Kenyan priest sees tribalism, not election flaws, at core of violence

Published: 2008-01-18

OAKLAND, Calif. (CNS) -- If the current violence in Kenya continues indefinitely, Father James Kimani Kairu won't be able to go home again to the land his mother bought and worked hard for. "We are refugees in our own country," the priest said Jan.15, two weeks after the results of a Dec. 27 national election set off looting, burning and killing in his homeland. Father Kairu, 37, is living at St. David Parish in Richmond while studying at the Jesuit School of Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. His mother, Margaret Muthoni, has been displaced from the home and little farm she bought in the 1980s from her "small salary as a primary schoolteacher" after the death of her husband. Although press reports attribute the violence to a dishonest election process, Father Kairu has a different view of the situation. In e-mail and telephone interviews with The Catholic Voice, Oakland diocesan newspaper, he said: "Even a fool will see that it is something deeper than election-rigging. Hundreds of warriors have descended on our village as they flatten all the homes of Kikuyus," members of the tribe to which the priest belongs.

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