It was an African assembly first and foremost. Bewildering, chaotic, colourful, rich with spirituality and that mystical African gentility and humility so difficult for the Western mind to grasp. The rains came. That made for soggy, muddy pathways through a University of Zimbabwe campus green with growth and splashed with African colours.
Rains are so critical in Africa where droughts too often destroy the continent's development.
The traditional soul of Africa reflects an innate spirituality and holiness. But also for all to see at this strange assembly in Zimbabwe were Africa's massive contradictions and a sense of near desperation at its marginalization, its horrible wars and epidemics, corruption and desecration of fundamental human rights. The assembly, in many ways conceived and run on Western lines, with Western liberal values, clashed head-on with the reality of Africa, which boasts of its rapidly growing Christianity, the fastest in the world. From the convoluted technology that faltered and fluctuated in technically backward conditions to the colonial legacies of rigid university and government bureaucracies, Geneva and co-opted staff struggled to change the WCC in a location where change is resisted and comes slowly. Technology and systems almost foundered before delegates ever arrived.