Chapter VIII
Missionary Traditions: Spreading God

"No tribe in Kenya is more deeply steeped in witchcraft than the Ameru. Witchcraft is their religion and the Wizard, their high priest."^[1]
Early Christian missionary
Meru, 1913

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]

Seeking Land: The Era Of Exploring

Griffiths lost no time in staking out his claim, receiving both funds and permission from the United Methodist Council of England. In 1909 he walked, with one European companion and twenty-four Gikuyu porters, around the entire eastern slope of Mount Kenya, traveling the 171 miles from Nairobi to Nyeri and on to Meru by footpaths that were often little more than traces in the bush.

Griffiths's party arrived at "Fort Meru" in October 1909, to be met by Home. The district commissioner advised them against attempting to "penetrate deeper into the Meru country, which was still subject to the depredations and disturbances of young warrior bands," no doubt a reference to a band of former warriors with whom Home had clashed as the year began. To ensure both social contact and military protection, Horne decided to allot the Methodists a plot of land less than two miles away from his administrative headquarters.

Griffiths's subsequent report of this expedition electrified Methodist leaders back in London. Describing Meru as a land of "hills, valleys, and innumerable streams," he found it "unlike any other area in Africa":

Its hills are covered with ferns, hedges are thick with blackberry bushes, and in the streams watercress abounds . . . [and] mosquitoes are unknown. . . . We have been toiling for fifty years in the sweltering climate of the coast, contending with tremendous difficulties, bitter disappointments and deaths. We have been for years meditating upon seeking another and better country in which our men can live and labor and reap. SIR, HERE IT IS. THE FUTURE OF OUR EAST AFRICAN MISSION LIES HERE . I implore the committee to enter it.^[9]

By 1910, London members of the United Methodist church had responded to Griffiths's glowing report with the decision to extend their mission into Meru. Efforts began immediately to recruit a missionary, carpenter, and doctor to launch the project. The carpenter's position ("industrial missionary") was granted, in 1911, to Rev. Frank Mimmack. In January 1912 he and Griffiths left England to occupy the allotted site and begin construction of the first buildings.

To search for a minister and doctor took longer, Griffiths having declined both positions in favor of returning to the Kenya coast. Eventually, the posts were combined and awarded to Rev. Reginald T. Worthington. Worthington had entered the Methodist ministry in 1910. After a period in the Home Service he began to look abroad and was overjoyed at the prospect of pioneering in a virgin field. As a minister, however, he lacked medical training; thus he delayed his departure several months to acquire a basic knowledge of medicine.

Worthington sailed for Kenya in December 1912, joining Griffiths at Mombasa. Thereafter the two traveled up-country, tracking around Mount Kenya's eastern flank, where they were joined by three Gikuyu youths, Maina, Kamau, and Wanjoe (to the missionaries, "George"), who offered to serve as translators among the Meru. The group then made the final trek across Mount Kenya's northern slope to North Imenti, where Mimmack eagerly awaited their arrival.^[10]

Horne also greeted the new arrivals with pleasure. In anticipation of their coming he had supervised every detail of Griffiths's earlier negotiations for land. Arriving in March 1912, Griffiths had initially been dismayed to learn that government policy restricted him to a single five-acre plot. Horne, although bound to enforce the restriction, determined to place the Methodists on the most favorable site possible. Characteristically, he accompanied Griffiths to the area he had chosen, then proclaimed a baraza (public meeting) to discover who had the right to sell.

The land in question was owned collectively by elders of the Murathankari clan. Horne's demand placed them in a dilemma. On one hand they wished to see no further whites invade their homesteads. On the other they feared the consequences of a refusal. They resolved the problem by offering the single tract of land shunned by them all, the "spirit forest" (sacred grove) of Ka-Aga, today known as Kaaga.

Ka-Aga was indeed a spirit forest, known to the Meru as the "small place of curse removers [Aga]" and to Horne as the witch doctors' forest. Spirit forests existed everywhere in Meru, "sacred" in that they were reserved for the ancestors. Every clan had such a forest. Depending on the altitude, it consisted of a particularly dense tract of vegetation, woodland, or rainforest surrounding a gigantic wild fig tree. The tree was the most sacred point within the grove and home to the spirits that lived around it.

No living Meru dared enter a spirit forest. No one could hunt there, chase straying livestock, or even cut wood. To be caught and cursed by the spirits in such areas meant experiencing personal terror, subsequent physical illness, and communal ostracism, and requiring the services of a curse remover. In theory, therefore, the forests were never entered. In fact they were visited at night by Kiamas of the various Meru supernaturalists. Ka-Aga, for example, was used by the "Council of Aga," the curse removers, whom the British mislabeled as "witch doctors." Their songs, heard faintly through the darkness, were believed by the Meru to be sung by the spirits themselves.

This forest tract, always shunned by the men of Murathankari, was now offered to the Methodists in hope that the ancestral spirits would wreak traditional revenge. Horne, aware of the grove's reputation, initially objected. To his surprise, Griffiths accepted at once, declaring a forest of wizards and witches to be the most fitting spot possible to sow the seed of God.

The Roman Catholics had also grown interested in Meru. Bishop Perlo's imagination had also been kindled by the story of Horne's bloodless conquest. It seemed logical, as Horne's administration took root, to extend the influence of the Consolata into this untouched region, particularly because it was so near his own. Perlo's conviction was strengthened by the promise of future financial support. This appeared in the form of permission to engage in direct commercial activity to support the faith financially, actions previously forbidden by the Holy See.

Earlier funding for the mission's work in Kenya had come almost entirely from Canon Joseph Alamano, founder of the order. Now Perlo responded to his new commercial freedom by purchasing two sizable tracts of prime coffee land in the more distant regions of Gikuyu and arranging future purchase of a three-thousand-acre estate adjacent to the mission itself. Because Gikuyu labor was available in unlimited quantities and at minimal cost, the anticipated profits could be directed toward long-range financial support of apostolic expansion.

