The Scotsmen

The ministers at the Church of Scotland's Gikuyu missions were only too aware that their Gikuyu converts' failure at the Mwimbi station had been matched in Cuka, where a site had been developed at Chief Kabandango's camp, two miles from the protection of Fort Naka, Orde-Browne's district headquarters. It seemed ideally placed. Nonetheless, it was abandoned after only a few months, having drawn the attention of only a single Cuka boy.

By late 1919 the successful end of war in both East Africa and Europe drew government attention to the missions once again. By 1920 the CSM received official notice that its sphere in Cuka-Mwimbi had to be occupied by at least one European missionary within the next few months, or the area would be transferred to another mission. As an inducement the colonial government offered to donate all of the existing buildings that made up Fort Naka—including Orde-Browne's well-built stone house—to the CSM for use as a base, the government having decided to move its own Cuka operation to another site. The cost to the CSM was to be £800, at that time a relatively nominal sum.

Arthur responded to the government's offer with a plea to England for funds. None proved forthcoming. The Fort Naka purchase was abandoned, and consideration was also given to abandoning the entire Cuka-Mwimbi salient as well. At this point a financial sponsor appeared—from a quite unanticipated source—offering funds sufficient for a whole new start in Mwimbi.

The sponsor was Ernest Carr, a wealthy Nairobi contractor. At the war's end his daughter had married Dr. A. Clive Irvine, a medical missionary, who had joined the CSM at Tumutumu in July 1919.^[16] Irvine had grown up in Liverpool, where his father had served as a Presbyterian minister. A young man of both intelligence and energy, he had obtained degrees in both the arts and medicine at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

In 1917 he joined the British armed forces as a medical officer and was posted to the former German East Africa (Tanganyika), where he served for the next two years with the ammunition column service of the Camel Corps. As a medical officer his work brought him into frequent contact with African porters (karia , or carriers), men drawn from among tribes in Kenya and Uganda.

Many of the karia were from Mount Kenya's highlands, and the two years gave Irvine a solid base in what then was known as "native medicine," as well as language fluency in both Swahili and Gikuyu. As the war ended, Irvine met Arthur, who described the work of the CSM within Gikuyu and invited him to join. Irvine accepted, taking temporary charge of medical work late in 1920 at Tumutumu Mission, where he married the daughter of Ernest Carr.

Carr's subsequent financial offer electrified the entire mission. In the winter of 1921 he offered to finance the entire Cuka-Mwimbi missionary effort by guaranteeing £1,000 per year over the first five years of the station's life. The sum granted for the first few months could be used to survey and select a suitable site. Funds thereafter would be allocated for construction of a house, hospital, school, industrial (carpenter's) workshop, and whatever other buildings might be required to operate in modern style. Electricity and running water were to be provided as required. In short it was to be a missionary's dream station, and thus the envy of its Methodist and Catholic competition. In return Irvine had only to agree to occupy the site for the entire period, take charge of its activities, and tour the United Kingdom as the five years ended to raise funds to continue the work.

Irvine and his wife were in England when Carr made his offer, having completed two years' work in Tumutumu and gone on leave. They accepted within hours and made immediate plans to return. Meanwhile Carr himself joined forces with Arthur to trek into the Cuka-Mwimbi region in January 1922 to select a site. Accompanied by both the provincial commissioner of Gikuyu and the district commissioner of Embu, they followed the same route Arthur had chosen during his pioneer venture into Cuka-Mwimbi in 1915.

The chiefs of Cuka and lower and upper Mwimbi were visited in turn. Kabandango's Cuka region was rejected out of hand, as was the lower Mwimbi chiefdom of M'Kiambati. Surprisingly, Arthur also decided to abandon the upper Mwimbi mission at Gaitangi's (Mwiria ya Mburia), where both Daudi Makumi and Ismaili Wangu had labored with such diligence the previous four years. Instead the group trekked uphill toward Mbogore's headquarters near the lower edge of the black forest.

Mbogore greeted them with enthusiasm, indicating a fertile site along the Maara River and thus adjacent to his administrative camp. The party was more impressed, however, with a second, lower site along the Kamaara (Little Maara) River, downhill from Mbogore's village and thus much closer to the geographic center of Mwimbi itself. The site, now known as Chogoria, was comparatively near the Horne Road (named for E. B. Horne) that connected Mwimbi both to Meru and Embu district headquarters. More important, it possessed a striking waterfall that could provide not only irrigation but also hydroelectricity and thus assure the mission's further growth.

The whites were jubilant. Mbogore was appalled. His own plan called for the mission's location to be in or near his camp, where he could supervise and thereby benefit from its activities. He argued forcefully with Arthur for the higher site, describing with some accuracy the relative poverty of soil in the lower area, as well as the presence of malevolent spirits in the nearby forest glades. Arthur, however, fully aware of Mbogore's intentions, firmly insisted on the Chogoria site.

Work completed, Arthur and Carr left Mwimbi to return to their respective posts. Before departure, however, they left Mbogore with extensive instructions. Within a few weeks tribal policemen were sent to round up laborers from every location in Mwimbi. These were put to work constructing simple bridges across that region's racing rivers in anticipation of the coming rains.^[17]

A few days after the bridges' completion a massive caravan of seventy-four carts arrived in April 1922, each hauled painfully across the rising rivers by stumbling teams of oxen. Within the carts were materials sufficient to construct a modern house, hospital, school, sheds, and whatever else the Irvines might require: "It was indeed a missionary's dream station. There was none of the struggling along with inadequate buildings and equipment. . . Everything was planned and provided beforehand, ready for the work to go ahead."^[18]

The construction was completed by September 1922. On 12 October a single ox wagon arrived containing Dr. and Mrs. Irvine and a newborn son.^[19] Irvine plunged into his work with exceptional enthusiasm; the very next morning tribal police were sent around to the local villages urging "anyone who sought shillings to come and work for the new white man." The response was enormous. A large proportion of the former warriors had worked for whites in more than one capacity, either as karia of ammunition or on the coffee farms emerging near Nairobi. Many who were warriors at that time recall their fear that the new white man would "seize them and put them in a school."^[20] Nonetheless, by 1922 the need for money had become universal, and Irvine had his pick of eager workers.

