When I was a little girl and I did something wrong, my instinct was always to justify on the basis that I was provoked, or one of my sisters did something worse…. “But she…” or “But what about her?” My mum would ask me, “Who are we talking about here […]
Reading Anastasia Boniface-Malle’s thesis about the absence of lament in Tanzanian Christianity exposed for me another plank in the theological foundations of prosperity theology, that is, the idea that God wants you to be happy and healthy, and that for the Christian this kind of victory is within your reach. A key […]
What is the Christian life about? Is it about success, and victory? The emphasis of the Tanzanian church on prosperity often comes from a conviction that God wants wholeness for his people, and brings healing to them by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the blood of Jesus. Or […]
I’ve been thinking about the idea of ‘rights’ recently, more specifically human rights. I’ve been thinking about it in relation to breastfeeding, which in Australian law is a right not a privilege. The hungry baby has the right to be fed without delay, and the mother has the right to […]
Tanzania’s President John Magufuli has introduced a ban on teenage mothers returning to school. His emphasis has been on the consequences after the fact; he cites their ‘distraction’ from their studies as the reason they are not allowed back. (There has been limited discussion of how these girls got pregnant. […]
I sprained my wrist cleaning a cupboard. I’m not normally one to clean cupboards but a layer of mould had permeated our house while we were in Australia. 4 days in to our return to Tanzania, I had a stress injury. And I say stress injury, not just because it’s […]
Elliot calls our apartment in Dar es Salaam ‘the bat house’, because there’s a big colony of bats in the surrounding trees. From the balcony where we hang our washing, you can look directly at bats hanging in the tree only centimetres away, and at dawn and dusk they fill […]