Thus in August 1910, Perlo sent Fathers J. Berlagnia and T. Gays to explore the Meru region. Like Griffiths one year earlier, they trekked across Mount Kenya's arid northern face, to enter what Gays later described as "a little earthly paradise, . . . rich with forests and streams, . . . fertile with regular rains, . . . and holding about 40,000 primitive and courageous warriors."^[11]

Like Griffiths the two priests proceeded initially to Fort Meru, intending to establish their station adjacent to Horne's administrative headquarters. On arrival they were crestfallen to learn of the earlier Methodist claim to the tract near Horne's log cabin. Colonial regulations, passed only months earlier, stipulated that each mission order be segregated from competitors, with Catholics and Protestants remaining at least ten miles apart and as far beyond that as geography would allow.^[12]

If measured at its base, Imenti was ten miles wide. Thus Griffiths's earlier Methodist claim blocked off the entire region to the Consolata. Nor did Horne show sympathy for the Italians' plight. As an

Englishman and member of the Anglican church, he had little use for either Catholics or Italians, especially those unable to speak English. Speaking to the two priests through Gikuyu interpreters, he tried first to impress them with the "savage" nature of the district and its people in the hope they would simply leave. When that failed, he suggested they extend their search south of Meru proper into the adjacent Mwimbi region.

After returning briefly to the Consolata mission in Nyeri to consult with Bishop Perlo, Father Gays again set out for Meru in 1911, this time accompanied by Father Giovanni Toselli. Following Horne's advice, the pair passed through Imenti and Igoji to lower Mwimbi. Finding no site there that met their needs, they returned to Fort Meru. There they petitioned Horne to allow construction of a single mission station in the region of Kiija, a flat, marshy plain that bordered lower Imenti and Tharaka.

Kiija was precisely ten miles from district headquarters and thus just outside both Imenti and the Methodist religious zone. Privately Horne objected, preferring that his personal colony be restricted to the British. Officially, the priests had clearly complied with government policy. Horne therefore permitted them to occupy not only the requested site at Kiija but also a second, still undetermined plot of land to be located somewhat farther south.

Gays and Toselli then returned to Nyeri, where Toselli was immediately charged with organizing a third expedition. In December 1911 he led three other missionaries and a file of forty porters into Meru once again. He was accompanied by Fathers Luigi Olivero, Giovanni Balbo, and Giuseppi Aimo-Boot. The priests reached Horne's headquarters after a four-day trek. After resting, they decided to move south, searching out the second site that Horne had promised within the relatively unknown regions of Igoji or Mwimbi.

Initially, they selected a tract of land at Thigaa, today a part of lower Mwimbi, which they described in subsequent reports as "wild and very low from a morality point of view."^[13] On further reflection they abandoned it completely, dividing into two parties to continue the search.

Aimo-Boot and Toselli traveled north and east (uphill) into Igoji, eventually settling on a site high on the mountain, on the banks of the Mutonga River and near today's Igoji Town. Thereafter they returned to ask Horne for permission to buy the tract from its original owner. Agreeing, Horne accompanied the two priests back to Igoji. On arrival he inquired of the person he had appointed blanket chief as to who

owned the land. Four men stepped forward. The group spokesman, M'Riria, listened patiently while Horne explained the Consolata offer, then flatly refused it. The other three supported his decision.

M'Riria's curt refusal fell clearly within Meru tradition. Land transfers were not settled within moments but emerged through long-drawn and complex negotiations. Ideally, adequate compensation would have had to be offered, not only to the plot's actual owners but also to each of their tenants who had previously negotiated cultivation or grazing rights. Deciding who might be eligible would take time.

Every Meru present at the scene instantly understood M'Riria's position as a bargaining ploy, the prelude to a long and satisfying period of negotiation. Voices from both sides rose, as Horne's police began to argue with the Igoji clansmen over how many goats they would in fact accept from the new whites, who clearly could afford so many. Horne, however, had little patience with Meru commercial traditions and none at all with the time they consumed. Unexpectedly, he cut short the rising babble of voices by striking M'Riria to the ground. Stunned and thoroughly frightened, the four landholders agreed immediately to the sale on the priests' original terms.^[14]

The other two members of the party were initially more fortunate. Fathers Balbo and Olivero had been selected to occupy the lowland site of Kiija. By prearrangement they were met at the location by R. A. B. Butler, Horne's newly assigned assistant district commissioner. Butler had no difficulty in convincing members of the Kiija Kiama to grant two pieces of land ("one for hut and one for garden") to the two priests in exchange for a specified number of goats. The real reason for their acceptance, however, lay in the elders' desire to acquire "white men of their own" to protect them from what they perceived as the rising power of Imenti clans higher up the mountain, increasingly arrogant because of their "possession" of Horne.

Taking Root

With land secured, Catholics and Methodists alike faced the task of recruiting labor in numbers sufficient for construction of church buildings. The Methodists achieved this by compulsion. Horne, strongly supportive of their effort, made them a government grant of unlimited logs from the Imenti forest. He then distributed a number of half-rupee pieces, provided by Griffiths, to each of his personal police, charging them to round up the needed labor.

The bands of warriors who subsequently appeared were ambivalent but not wholly unwilling. By this time (1913) most had been made increasingly aware of the hut tax, to be paid either in money or the forced sale of livestock. Thus while openly angry at being forced to do what they considered as the work of women, many were privately pleased at the chance to earn rupees for taxes by doing what seemed like easy work.

