Ita missa est

Getting into Mass on Sunday with seconds to spare was surprisingly easy, as there was room in both the carpark and church. Usually if you are not there as the previous Kiswahili Mass comes streaming down the steps you won't get a seat in the church at all. I put it down to two reasons - firstly it was the Mass for the "special collection" for the new parish centre that is going up in true Tz fashion - a bit more is added to it every time some more money comes in. The special collection is taken up at one of each of the 5 Sunday Masses in turn, and what is special about it is that you are supposed to go up to the altar and deposit your offering in one of the wide baskets held out by the parish priest or the nuns. No pressure there then. The GOM naturally isn't having any of this religious blackmail, and sits, arms folded, bum firmly in his seat. What is coming up in the next week is the lenten alms which the Catholics use the Muslim expression zakat for - but interpret it as 10% of a month's salary - and they have a second go in Advent. Muslim zakat is 2.5% of annual income so I guess it is less, and certainly less than the Pentecostal churches who expect a full 10% tithe here. For Muslims it is one of the 5 pillars of Islam so if you cheat it is only yourself that you are cheating because Allah knows; for the Tz RCs the attempt to enforce the same sense of obligation is "if God asks it of us, who are we to refuse?" And where exactly does it say that God asks it of us?
The second reason is the continuing quiet but unrelenting power struggle that has rumbled on in St Peter's since I was first in Tz. Priests have come and gone, but this battle continues. It's just so stupid. Two old men, neither of them with a musical bone in their body, have seen off virtually every effort to get some decent music into the English speaking Mass and inflict their egos on us Sunday after Sunday. The kids get together a half way decent choir that leads the singing once a month. Then these two monopolise the other Sundays with their solo efforts. Last Sunday it was the turn of one with the self satisfied gravitas which speaks of a probable former career as a middle ranking civil servant. As a Tanzanzian, he manages to (quite uniquely, I imagine) both sing off key and be unable to keep time. On Sunday, he surpassed himself by having got the hymn numbers out of sequence so that as he boomed out each wrong number, twice, he then conducted himself with huge arm movements to a silent church full of people. Right or wrong numbers, it would have made little difference as it is impossible to sing along with him. It must have been the heat because, for once, I was irritated rather than amused. He is so full of his own self importance, that I don't think he has ever questioned why he invariably reduces the congregation to silence. He does love the sound of his own voice speaking or singing. And every time I see his grey head, I ask myself why we don't go to a Kiswahili Mass instead. So, lack of both charitable thought and deed last week. Not very Lenten.

A day or so later I was at what was signposted as the first Christian cross to be raised in East Africa. The post is wrong however - it points to the site - the cross itself is distinctly modern. There are many contradictory views about the role of the Christian missions in Africa, sometimes held at the same time by the same person. Some see missionaries as merely the spiritual arm of the colonial power, and as people who rode roughshod over pre-existing cultures. The alternative view is that the missions were the only part of the colonial enterprise to bring education and healthcare to Africans, and that it was largely in the environs of Mission schools and Colleges that the leaders of independent Africa were nurtured. Whichever is right, and both may be, they managed to plant an enthusiasm for Christian practice and belief, which eclipses anything seen in Europe, in recent decades. I did feel ashamed, thinking of the total commitment of those men and women who came to mostly die in Africa, of my petty irritation. It doesn't make me wrong though - we should go to the Kiswahili Mass