nourishes the robber’s fields while flooding the honest man’s, bears the bloody-minded safely to their destinations while sinking the vessels of the guiltless, for He doesn’t demand good behavior from humankind, only recognition of His dyadic sovereignty, and submission to it—
She interrupts: “Fitz, what are you talking about?”
“I’ll admit the idea isn’t completely my own,” he replies, as if its originality were the issue. “It was inspired by something I read. In Isak Dinesen. In Out of Africa.”
The journalist has never seen a photo of the real woman: a picture of Meryl Streep comes to mind; it doesn’t help her understand Fitzhugh’s meaning. She asks him to explain.
“Simple,” he says, clutching a fifth Tusker. “If we were in front of one of those Nile cataracts right now, and I said, ‘Well, that’s bad, let’s get rid of it and put it someplace else but keep the nice smooth stretches below,’ you’d think I was crazy. That’s how the African thinks of good and evil. It’s foolish to try and separate the two. Foolish and dangerous. You have to give in to it, the oneness, I mean, but not entirely. No! You submit without surrendering. That’s the difficult trick. That’s how the African survives, physically and otherwise.”
Fitzhugh is an African, albeit of mixed race, so she accepts his sweeping generalizations without argument, but she’s grown impatient with his figurative lingo. He senses this and raises his hand to hold her in her chair, facing the Bob Marley poster taped to the wall behind him.
“Let me tell you about a friend of mine, an American missionary priest, Father Rigney. Jim Rigney. Maybe then you’ll see what I’m getting at.”
A political missionary as much as one who ministered to the soul, says Fitzhugh. An apostle of human rights who became known in Kenya for his intemperate public denunciations of official greed and nepotism and brutality. Bandits in Savile Row suits, Father Jim called cabinet members and members of parliament, fattening themselves while people in the villages he served went without clean water or electricity or proper medical care. He raised money back in Chicago, where he was from, built churches, schools, and clinics, had wells dug. He lived ascetically, in a small mud-brick house out in the Masai-Mara, and his veranda was neutral territory where disputes between Masai and Luo were settled, Father Jim presiding. He had exposed a land-grab scheme by a couple of cabinet ministers and sheltered the farmers who’d been driven off their shambas in a tribal clash orchestrated by the politicians. He was beloved by his congregations and seen as a champion of the oppressed, even as a kind of charmed figure because he got away with things that would have landed a Kenyan in jail or in the morgue.
“I loved the guy,” Fitzhugh declares. “He did things that needed doing and said things that needed saying, but”—he pauses, contemplating the elephant on the label of his beer can—“he did them the way white guys do things over here, head-on, and he said them so loudly, so directly, even after he got a couple of death threats, even after the head of his own order sent him a letter, asking him to back off just a little. They were worried that he was going too far.”
One afternoon about two years ago some of Father Jim’s parishioners told him that two girls, fifteen and sixteen, had dropped out of school after they’d had sex with a powerful member of parliament, Daniel Mwebi. The sixteen-year-old was Mwebi’s niece. The priest counseled the girls and hired lawyers for them. A lawsuit was filed against the MP, alleging statutory rape. The case made all the newspapers. Also TV and radio.
A couple of weeks later both girls were visited by certain gentlemen and strongly advised to withdraw the charges. They refused, their defiance encouraged by their lawyers, who belonged to an organization that defended women’s rights in Kenya and had somehow deluded itself, as well as its clients, into thinking it could. The girls were summarily thrown in jail. Kenyan jails are extremely unpleasant places, and a week in one was enough to persuade the fifteen-year-old to do as she’d been told. Mwebi’s niece, however, wouldn’t quit. Her lawyer managed to get her out, and they went ahead with the case. The member was arraigned. More headlines, more stories on TV and radio.
In the meantime Father Jim had heard that several other underage girls in the parish had slept with Mwebi, and he mustered