The "easy work" began by cutting trees that often ran to four feet in diameter, then dragging them by hand to wherever the whites wished. Many of the new employees, however, had already worked for Europeans, some having traveled to the Gikuyu region of Nanyuki. These "Nanyuki Nthaka" (Nanyuki warriors), as they called themselves, had become sufficiently familiar with European construction methods to work efficiently. Under Mimmack's direction and advised by Horne, they constructed the region's second Canadian-style log cabin. Initially, it was to serve as home for both Mimmack and Worthington, after Griffiths's departure for the coast, and thereafter form the basis for a larger dwelling devoted entirely to God.

The Catholic priests at Kiija and Igoji had no expectations of assistance from Horne. The Igoji fathers, in particular, faced the problem of recruiting labor from among a population mistrustful of their presence. Both groups resolved the problem by simply appealing to local warriors to come and work for them "as warriors." By 1911–1912, of course, the warriors of Kiija and Igoji had been both demobilized and demoralized by the shock of conquest. Many looked with open envy on those "more fortunate" war bands of Imenti, who had found work and thus a new sense of purpose as bodyguards and blanket police for Horne. On reflection several in each region decided they could achieve similar status by seeking the same type of work with these whites who had settled near them.

Thus the first employees to appear at both missions, therefore, sought work only as guards and watchmen, returning to their warrior traditions by "protecting" the whites. At night they stood silent watch around each mission campsite. During the day they formed squads of armed guardsmen, following each priest wherever he went. Their request to serve as soldiers fitted easily into the fathers' tradition of militant Christianity. As warriors appeared in search of work, they were renamed the Nthaka ya Kristo, or "warriors (soldiers) of Christ."

The warriors refused, however, to construct lodgings, explaining to both sets of priests that such work was for women. Unlike the Meth-

odists the fathers heeded them and set aside their European prejudices as to what constituted the appropriate sexual division of labor. As a result their initial request, which took the form of a "plea for trees," brought scores of singing women to their camps, each dragging three- to six-inch-thick tree trunks, which they then bound into the framework of as many traditional huts as the priests required. Each hut was then covered with banana leaves (Igoji) or papyrus (Kiija), woven in the latter case by groups of women into rainproof mats. Gradually these first church buildings took their somewhat untraditional form, and the first Holy Mass in Meru was celebrated on Christmas Eve in 1911.^[15]

The choice of Kiija, however, soon proved a strategic disaster, because of its impact on the health of both priests. Set amidst a marshy plain at the mountain's base, the site was subject to several ecological extremes. Throughout the dry seasons it baked beneath a searing sun. During the rains it virtually dissolved into the rising waters of the marsh. Each evening brought mosquitoes in clouds too great to bear, and with them, of course, came malaria.

By early 1912 both Balbo and Olivero had become seriously concerned. Their rising fears were fully shared by Bishop Perlo, after an inspection of the Kiija setting in February of that year. The bishop's initial request for a new site, higher up the mountain, however, brought no response from Horne, other than a reminder that such a move would bring the priests too near to the emerging Methodist mission at Meru Town.

By October 1912, however, the appearance of heavy rains drove the two Kiija fathers to desperation. Their desire to move "uphill," away from the marshlands, was given further impetus, moreover, by Horne's decision, in October 1912, to begin construction of the regionwide roadbed (the Horne Road) that would eventually link Fort Meru with Fort Embu to its south.

The Methodists, unwittingly, had placed their mission along the very edge of the projected road. The Catholics felt that simple justice should allow them the same privilege. Thus, in November 1912, Father Balbo petitioned Horne once more, asking to move "directly uphill" from his present site, to the "edge of the road now in construction," thereby escaping the "perils of marsh malaria, heat, and flooding."^[16] At the same time, Balbo argued that by placing themselves roughly equidistant between Forts Meru and Embu they could both remain under British Military protection and distant from the emerging Methodist church.

Once again Horne opposed the move but found himself overruled by colonial authorities in Nairobi. The new agreement thus allowed the Consolata to establish one new site "not more than one uphill walking hour" from the old one as far as possible from the Methodists in North Imenti. After a brisk uphill walk by Balbo the mission was resited on what only a few years earlier had been a warriors' dancing field, near the modern community of Gitie Mujua, in South Imenti. In keeping with the change, it was renamed Mujua (now Mujwa) Mission.

The actual transfer from Kiija to Mujua occurred in January 1913. During the same month, colonial authorities in Nairobi gave permission to extend Catholic religious activities into the regions farther north. To comply with the ten-mile rule of separation, the Consolata fathers were required to skip over Imenti and its Methodists but were allowed to establish stations in both Tigania and Igembe. The idea was deeply attractive, because it would provide a virtual religious monopoly over the Nyambeni Mountains.

Expansion was slower than expected. In 1913 two Catholic stations were established, one in Tigania (Athuana Mission) and a second in Igembe (Amun'Gente Mission). Each was manned by the now traditional pair of Consolata priests. Ten years passed, however, before additional stations were constructed in either northern region or before the Methodists sought to challenge the Consolata's monopoly by building a mission in Igembe. Meanwhile, local elders in both Tigania and Igembe proved eager to accept "new" whites, hoping to increase their power with respect to clans in Imenti. The same could not be said, however, for local willingness to accept the Christian message.

Sowing Seed

The search for converts began as soon as the first buildings were completed. Methodist and Catholic missionaries alike faced the problem of spreading God's word among peoples thoroughly content with their own religious system. For the Methodists the problem was intensified by their own preconceptions of African beliefs. For example, an early report back to England commented: "No tribe in Kenya is more deeply steeped in witchcraft than the Ameru. Witchcraft is their religion and the Wizard, their high priest."^[17] The mission's directors in London, supported by the Kenya Mission Council in Nairobi, responded by asking Worthington to "engage in constant study of the evils particular to this [Meru] country, so as to devise ways to combat them."^[18]

Considering both his lack of African experience and the religious bias characteristic of the era in which he worked, Worthington's study of the Meru religious system was relatively impartial. The Meru, he decided, did believe in a supreme being, whom they called either Murungu or Ngai. They perceived Him, however, as either indifferent or hostile to people's fate. It was Ngai, they told him, who sent famine by withholding rain. A run of good fortune, in contrast, simply meant He had turned His attention elsewhere.

