Charles Onyango-Obbo
4 September 2007
column
Kampala — Recently South African jazz singer Judith Sephuma performed at the Nairobi Pentecostal Church in the upmarket Karen area.
Sephuma is one of my favourite musicians out of South Africa, and I was almost startled to see her show in the listings. Only briefly did it occur to me that NPC was an odd venue for a jazz concert.
On the day I headed out to Karen. There were hundreds of cars parked, and as many lining to enter. That was when I figured I had missed something, because even if it had been the great man Hugh Masekela, I didn't expect that many people would turn out for a jazz concert.
The tickets were going for the princely equivalent of Uganda Shillings 50,000. I asked the lady at the window whether indeed this was the venue of the Sephuma show.
She replied; "Who is Judith Sephuma?" I was puzzled, I looked at the posters closely. The posters were proclaiming that it was a concert by Donnie McClurkin, the Grammy Award winning American gospel singer and minister. Turns out Sephuma, who has roots in gospel, goes to a church in Johannesburg led by the Kenyan pastor who had organised for the undeniably inspirational McClurkin, to take time off his South African tour for an overnight performance in Nairobi.
The NPC hall is a dizzyingly vast place. But it was overflowing. There were the usual small time opening acts, all of them Pentecostal-based groups, then Sephuma came on. I was wowed, but not so much the rest of the crowd.
Then it was the turn of McClurkin. Some things, you need to see. There are really no words to describe what happened over the next two or so hours.
Beside the atmosphere, two things struck me. I had never seen something like this at close range and I realised for the first time that, perhaps, some of us are too cynical about "saved" churches. There is, the downside notwithstanding, something special and important going on in these places that we need to study with more rigorous social science discipline.
Secondly, in the audience of anything between 7,000 to 10,000 people, there were probably less than 750 men!
I have never been among so many women, nor felt so totally intimidated. If I ever needed to understand how women feel in situations that are overwhelmingly dominated by men (politics, boardrooms), I did that evening.
I appreciated just how much the world we men have constructed are driving women away into warmer and more welcoming alternative communities like the Born Again churches.
This ultimately, is about what it means to be gay in places like Uganda and other parts of Africa and the world where homophobia is running high. In Uganda, the recent demand by gays for their rights brought a nasty response. Also, in the last few days we have witnessed in Uganda the ordination of an American bishop who broke with the Anglican (Episcopal) Church in the US after the consecration of a gay bishop. In Kenya, two breakaway bishops were also consecrated.
Yet no matter how many bishops abandon churches that consecrate gays, gays will still go to church. In good time, if liberal attitudes don't prevail, we shall have religious segregation; where gays pray apart in their churches with their gay bishops.
For just like the women at McClurkin's show shouting "Alleluia" and "Amen" with the abandon they cannot do at home, eventually gays will also gather to celebrate life and their faith in a community where they are accepted.
This segmentation has actually been under way for some years now. Take pastor Jay Bakker. His arms are covered in thick tattoos. He wears several rings in his ear lobes, and a silver ring pierces his lower lip. He is bearded and wears jeans.
No, Bakker is not a rock star or a wild biker, and the book he always has in front of him is a Bible. Bakker is among America's hottest, and most controversial, young pastors. He's been nicknamed the "Punk Rock Priest".
Bakker's appeal lies in his simple services, which he delivers while smoking a cigar. There are no hymns. And there's no worship.
Jay recovered from a destructive cycle of drinks and drugs, to found his own ministry, called Revolution. His flock are the lonely, the poor, drug addicts and, ironically, aetheists.
He tells his young audience, many of them covered in tattoos and metals like him, that it's wrong for people to think that being Christian is about not having abortions and not being gay.
His message is that you can be gay, have an abortion, and still be a great Christian. And they are flocking to him in their thousands. You can ostracise gays from your church; and abandon the churches where they commune. In the end, it will be futile, because God will not slam the doors in their faces.
These "rejected" groups have spawned a movement of "subculture churches" in the US. It has been growing, and now they are in their thousands...and spreading.
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