The Gift of Passage:

One day, my mother pulled me out of school. Just for a day. I was 17. It had occurred to her that I needed to be given a rite of passage. 

That rite turned out to be an Anglican one. The Church of England had erased our cultures and bequeathed us theirs. Yeah, some aspects of some rites needed to go but we threw away the baby with the bathwater. I was an African child born into an Anglican identity. A thing like that. One day we will talk about life as a hybrid creature.

So my mother sent one of my aunts to come to school and get me home. "You are to be confirmed today," my aunt said. "Oh?" I said. This will be interesting. I had not done the learning that qualified one for this rite.

When I got home, my mother showed me a white dress I was to wear. I loved it. It was new and it fit perfectly. It also awakened in me my unknown attraction to ritual drama and its therapeutic powers. My godmother was there with the gift of a tote bag decorated with big beautiful flowers.

In its years of existence, I had gone on to love that bag until it melted away, literally, because it was made of plastic material and years later someone had accidentally placed it too close to an iron. I had taken it to the fundi for mending and he sewed on a mismatched plastic patch where the big hole had formed. But that poor bag was never the same. Something was stolen from it, and the replacement made it dysfunctional, the stitches never quite holding it together. Things die strange deaths.

A goat had been slaughtered and chickens dispatched to poultry heaven. The soil had soaked in the sacrificial blood of these animals and the ancestors grudgingly accepted the shift in customs.

The compound was coming alive with festivities and before long, we would all be trooping back from church and I would be the center of attention. Had I been older and wiser, I would have requested for mwazindika drummers and their healing drums that sent old ladies into a trance when the boom of the beat was just so.

For that one day, the world would revolve around me. I have never forgotten just how special that felt. You carry this gift of love in you forever. That's how my mother had planned it.

In my mind, I figured my mother had pulled off a mafia move with the church authorities. I could see her whispering to Don Corleone to tell the Padre to tell the Bishop that I needed to be part of those to be celebrated on the special day the Bishop was visiting the village.

I could see Don Corleone hesitate and ask, "Has she taken her Confirmation classes? The Padre will not like that."

I could see my mother not entertaining any questions, "The child is ready. Tell the Padre she will be celebrated."

I could see Don Corleone go, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." And just like that, my name was on the list.

Heck I don't know how my mother pulled it off, but she did. She knew the Bishop would not be visiting that village in perhaps another ten years. He would be coming to lay hands on a cohort of young people that had completed their Confirmation classes and could satisfactorily recite the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed and other required Anglican chants.

Me? I'd have failed that test miserably and been denied the opportunity to have the Bishop place his hand on my head and declare me officially confirmed as a wiser human ready to bear the responsibility of being a moral being.

As a newly minted Anglican adult, this also now meant I could legitimately eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood too and it wouldn't choke me.. oh, wait, the chocking part is Catholic. They come up with the strangest things these religions.

All I'm saying is, thanks to my mother, I got rigged in to the gift of passage that brought a whole village together to celebrate me. She knew I didn't need to go through that curriculum. I suppose I already had morality knit into my conscience. To love my neighbor, to do unto others, and to make up stories.

Mwazindika: The healing drums of the Taita people