For want of such attention, Worthington decided the Meru had turned to the worship of innumerable alleged spirits. Some were spirits of the bush, woodland, or forest that surrounded every hut. Others were the shades of ancestors, returning from the dead. Such spirits also alternated between hostility and indifference, never displaying love. Daily life, therefore, was lived in constant fear, briefly alleviated only by continued efforts to placate one or more of the spirits through the continual sacrifice of livestock.

Worthington's first act against these forces came unintentionally, through his party's need to cut daily loads of firewood for warmth and cooking. Without thinking, he ordered Wanjoe, the Gikuyu translator who also served as cook, to cut firewood from the forest groves that encircled his cabin. Having learned from neighboring Meru that the entire site was sacred to ancestral spirits, Wanjoe refused.

Worthington's response was to cut the wood himself, having decided that their belief in spirits was what cut the Meru off from God. The action stunned Imenti observers, as did Worthington's subsequent excellent health. Unable to explain why the spirits spared him, local elders decided they must have fled before his ax. That flight became part of Meru oral tradition. Those elders who once lived near Ka-Aga still claim they heard the spirits sing their final song: "Twathama, twathama. Tweta Rinyuri. Mugumo, mugumo. Jutigwe, ntiu." (We [the spirits] move, we move. We go to Rinyuri [a place]. The sacred fig tree, the sacred fig tree. It will be axed, when we are gone.)^[19] Because the location of Rinyuri is unknown in Meru, the spirits were never seen again.

Having established the sanctity of his mission station, Worthington then attempted to venture out into the surrounding villages. Unable to speak Ki-Meru, he was accompanied by one of his Gikuyu interpreters, usually Maina. His method was simply to walk, greeting people as they passed in twos and threes by asking Maina to impart that "this day was God's day, and would they come to hear a message?"^[20]

Without exception small crowds gathered at a designated point. Many came out of fascination with Worthington's "red" skin and the pleasure of hearing him talk using sounds they never had heard. Others enjoyed his attempts at song, participating cheerfully in simple chants, which they later learned were prayers. Only the elders interrupted his preaching, often to question one of his statements, but also occasionally to approve. Notwithstanding, Worthington himself grew swiftly disenchanted with what he saw as the "extensive method" of sowing God's seed. In establishing a new mission, he later wrote: "[a single, isolated missionary] must either sow widely, preaching to every village in reach, while trusting other hands to reap the harvest, or he must turn to the intensive method, gathering a chosen few around him, [then] surrounding them with a Christian atmosphere."^[21]

Conditions within Meru, he decided, dictated the intensive approach. Too often the crowds he assembled failed to stay, drawn away by their work. In dry seasons the heat proved stupefying to both the missionary and his audience. In wet seasons the rains proved too heavy to permit extensive foot travel.

Over time, therefore, Worthington placed more and more emphasis on drawing people into his home. In theory men of his age-set (family heads/apprentice elders) and older would have responded with pleasure to such invitations, had he been willing to greet them, as tradition required, with servings of millet beer. Unfortunately, because Methodist tradition of that era abjured beer, Worthington refused to even bring it near his "house of God." He thereby placed himself outside the traditions of Meru hospitality. Affronted, few apprentice elders ever came.

The same, however, could not be said for children, particularly youths between eleven and fifteen. These were known as the Ndinguri, or "elder boys." Before the conquest, every moment of their time would have been spent in their Kiama Kia Ndinguri (council of eldest boyhood), training ceaselessly for their approaching time as warriors. By 1913, however, such training was pointless. Idled by forces they could not understand, many began to consider approaching the white strangers to seek either diversion or work.

Worthington responded swiftly. The first Ndinguri to approach his compound were rewarded with stories, salt, bits of sugar, and strips of cloth. Because at this age boys often went naked, the cloth was particularly prized as a symbol of their approaching adulthood. The salt and sugar also proved attractive, and many of the boys became regular visitors as they grew increasingly addicted to the "honey powder" with

which the missionaries proved so generous. However, the stories often proved the strongest lure of all. As Worthington's mastery of the language improved, he became an artful storyteller, able to hold an entire circle of boys spellbound with his tales of the boyhood of Jesus.

In the long run, however, the greatest attraction—to boys of every age—was the pleasure of learning to read. Several of the Ndinguri who would subsequently form the first generation of Methodist converts were fascinated by the promise inherent in a printed page. The most notable among these was Filipo, M'Inoti, later to become Meru's first author, Methodist minister, and regional chief.^[22]

M'Inoti was the fifth of ten children. His father had died when he was five. His mother lived in relative poverty, near Ka-Aga. M'Inoti originally came to the mission seeking work. At age fifteen he was at the end of boyhood and deeply restless. His older brothers, all warriors, had refused to approach the white man, scorning the work he offered as women's labor. Worthington was struck immediately by M'Inoti's intelligence. When offered the chance to learn reading, M'Inoti in turn was initially stunned with the ease in which written words could be learned and understood. Thrilled by the chance to acquire a wholly new skill, he came daily and was soon far ahead of every other budding reader.

His example inspired several others of his age-set to join him. Together they resolved to follow both Meru and Methodist tradition, by forming a "Kiama of learners" (Kiama Kia Mabuku, or "council of 'bookers' "), which would live in a war hut, as warriors, next to the white man's church. There they would learn to be both men of war and men of books. Worthington, retranslating this concept into British form, was delighted to assist in the construction of what he perceived as a boy's dormitory, which in daytime could function as a school. By late 1913 the structure housed eleven youths who met as schoolboys during the day and as "almost warriors" at night. To Worthington it appeared that his intensive method of conversion had achieved considerable success.

