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Protestant Missions in Kenya

It is a pity that this challenging study of Kenyan reactions to Protestantism between 1874 and 1929 has been so ill-served by the publisher. The title, maps and index are uninformative, and there are a number of printing errors and infelicities of style that competent editorial assistance would have removed. Dr Temu has modelled his book on those of Ajayi and Ayendele in West Africa; he deals with the missionaries' predicament as secular rulers, their relationship to the process of European colonization and their conflict with the coastal Arab slave economies. In a striking parallel to the Creole elite in Nigeria, the 'Bombay African Christians' dominate the Kenyan Church until their clash with bigoted second generation missionaries. There follow well researched accounts of conflict over land, education and initiation rites. The ongoing resistance of the Kikuyu is regrettably truncated in 1930, the birth of independency in education and church government marking the end of the book. The text is supported by a wide range of archival sources and interviews in Kenya; it is an important contribution to comparative mission history. However, its aim is to recast mission historiography 'from an African viewpoint'. In as much as the author is an African academic, this is no sooner said than done. In as much as similar incantations are said over Eurocentric publications destined for the African History market, scepticism is appropriate. There is no detailed description of Kikuyu religion and society against which Protestant Christianity might be measured. Nor are there privileged insights into the lives of prominent African Christians like George David, William Jones and Ishmael Seimler. The question of polygamy was hotly debated at the 1888 Lambeth Conference, and both Nigerian ministers, James Johnson and Samuel Crowther, were opposed to the baptism of polygamous men. Doubtless because the material is lacking, Jones and Seimler's views on this and other doctrinal issues are not included. The Protestants' failure to grasp the dynamics and values of African societies in Kenya is well illustrated; but why were the UMCA not equally infected by the social Darwinism that the author diagnoses as the cause of missionary racism? Again, traditional African education is praised for turning children into 'useful members of society', and the mission schools contrasted unfavourably. But the Phelps-Stokes' advocacy of village based character and agricultural training, the essential ingredients of traditional education, is criticized as a refusal to provide elite schooling for a technological world. From an Anglo-Saxon viewpoint, Dr Temu understandably wants both his Beowulf and his Roman Bath, but the incompatability between traditional and technological culture is real and cannot be resolved by blaming the colonizer. It is difficult to appreciate the nature of the Kikuyu's extraordinary drive to control their own education without examining these tensions more fully.