Article April 2, 2007 Issue

SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFS BANISHED

BY JOSEPH WAWERU KAMENJU

MY GRANDFATHER was a traditional diviner (a seer or prophet) priest in our ancestral Kenyan village. When his son, my father, was a young man, he fled home to join some new Christian missionaries in our region. He had to be very strong, as he was breaking with the ancestors' way of doing things.

My father married a Christian woman who was to become a pillar of strength for the family. Our parents brought up their children according to strict Christian values. My mother taught me that there can be no power besides God, that we worship the one God, and that the myriad superstitions that clouded the lives of many Africans were to be dismissed and banished.

I owe a lot to my mother's wonderful teaching, and also to another Christian woman, Mary Baker Eddy, whose discoveries have opened my eyes to the depths of this terrible evil of superstition, which continues to hold down Africans, as well as millions of people in the West and East.