In contrast the Consolata fathers in Igoji, South Imenti, and (later) Tigania and Igembe relied entirely on what Worthington would have called extensive methods, or "walking everywhere within the wilderness to spread the word of God."^[23] Initially this "word" was spoken only in Gikuyu, the only local language the four pioneer fathers knew. For translators the priests initially drew upon the services of ten-year-old boys from the Gikuyu Catholic orphanage at Nyeri. These had all

learned some Italian and quickly proved able to bridge the gap between their own and the Meru dialects. Inadvertently they also served as cultural interpreters, teaching the priests the courtesies associated with the Meru language as they learned it.

The priests' first approach, therefore, was to visit the surrounding homesteads and present gifts ("We began Christ's word by giving greetings and tobacco").^[24] The Kiija and Mujwa fathers offered native snuff. The Igoji fathers gathered salt, then placed it in their saddle bags and rode on horseback through the Meru homesteads dispensing lumps as gifts.

These acts fell squarely, if inadvertently, within Meru traditions of hospitality. Custom, within every Meru region, required that strangers present gifts to the heads of each homestead they visited and accept other gifts in return. The exchange was intended to generate feelings of empathy that would transform host and visitor into friends.

The priests behaved precisely as tradition required, visiting favored homesteads on a regular basis, each time with gifts of snuff or salt. In response the elders asked their wives to brew huge gourds of beer on days the strangers were expected. The priests shared the beer and then asked their hosts to visit them in turn at their home on "God's day" (Sunday). They hired the women who lived nearest to the mission to brew fresh supplies of millet beer. Thus each Sunday found the mission filled with visitors, all drinking happily from the Consolata's supply of beer. The days were then spent in exchange of song and story, which gave the priests unending opportunity to speak of God.

The visits were extended, zone by zone, into concentric circles spreading outward from each mission. On occasion they took on somber tones, allowing priests to expand beyond their initial role as guests. For example, the priests entered homes where occupants lay ill or dying. They responded according to their religious tradition, dispensing such medicine as they carried while refusing to accept payment, even when recovery was complete.

These refusals, however, clashed sharply with Meru tradition, triggering suspicion among patients and relatives alike. In Meru those who gave the gift of medicine without accepting gifts in return were believed to be Arogi, or cursers. Father Balbo, in particular, was adamant in his refusal to accept what he perceived as payment. Consequently several of the elders he was treating denounced him as a curser and refused all further medicine. To the consternation of the local community, they soon died, but others who had accepted Balbo's treatments lived on and

grew well. His reputation restored, Balbo continued to practice, after modifying his approach once again to conform with Meru custom.

The Consolata fathers were sometimes faced with those their medicine could not save. Again following Western tradition, they administered both the rites of baptism and extreme unction. When questioned as to what they were doing, the priests replied they were cleaning the spirit, to prepare it for God. Their answer pleased the Meru. The rites of "cleansing" (i.e., curse removal) formed the very core of Meru religious belief and those of baptism and extreme unction allowed the Catholics to believe they were reclaiming souls. The first 155 of these "secret baptisms" were duly recorded in the early mission logbooks as evidence of the Meru's spiritual awakening, long before the first living candidates appeared.^[25]

Many Meru displayed a lively interest in the new ideas, along with a total disinclination to accept them. Women proved too deeply wedded to their own traditions, with no room left for intellectual inquiry. The same could not be said for Meru men. The first to truly listen to the Consolata message were the ill and dying, "who would come every Sunday for [the fathers'] medicines and instruction, simply for the comfort that it gave them."^[26] The next to reconsider were often half-castes: men of mixed tribal ancestry whose mothers had been seized in war. As boys they had noted that their mothers worshiped other spirits. As warriors many had visited their mothers' kin, learning of other ways. As elders, however, many were cattle poor, barred from social prominence by their heritage. These men were thus often least loyal to Meru traditions and most willing to examine the Catholic way.

The missions also proved attractive, on occasion, to "political" outcasts, cattle-rich elders who had incurred the greed or anger of Horne's blanket chiefs or more often their retainers. In such instances the elder might be seized and brought before the chief or the retainer's Kiama for a trial intended to drain off at least a portion of his flocks and herds. Having been judged guilty, he would be told to bring the animals in. Instead he sought refuge for them in the mission, where at the very least the priests would guarantee an accurate count.

The experience of Meru's third Catholic mission, founded at Athuana, Tigania, in August 1913, provides an interesting example of this trend. The mission, established by the now experienced Father Aimo-Boot, had been placed in the administrative chiefdom of Muthara, a district that had been given to the famous old warrior M'Minuki (Dominuki). M'Minuki, remember, had begun his career in the late

1880s as a war leader for the tiny border clan of Daicho. Caught between far larger forces in both Tigania and Imenti, he sought allies to survive, systematically befriending every Western caravan leader who crossed his land.

M'Minuki displayed an unusual ability to adapt to change. During the 1890s he passed from warriorhood and became a family head, intent solely on expanding his lands, flocks, and herds. He achieved this by becoming a "broker," selling ivory, which he had acquired from A-Athi and Ogiek hunters from Tigania to Mwimbi, to passing caravans. By the early 1900s he had become a ruling elder, cattle rich and the acknowledged spokesman for the Daicho clans. For him Horne's conquest meant an end to war and thus guaranteed safety for his growing herds.

