Setting Out: The Era Of Discovery

The first Christian missionary body to enter Meru was that of the British United Methodist Mission, later known as the United Methodist Church. The Methodists brought fifty years of East African experience to the venture, having initially entered the area in 1862. In that year Charles New established a mission on Kenya's Swahili coast. From there Methodists within Kenya focused their attention toward people of the Tana River, particularly the Pokomo. Their hope was to use the Tana as "Christ's Highroad to the Mighty Galla Peoples," whom they believed waited one million strong to receive the word of God.^[2]

They had little success. A combination of extreme aridity, desolate landscape, unresponsive tribespeople, and virulent malaria reduced the mission by the early 1890s to little more than a token outpost. By 1898, however, completion of the Kenya railway survey confirmed earlier descriptions carried back to the coast by white leaders of trade caravans. These spoke of wealthy, war-like, and cattle-rich tribes, living in a fertile highland region that offered lush vegetation, flowing water, and a climate much like that of England.

The stories were also of interest to members of the Roman Catholic church. The first Catholic missionary body to take interest in these newly discovered highlands was the Consolata Mission Society of Turin, Italy. The order, at that time composed wholly of Italians, was founded on January 1, 1900, one of a number of similar religious

orders created on that day expressively to carry both Christian teachings and Western technology into areas selected for conversion.^[3]

Like the Methodists, members of this order had originally directed their attention toward penetration of the Galla regions, in this instance by proceeding south through Ethiopia. This project was blocked in late 1901, however, by the unexpected refusal of Ethiopia's emperor to allow new orders of Western missionaries into his kingdom. Instead the society turned its efforts toward the island of Zanzibar, responding to requests from the apostolic vicar of that island for Consolata to send him priests to support his work.^[4]

The first four Consolata fathers reached Zanzibar in October 1902. They had expected to remain on the island. Instead they found themselves caught up in preparations for "the apostolic penetration of a wild, new country,"^[5] the mountain region of what was then known to Europeans as Kikuyu (today's Gikuyu).^[6] The idea appealed to the new arrivals, particularly Rev. Philipo Perlo, their senior member. At his insistence, the four priests entered the Gikuyu region in December 1903, having refused the military protection offered them by the colonial government, and established the first Consolata mission in January 1903.

The next few years were spent in learning how to evangelize. It proved simple to erect a mission station but far harder to convert a population wholly committed to its own traditions. The missionaries were also hampered by a then common European belief that Africans used "sounds" when speaking that could not be written out in European characters. Nonetheless, seven stations were constructed in the next six years. By 1909 the faith was sufficiently established for the region to be declared an apostolic vicarage, with Father Perlo as first vicar. In 1910 he received the rank of bishop and with it permission to seek out adjacent regions into which the order could expand.

Methodist leaders also avidly wished for expansion. One of the most outspoken was John B. Griffiths, a minister with many years' experience on the Kenya coast. A shy, intellectual Welshman, who had only learned English in his teens, Griffiths found himself inspired by the rapid conquest of Embu in 1906, followed by the bloodless surrender of Meru to E. B. Horne in 1907–1908.^[7] On receiving the news, Griffiths first petitioned the colonial government to grant the entire Embu region to the Methodists as an exclusive religious sphere. The request was denied, initially because the government considered it unsafe. Griffiths then applied a second time, requesting that the comparatively "peaceful" Meru district be regarded as the exclusive sphere of the United Methodist church. In December 1909 the government agreed.^[8]