Rebirth of hope in God, country and a continent in great need of salvation

This man decided to lay his head beneath this seat, which means he had a roof over his head. [PHOTO: COLLINS KWEYU/STANDARD

NAIROBI: I thought I would be writing this from an airport lounge; instead, I am writing from a hospital lobby to welcome the newest member of the family, baby Samora.

He arrived, with tiny, clenched fists, early Wednesday morning. His birthday is also the day of Tumaini's grandma, so we got something special: Tumaini got a brother, I got a son and the granny is elated at having a birthday mate.

Samora is named for the former leader of Mozambique who was committed to the liberation of his country and continent. It is also affirmation of our pan-African credentials.

Tumaini's grandma arrived hours later from Central Africa, a land that's still restive 50 years after independence. It was there that Patrice Lumumba sought to end the exploitation of his people; the Belgians, with American participation, deposed him, chopped him into pieces and doused his remains with acid when they couldn't light up. The full confession is in a new book that I encountered recently.

So Samora's own birth is a resurrection of hope that there is still work to be done for the full liberation of our people. And that there are young men who shall survive us in that quest.

But such high ideals are still a pipe-dream if we still can't get the basics right. Perhaps that explained baby Samora's ambivalence about the future; he kept his eyes shut most of his first day in this world, not keen to face it and deal with it.

For most of the week, I was weighed down by two things, both of which, incidentally, relate to matters of life and death.

There is the church, which devotes its energies to preparing its faithful in dealing with hereafter, and there is insurance, whose business it is to manage life with minimal damage.

An insurance policy that I had procured earlier in the year from a reputable firm, with Samora's birth in mind, turned out to have been a fake. Or rather, I was duped into believing it offered certain protection when it did not.

Matters did not end there; even the insurance firm appeared to believe its own lie and issued letters undertaking to cover the hospital bill, before withdrawing it with similar haste. Only in Kenya can such duplicity survive.

Then there is the now familiar issue of the preacher who has been, for all intents and purposes, operating as a confidence trickster. His work is not to win hearts of his worshipers, but to plot how to scam them.

His schemes of deception range from integrating science in his worship (by using certain compounds that elicit the least suspicion) to sexual and financial exploitation of his followers.

The latter is managed through deft use of information provided in confidence by people in need. Some of those needs require clinical medicine, but the pastor has no qualms about exploiting them all.

That's the world that baby Samora is coming into, where basic values like truth and honesty have been eroded considerably.

Yet, seeing the joy that he has brought into our world, and the sheer number of friends and relatives who dropped everything just to be with him, provide chinks of hope that all is not lost.

That's the faith that baby Samora inspires, that he shall not just survive the troubles that afflict our times, but also transcend the burdens of the history that his forebears did not. That's something worth living for.