On completing his subordination of the Tigania region, Horne acknowledged M'Minuki's position by appointing him blanket chief, not just of Daicho but of the entire Muthara District, a location that contained almost all of his traditional enemies. Trapped by circumstance, M'Minuki responded by seeking even greater numbers of livestock to bolster his own sense of security. He was thus deeply pleased, initially, to acquire a "missionary of his own," to counter both the resentment of his Tiganian enemies and the power of the Imenti at Fort Meru, who claimed to "own" both the Methodists and Horne. As a result he expansively invited Father Aimo-Boot, now joined by a second priest, Father A. Russo, to place their mission adjacent to his "chief's camp" in the heart of Muthara District.

Having done so, however, the priests refused emphatically to join in with M'Minuki's plan to drain the herds of his subjects by imposing constant livestock fines for alleged violations of colonial law. Worse, M'Minuki's most vocal opponents, elders fearful of losing their animals, began to look to the mission for refuge. Thus a predictable pattern of events emerged. A wealthy elder would speak out against the chief or his retainers. He would be seized, tried, and fined. Desperate, the victim would drive every animal to the mission, then refuse to return for fear of the chief's retribution. The priests, too often aware that the trials were unjust, felt bound in turn by their own traditions, which allowed the Catholic church to serve as sanctuary for the oppressed, to allow the outcasts to stay.

The missions also offered shelter to former warriors. The first warriors to work within the missions, of course, served as watchmen and guards. During this same period, however, all men of warrior age were

conscripted to work on the roads. By 1913, military traditions had crumbled so much that the blanket chiefs began to practice conscription in their turn, seizing entire war bands to cultivate their private farms. The idea spread, in turn, into the ranks of each chief's troop of retainers, who began to imitate their supervisors, extorting labor on a smaller scale from men of an age-set now increasingly perceived as "idle" and "unemployed." Exceptions could be made, however, for warriors who worked for Europeans. Horne's private guards, for instance, were formally freed from conscription, and the Catholic mission warriors soon followed their example. As a result missions became increasingly attractive as possible havens for warriors particularly oppressed by demands for what amounted to indefinite involuntary servitude. On occasion those who angered either chiefs or chiefs' men sought security where they could and often found it in the church.

On occasion, a warrior might also join the mission because of his admiration for its details. Often these were not the central teachings of the faith; however, concepts peripheral to the Italians were often central to Meru thought. One early convert in Igoji, for example, explained his draw to the church thus:

When I was a boy, a child died in my village. The body was eaten by hyenas. I swore an oath that hyenas would never eat me. Later a white man appeared, who said he carried word from God that no one should ever again be eaten by hyenas when they die. Instead they were to be placed safely in the ground. So I looked at what was happening in the world and decided to listen to what the white men would say.^[27]

The Catholic missions' major successes, however, like those of the Methodists, were with children. This was especially true with youths falling within the eleven-to-fifteen-year-old age range (Ndinguri). Traditions governing this final stage of boyhood included learning wisdom from one's elders. This applied particularly to wisdom taught by strangers, because in former years they might have learned something of the regions where they might some day wage war. Thus as one source stated: "So it was the children who came. They approached out of curiosity, and took our medicine for the pleasure of spitting out the taste, and for the good it did them. They listened to our stories of Jesus as a boy like themselves, and generally took pleasure in our company."^[28]

Inevitably, the focus of both the Methodist and Catholic missions shifted to the children. Having won their attention, both churches directed the second stage of their labors to providing schools. The

Catholics began constructing a considerable number of traditional beehive-shaped "school huts," initially within the villages they visited but subsequently also on the mission grounds. Like the Methodists, the priests lured the first generation of students into these huts with promises of sugar and cloth. The first schoolteachers, however, were often Gikuyu youths, still in their teens. Usually, each teacher lasted less than a month, remaining only until he had exhausted either the situation's novelty or his store of knowledge. Thereafter, to the pupils' intense amusement, their teacher would "escape to Kikuyuland."^[29] The school would close, and the pupils returned to herding goats. In time, however, the priests provided new Gikuyu, and classes began again.

The Costs Of Conversion

In Meru both the Methodist and the Catholic forms of Christianity proved attractive only to a few. Despite persistent missionary efforts the number actually willing to accept the Christian faith proved astonishingly small. European estimates of the Meru population during the early colonial years ranged from 80,000 to 200,000. During their first seven years the four Catholic missions recorded only twenty-eight baptisms between them (twelve in Igoji, eight in Imenti, and eight more in the north).^[30] Methodist efforts were no more effective, with six conversions in 1913 and only twenty-six by 1920.^[31] These are small numbers for so many years of unremitting effort.

Neither faith, however, had underestimated the social, cultural, and psychological costs of conversion. "The supreme act of surrendering . . . to Jesus," a missionary wrote in 1919, "is an act of separation from the African's own people. He is called to give up so much which he has regarded as . . . African, . . . tribal dances, . . . customs, . . . traditions. The danger is that he must cease to be African . . . to become Christian."^[32] These costs grew progressively greater as potential converts aged. The Catholic missions relied partially on the collection of abandoned infants to swell their ranks, reacting to Meru tradition that sanctioned the abandonment of certain types of newborn babies. Twins, the deformed, and those born feet first were believed cursed and were thus abandoned to the hyenas. The Catholics, aware of the tradition from their experience in "Kikuyuland," sought to collect and thereby save those babies. Thus over time a Catholic orphanage appeared at Mujwa Mission that provided a small but slowly increasing number of future converts.

Entry into the Christian faith was also easy during childhood. Children entering the mission, usually in search of schooling, found themselves subjected to the "European cleansing rites" of soap and water, as hair and bodies were scrubbed and goatskin clothes replaced by squares of cloth that could be kept clean by washing. Beyond the required rites of cleansing, however, little change was required. Like Meru children everywhere, they were required to do little more than sit, listen, and learn wisdom from their elders. Beyond that their decisions on whether to accept their "elders' wisdom" were essentially religious, touching few of the secular traditions that governed their childhood lives.

