By Deirdre Good
I was born in Kenya and my first memories are of Mombasa and the Indian Ocean, pawpaws and passion fruit, boarding school and mosquito nets. Years later in 1983, I traveled to Nairobi for the UN Decade of Women Conference with several students from the college where I was teaching at the time. I stayed at a convent of Roman Catholic sisters near Matare valley. When they heard that I was attending the conference, they were very pleased. They studied the conference program and began to plan which events they could fit into their busy schedules.
And so it was that several sisters and I went to the opening lecture together on the first evening of the conference. I was as excited as they were: Angela Davis was the speaker and I had recently read her book, Women, Race and Class. I wanted to hear in person what she had to say. As we made our way to the venue for the lecture, a sister who had gone ahead turned back and spoke to me before I could enter the building, “You are white,” she said, “and Angela Davis has said that only blacks may attend.” I was crushed. I had journeyed thousands of miles to come home only to be told by a foreigner that I was not welcome.
The next morning, Sr. Geraldine, one of the sisters who had attended the lecture came to me at breakfast. “I have only one thing to say to you,” she exclaimed, “Romans eight!” I hugged her in gratitude.
After the conference concluded, Sr Geraldine took me to see the work of her community including that of several sisters who were teaching in a local school and other who were working in a clinic for the neighborhood. Wherever she went in public, groups of local children ran to her, crying out greetings and joining our little tour. One particular child saw us from a distance and ran happily towards us calling out in Swahili upon seeing me, “Jambo, mzungu!” (“Hallo, white person!”)
Not long after these two incidents, we had a good discussion in the convent after dinner about differences, race, and racism. The European sisters had no time for what appeared to be racist behavior on the part of African Americans at the conference. And they had no time for my hurt reaction to being excluded from the opening conference lecture either. The sisters from Kenya and Uganda, on the other hand, were fascinated and astonished by the exclusion of whites from parts of the conference. For them, exclusion of anyone transgressed God’s love for the entire human race. They wondered at the level of hurt that might have prompted such behavior. And they were taken aback that it had been a shocking discovery for me just before the opening lecture rather than being announced in the conference publicity.
When I returned from the conference, I was interviewed for the college newspaper about the trip. The reporter decided to publish a glossy photograph of me holding a baby in my lap to accompany the article. It had been taken on the tour with Sr Geraldine through Matare valley. Years later I found out that this was the first picture of a white faculty person holding an African baby in the southern college’s newspaper and that it caused a stir.
I’ll always be grateful to Sister Geraldine for reminding me of Romans eight, and to the little child who called me a white woman that day in Matare Valley.
Dr. Deirdre Good is professor of New Testament at The General Theological Seminary, specializing in the Synoptic Gospels, Christian Origins, Noncanonical writings and biblical languages. An American citizen, she grew up in Kenya and keeps the blog On Not Being a Sausage.