Ombindi has preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it’s a weakness in his pitch all right—it looks bad, looks like Ombindi’s trying to make believe the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi here to look back toward an innocence he’s really only heard about, can’t himself believe in—the gathered purity of opposites, the village built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though the jokers around the
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