Upon entering the stage of elder boyhood, however, it became increasingly difficult to be both Christian and Meru. As each boy moved through adolescence, warriorhood, courtship, and marriage, he found himself gradually engulfed by a rising tide of religious prohibitions, intended to isolate him not only from his "pagan" age-mates but also from the life of the entire tribe. Boys choosing to join either religious faith during elder boyhood, for example, faced two immediate decisions, intended to separate them instantly from members of their age-set. The first was to shave off their warrior braid, the mark of an emerging warrior.

Younger boys wore their hair short. Only Ndinguri were allowed to let it grow into what would become a foot-long warrior braid. The braid could be further elongated by attaching it to a fifteen-inch-long wooden rod, after which the entire creation was decorated with strips of hide and wooden beads. The hair braid and rod were dyed bright red, using the ocher clay found in ponds along the mountain's base. The result was a unique, distinctive hairstyle for which all growing boys yearned, knowing it would distinguish them as warriors and men.

On entering the Catholic mission, men had their magnificent war braids shaved away. The red ocher used to enhance the beauty of women and warrior alike was scrubbed from hair and body. Beads, skins, and every form of ornament were cast aside. "We knew too much of symbols," a priest recalled. "We had to make them see that in accepting Christ they left all other things behind."^[33]

The Methodists, in contrast, relied on peer pressure. Young men who joined the church soon realized that both the missionaries and the Gikuyu converts who became their teachers disapproved of warrior regalia, particularly the war braid. Thereafter, as their own perspectives changed, they followed "Christian fashion" by imitating Worthington's close-cropped hair. In so doing, however, they both distinguished

and separated themselves from those of their age-mates who retained traditional ways, a separation that inevitably stimulated hostility.

This separation was further enhanced by Christian pressure on the elder boys to "close up their ears." Traditionally, entry into elder boyhood was marked by widening the earlobes. This was done by piercing them, inserting wooden plugs into the holes, then replacing each plug with wider versions until the earlobes reached a desired size. Both Catholics and Methodists abhorred the practice, declaring that any mutilation was against God's will. The priests required, therefore, that the earlobes be sewn up on entry into the church. The Methodists again relied on peer pressure, designating Paulo M'Ituke, an early convert trained in mission carpentry, to "stitch the ears of anyone who asked."^[34] In time, "small ears," like short hair, became a Christian fashion, to be displayed with pride. At the same time it served to further differentiate and thereby isolate the Ndinguri converts from their age-mates.

This isolation intensified as elder boys approached the time of preparing for their entry into warriorhood. Tradition required them to form themselves into "councils of elder boyhood" (Kiama Kia Ndinguri), then mount challenges against the bands of true warriors in their community. Initially these contests took the form of taunting songs, which grew in insult and ferocity until the warriors were provoked to respond.

Tradition also encouraged warriors to strike back at their tormentors, imposing thankless tasks upon them as a group, then beating any boy evading the labor with the flat of their swords. Each task was sanctified by tradition. The most onerous and humiliating was the brewing of millet beer, a process involving hours of monotonous labor. It was traditionally done by women. Thus by requiring it of elder boys, warriors could both anger them and cast doubt upon their manhood.

Any warrior could demand this task of any Ndinguri. The victim would then gather age-mates to assist him in the brewing. Forbidden by custom even to taste it, Ndinguri would deliver the completed brew to warriors in their war hut. Tradition also forbade warriors to drink, however, lest they be drunk when enemies attacked. The beer, therefore, was carried onward and delivered finally to their fathers, who alone as ruling elders were allowed the luxury of drunkenness.

Unfortunately, neither the Catholic nor Protestant missionaries understood the social complexities of Meru beer drinking. Both faiths, however, refused to allow those elder boys who converted to brew beer,

reasoning, not illogically, that they meant to drink it. Nor were the boys' declared intentions to "pass the beer on to the warriors" accepted by either ministers or priests, since both faiths opposed intoxication within that age-set as well. In consequence elder boys who joined a Christian mission found themselves isolated from the entire spectrum of obligations that normally would have led to their emergence into warriorhood.

This isolation intensified further as each boy reached his time of circumcision. Meru tradition exalted both male and female circumcision as the single most important event in life, signifying the abandonment of childhood and the acquisition of adult status. That abandonment was symbolized by slicing away a piece of the flesh itself: among women, the clitoris and labia minora; among men, the penile foreskin. Custom permitted no one to show pain during the cutting, because successfully bearing the "bite of the knife" marked full entry into wife- or warrior-hood. The operation was universal. To avoid it would have meant acceptance of a child's status for the remainder of one's life. To call any adult an "uncircumcised child" was a deadly insult. Thus the operation was an experience for which every child in Meru yearned.

Nevertheless, both Catholic and Protestant missionaries objected violently to the operation as a direct violation of God's will. To their surprise even the most devoted among their disciples refused to abandon it. Early attempts by Catholics to preach against it resulted in a total—if temporary—withdrawal of every member of their congregations and systematic ostracism in the surrounding villages. On reflection they decided as early as 1910 to regard the operation itself as outside the sphere of religion and to concentrate their preaching against those elements of the surrounding celebrations—the drinking and dancing and so forth—that lent a "pagan atmosphere" to the entire rite.

The Methodists followed a similar, if somewhat stronger, line. Also unable to stop the actual operation, they too turned their attention against the rituals accompanying it, which they perceived as "little more than an orgy of indescribable practices affording opportunity for the unlimited exercise of gratuitous cruelty" (a reference to the cutting itself).^[35] Their first solution was to Christianize the operation, allowing the actual cutting to take place within the mission but replacing the music, dancing, and "pagan" elements with Christian prayer.

