Baha’i Perspectives

shadi February 21st, 2008

Brooks and I, currently based in Nairobi while assessing the situation, recently made a day trip to Kisumu to visit some colleagues and pack some essential items.

It was both incredible and difficult to reconnect with my Kisumu colleagues. Everyone has been affected in some way by the post-election crisis. Everyone had a story to tell. One of my colleagues has a Kikuyu mother and a Luo father. His mother has been camped out at one of the Kisumu police stations because neighbors had threatened her life. My colleague and his father have to visit the police station in order to see her. Another colleague of mine, who is married to a Luo man and comes from the Kamba tribe seen to be closely associated to the Kikuyu tribe, finally decided to move to Nairobi to stay with her sister. She told me that her neighbors had been arguing on a daily basis with one another over whether or not she should be allowed to stay in Kisumu. These stories are everywhere in Kenya right now. It is very easy to become disheartened and conclude that Kenya is rapidly spiraling towards an even greater disaster.

The current mediation talks are a step in the right direction. Although some progress has been announced, decisions regarding the political way forward continue to loom over the talks as each side seeks to gain an advantage over the other. It is uncertain how long the talks will continue and whether or not there will be a satisfactory resolution. One thing is clear: not until people put aside their superficial differences and truly come together in the spirit of brotherhood will a true lasting solution be established.

…the breeding-ground of all these tragedies is prejudice: prejudice of race and nation, of religion, of political opinion; and the root cause of prejudice is blind imitation of the past — imitation in religion, in racial attitudes, in national bias, in politics. So long as this aping of the past persisteth, just so long will the foundations of the social order be blown to the four winds, just so long will humanity be continually exposed to direst peril.

(Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 247)

Indeed, looking at the world at large, the number of societies that are experiencing crisis and instability seems to be growing by the day. The Baha’i Faith views these crises as growing pains towards the establishment of the New World Order on Earth. Shoghi Effendi notes,

The process of disintegration must inexorably continue, and its corrosive influence must penetrate deeper and deeper into the very core of a crumbling age. Much suffering will still be required ere the contending nations, creeds, classes and races of mankind are fused in the crucible of universal affliction, and are forged by the fires of a fierce ordeal into one organic commonwealth, one vast, unified, and harmoniously functioning system. Adversities unimaginably appalling, undreamed of crises and upheavals, war, famine, and pestilence, might well combine to engrave in the soul of an unheeding generation those truths and principles which it has disdained to recognize and follow. A paralysis more painful than any it has yet experienced must creep over and further afflict the fabric of a broken society ere it can be rebuilt and regenerated.

(Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u'llah, p. 193)

Tags: Kenya

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