond gangs exploiting girls in the UK, to the rest of the West’s international relations. It is not in the long-term interests of people to ignore who they are just so as not to be racist. The West has for too long provided financial and other incentives for people, in the case of my book the focus is on Africa, to ignore who they are in preference to the pretense that they are simply normal, i.e., like white Western Christian people.
There is one major difference between the current UK position on these groomers and sexual abusers, and my approach here in Kenya. Instead of prison and the court, God offers grace. While it might be right for governments to do what they are doing, the rest of us should be sharing the message of the need for repentance in Christ. The need to bring perpetrators to faith in Christ is, it seems to me, much more important than to, in the modern sense, bring them to justice.
Apartheid – the way Forward?
I am not aware of one other white man in the whole wide world … who lives cheek to jowl with African people on a daily basis, within their culture, using their language, eating their food, enjoying their company. In many places, in practice, actually, ‘apartheid’, better apart, is the rule between Black and White, that people pay attention to. (Unless Blacks adopt White ways.)
Now that is being tested: is the (unfounded) fear that I am sexually abusing children now going to force me to live in an isolated bubble, away from folks I have shared living space with over the last 32 years? This would be enforcing Apartheid through the back door.
Please pray! I do not want to withdraw from what I see as a uniquely privileged position of vulnerability to local people, just because of a misguided accusation …
Joking and Laughing Together
Tanzanians (perhaps even more than Kenyans) love to taniana. (Maybe that’s why it’s called Tanzania??) That is to say, joking, verbal sparring, humorous, conversations that propose fictious scenarios are widespread and common. Someone proposes something intended to trap you. That is, a verbal challenge to you the listener. How will you respond? If you have a sharp wit, you’ll turn it around, and put your interlocuter into a trap instead! Verbal sparring using Swahili requires considerable language skill. I’m not always up to it. But, when I am, the Tanzanians love it! I guess it’s rare to find white people able to engage in this national verbal-sport!
Witty conversation openers are often an apparent looking for material advantage. Sometimes, I am sure it must happen, visitors to Tanzania, especially those who feel guilty over having too much money, do not realize the sparring that is going on. Instead, they think someone is begging … and may hand over the clothes, money, bicycle, food, or whatever is playfully being coveted, perhaps leaving the recipient in shock.
Vulnerable Mission Research Project
Please give thanks for, and pray for, this very encouraging and exciting prospect:
The new Director of the AVM (Alliance for Vulnerable Mission), who has taken over the leadership of the AVM from me, Dr. Marcus Grohmann, is working on a new research project. Starting around 2027, the plan is to spend about three years collaborating with an interdisciplinary team from South Africa and Germany, focusing on how “Chosen Vulnerability” plays a role in intercultural Christian service.
Marcus will soon, with the support of Stellenbosch University in South Africa, be starting to look into potential funding sources, then grant applications. Right now while visiting Germany he will be exploring research partnerships with various universities.
The discourse I included in my last news regarding the advantages of sharing in poverty have now been published by the AVM, for free access, go here: https://vulnerablemission.org/sharing-in-poverty/
An Incredible Oversight!
Have you ever been struck, or amazed, by the fact that African people are always (well, there are probably a few exceptions) evaluated according to a white standard? This continues apace. No one very seriously values African people as they are. Most the things that are thought to make them worthy of respect, are things of foreign origin.
Education in Africa, uses a foreign curriculum and foreign money. Governments the same. Businesses the same. To not be racist in the West, is to consider Africans equally capable as whites (never the other way around). Multiracial churches, is Africans joining a Western Christian tradition, not Westerners joining an indigenous African church. We (Westerners) want to be multiracial when Africans come to us … but we never (? Or very very rarely) consider being integrated with them when they live according to their native ways.
How African people function or thrive when not under Western control, dictation, funding, governments, is never asked. This oversight is not only massive. It is also risky because – no one knows if African people can actually thrive if not under the control of outsiders. Or if they do know, no one says it …
PS This is one of the issues that the AVM (Alliance for Vulnerable Mission) is trying to rectify!
I found the above sign in Tanzania. The road (barabara) ahead is to God. The alternative road is to machinjioni, i.e., the place of slaughter (slaughter-house)!
Safeguarding
I had an article on safeguarding and mission published in 2023. It now seems particularly relevant …
Back In Kenya
I arrived back in Kenya on 20th June. That day I visited a German missionary couple with a view to helping them to learn the Luo language. The husband is planning to periodically visit me, so as to work on his Luo. I attended a wedding in my home church on the 21st.
All the new developments, have me now re-adjust my village life in Kenya. Last night I sat down with one of my 16-year-old children who had come back for a visit. ‘You are not allowed to spend a night here’ I told her, hating myself. I have lived with African children for 37 years. UK law has recently made that illegal. Although it is hard at the moment to know how that can work out in practice (children always seem to be everywhere in Africa), I felt I had to take that step. The grandmother, auntie, and cousin of this particular girl are all staying with me. Certainly no one would have taken me seriously if the police-raid hadn’t already happened on 26th March.
Many logistics to be worked out. I have taken a room in a university hostel near my home (while students are on vacation) to act as office. There are many reasons it is difficult to do office work at home. Not least – when ladies cook in our current kitchen, my office fills with smoke. We now have an extra room outside of the house, so want to separate sleeping by gender. My toilet has no doors. My ‘resident electrician’ is working on the lighting system. I also want to install the solar-lighting system that we had before in the new house. I still have too many suitcases of ‘stuff’ despite having given away and burned a lot of it before moving out of the Coptic mission compound in April.
I am in the process of discussing the possibility of future service in East Africa with a variety of churches and mission agencies.
Jim