Unfortunately, that decision clashed with a Meru tradition that required all newly circumcised boys to remain for one to three months in the formal isolation of a specially constructed recovery or healing hut

while their wounds slowly healed. The time spent in the huts was specifically intended as a period of further trial, a final stage in their transition from boyhood to warrior status.

In theory their isolation was total. In practice it was violated continually by older warriors, allegedly intending to instruct them in the ways of their own warriorhood. In fact much instruction was in the form of beatings, as warriors took their final revenge upon the boys who would someday replace them. The beatings were intended, however, to remind the novice warriors that they were now men. Upon leaving the healing huts, they would be expected to put aside all childish ways, join their new age-mates in the war hut—and be warriors.

During this healing period, therefore, Worthington's most devoted converts would recant, abandoning their Christian training as "a thing of boyhood" in favor of a return to the ways of the tribe. The missionary's initial attempt to Christianize the operation failed when the first boys scheduled to pass through the Christian version slipped away to undergo the rite in customary fashion.

Worthington therefore shifted strategies, allowing converts the traditional operation but compelling a return to the mission immediately thereafter. In December 1916 he enforced this decision by sending a group of converts to forcibly seize two of their number on completion of their operation. Embittered protests by the two boys' fathers were ignored by the district commissioner. In June 1919 he repeated the action, seizing a larger number of converts at the moment their operation was complete.

This time, however, Worthington's action was vigorously opposed by A. E. Chamier, newly appointed to the district administration and a vocal champion of native rights. Chamier, coincidentally meeting the converts as they returned to the mission, ordered the seizures to stop. Worthington, furious at what he perceived as an attempt to dismantle his years of labor, appealed to Chamier's superiors at both the provincial and colony levels. Surprisingly, administrators at both levels supported the Methodists, contending that only through insulating their converts from the lure of pagan rituals could their educative efforts succeed in weaning them from "paganism and savagedom to a higher form of life."^[36] Thus the process by which potential converts were drawn away from interaction with their age-mates was gradually intensified. But to accept it meant increasing isolation from every facet of communal life.

During the warrior years this isolation assumed sexual dimensions. Before the conquest, males entered warriorhood soon after puberty, most often between ages thirteen to sixteen. They then spent the next twelve to sixteen years at war, in an unending cycle of livestock raiding intended to allow them to acquire the livestock they would need as bridewealth. By their late twenties most men realized their warrior years were ending, and shifted their energies from cattle raids to courtship.

After the conquest, of course, cattle raiding was banned. Deprived of warfare, older warriors who had collected livestock focused on the only activity that remained. In Meru, however, the initial stage of courtship was based on mastering the intricacies of extemporaneous song and traditional dance. As in the West, both men and women used their bodies as instruments of sexual attraction. Meru tradition sanctified male nakedness, under circumstances that were both controlled and free. All dances were public and lit by blazing fires. Elders of both sexes were present. Younger men and women sang and danced only within their own age-sets. Sexual attraction was equated not only with physical grace but also with the ability to create extemporaneous songs that drew appreciative laughter from the crowds. Finally, after the dancing ended, brothers escorted their sisters home.

Unfortunately, both Methodist and Catholic missionaries were unaware of these restrictions. In consequence all Christian converts were forbidden to join, or even watch, the traditional songs and dances with which the process of courting began. Methodists and Catholics alike objected to any form of public male nudity, even if participants wore goatskin cloaks. They opposed the songmaking because the verses often elicited audience response through sexual innuendo. They associated drumming with "savagery and darkness"—the time when dances did in fact take place—and thus with their own ideas of evil. The Methodists, in addition, objected to the elders using these communal occasions to drink beer.

Faced with unrelenting mission opposition, males who had reached the age of warriorhood often initially reacted by sneaking off to dance at night, expecting to return to their studies by dawn. It proved impossible. The converts' shaven hair, lack of weapons, and Western ways all worked to turn their age-mates against them, sending them fleeing from a barrage of taunting songs in anger and humiliation. On occasion, converts who attempted to rejoin their age-mates' courting rituals

were met by a hail of curses and rocks, intended to remind them that "Meru women were reserved for Meru men."^[37]

Thus deprived of normal forms of courtship, converts saw no way to marry. In the first years neither Catholics nor Methodists had proved able to attract women into their congregations, and over time the problem of providing mates became crucial to the survival of the missions themselves. "In the ordinary courses of nature," Worthington wrote during these early years, "our young male Christians will want to marry. Those upon whom their choice will fall are heathen, and as such forbidden to them by the rules of the Church and the express injunction of St. Paul."^[38]

The solution, of course, was to extend the web of religious isolation to as many women as there were converts. Although Christian tradition declared that no convert could wed a pagan, Meru tradition held that no woman could oppose the wishes of her prospective husband. Presumably that custom also applied to his choice of her religion.

The problem, therefore, lay in convincing the fathers of these prospective brides to permit their daughters to marry Christians. The solution, according to the prospective bridegrooms, lay in their being able to offer substantial numbers of livestock to the girls' fathers, to serve as bride-wealth in the minds of all concerned. On reflection missionaries of both faiths threw themselves enthusiastically into the proceedings, arranging for the needed livestock. Thereafter, they assumed the role traditionally assigned to each potential bridegroom's father, negotiating the customary types of livestock to be paid to the fathers of each prospective bride and participating cheerfully in the communal meat feasts intended unite the bride's and bridegroom's kin.

The women were given no voice in the decision. "We women went to the mission," one of the earliest female converts declared, "not because we liked it, but because our [future] husbands demanded it. . . . Once a girl was betrothed . . . she had to want what her husband wanted. If she refused the soap [the Christian cleansing rites], she would be beaten [by her new husband] and sent back to her father in disgrace."^[39] As a result those adolescent girls who married the first generation of male converts entered the Christian faith as a matter of course, sharing both the religious conviction and social isolation of their age-mates from that point onward in their lives.