The Christian Century

Kenyan Muslims are a marginalized minority. Many are concentrated in Coast Province, where unfair land distribution is a festering wound.

Orthodoxy's roots in Egypt and Ethiopia are ancient. In East Africa there is a younger movement: a native Orthodoxy, locally grown.

Kenyans were sent reeling by a report made public in September by the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Cult of Devil Worship in Kenya. Reactions range from ridicule to alarm. Others wonder what the real reasons are behind the sudden release of the report after four years of delay and secrecy.

Standing on a dusty Nairobi roundabout amid exhaust fumes and blaring horns, several hundred young men raise their hands north to the unseen shrine of Kerinyaga, or Mount Kenya—the second-highest mountain in Africa and mythological birthplace of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest tribe.

There is an intersection in central Nairobi known as “five churches corner” (one of the buildings is actually a synagogue). But then nearly every urban intersection in Kenya features a church or two.

Seventh-day Adventist leaders say there was no attempt to convert President Obama’s step-grandmother, a Muslim, during an evangelistic event this spring in Kenya.

Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki, speaking at a national prayer breakfast, urged his fellow citizens to move on and rebuild their nation, while describing Kenya’s destructive postelection crisis as the “country’s little mistake” that God wanted repaired.

Religious leaders are condemning postelection violence in Kenya that some observers say evokes memories of ethnic violence in Rwanda almost 14 years ago.

An Assemblies of God church in western Kenya was targeted January 1, and at least 30 people were killed after it was set aflame by an angry mob following disputed presidential elections, held December 27.