A man of unflagging zeal, Irvine worked unceasingly to earn a welcome from his hosts. The people in his immediate area were poor. Many had been forced to flee from the drought, famines, diseases, and locusts that had ravaged the area. Others had been strong-armed into the Carrier Corps and had never returned. As a result land in much of the Chogoria region had reverted to bush, often simply for lack of men to clear it. The remaining population was therefore forced to struggle not only with poor soil but also constant depredation from bands of bush pigs, which raided the farm plots each night. Irvine earned the gratitude of many Mwimbi by waging war against the pigs with strychnine, poisoning them in sufficient numbers to reduce the problem.

The missionary also made full use of Western medical knowledge. Unlike Samsoni Maingi, who preferred to heal the sick in silence, Irvine interpreted his healing mission as a major portion of his work for Christ. He was particularly fortunate to have arrived in Mwimbi when several of its more visible diseases proved amenable to new discoveries in Western medicine. One of the more striking examples was yaws, a condition in which the legs and lower body are covered with open, gaping sores.

Irvine believed that almost half of the Mwimbi population showed symptoms of the disease. In 1917, French scientists had developed a medicine known as Galyl, based on arsenic. By 1920 the treatment was available in East Africa. Irvine had previously used it to treat yaws among the Gikuyu. Drawing from that experience, he brought to Mwimbi vast quantities of the compound, which he used with conspicuous success.

Irvine wasted no chance to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of his medicines in contrast with those of the "witch doctors." When possible, he competed directly with local ritualists, contests in which the latter did indeed come off second best. As a result many of the aged who had previously enjoyed both financial security and community standing as healers became increasingly subject to verbal taunts and even physical abuse from youths influenced by Irvine. This abuse was sometimes so intense that the healers were virtually sent fleeing from the very homesteads where they had once practiced their skills.

Irvine proved equally enthusiastic in his attacks on the concept of Mugiro, or the ritual curse. As a doctor he inquired often about what the Mwimbi themselves believed to be the causes of the various illnesses that beset them. As a missionary he was both amused and angered by their continued assertions that almost every form of illness was the direct result of a curse having been ritually placed upon the sufferer, either by an ancestral spirit or a living person with whom the afflicted individual was in conflict.

Irvine lost no opportunity to convince those youths with whom he came most frequently into contact that they no longer had to fear either curses or the ancestral spirits believed to have imposed them. His central argument was that faith in Christ was like a shield, protecting Christians from the curses cast against them as they advanced against their enemies. To dramatize his point, he bid them enter with him into the spirit forests (sacred groves) in which ancestral spirits were believed to live.

These forest groves had been considered sacred to spirits for generations. No living person was allowed within one, whether by intent or accident. Those who strayed incurred an automatic curse that could be removed only by intercession of the proper ritualists, who would require sacrifice of livestock to appease the spirits involved.

The spirit forest closest to Irvine's rising mission at Chogoria was called Muriru. In it was a pond, welling up between two huge rocks, which was believed to be the opening through which the ancestors en-

tered the grove itself. Upon hearing of it, Irvine entered the forest and blocked off the pond with stones, thereby symbolically locking the spirits into the ground. He then invited the small number of youths who had accompanied him to gather that night's firewood from within the grove itself.

This pattern was repeated in at least two other sacred areas, the groves of Gikarangu and Iiga via Mukuri.^[21] Irvine may also have visited others. In each case the destruction was essentially symbolic rather than physical. In each case people from the surrounding localities waited for the ancestors' retribution against those who had desecrated their homes.

Irvine, aware of their expectations, taught those accompanying him to shield themselves against the fear of either illness or calamity by using Western rites of prayer. "The spirits [fear] could be kept at bay, he reassured them, simply by calling out to Jesus as their shield, then believing He would guard them."^[22] Each day that illness or calamity failed to strike, Irvine led them in mass prayers of thanksgiving, reassuring them that continued righteous conduct would cause Jesus to shield them throughout this life and beyond it, into heaven. On those occasions when someone did fall sick, Irvine usually effected a cure with Western medicines. As belief in the new faith took root, the converts themselves began to enter the sacred groves, deliberately felling the ancient trees and, with them, a tradition that had endured for generations.

It was not the new faith that drew people to Irvine, however, but the new learning. By the early 1920s many youths had become interested in acquiring an entire range of European skills. Informants now recall with amusement the intensity of their boyhood desires to "speak through their noses like White men" or "talk the same tongue as a book."^[23] More realistically, they were also aware that mastery of reading might lead to jobs within the colonial economy that could earn enough not only to pay taxes but also to purchase European goods.

In striving to acquire this new knowledge, however, these youths were exposed to the new faith, which began to attract them as well. Irvine sought to meet both needs. Those who sought work during the construction of his mission were initially required to participate in twice-daily prayers, at dawn and dusk. The evening prayer sessions were then extended to include instruction. Irvine began with stories from those sections of the Bible that he felt might most appeal to youths and warriors. His sermons, woven around the biblical selections, were

in Gikuyu, the language in which he was most fluent. Inadvertently, Irvine had chosen a language unknown to Meru women, which had the effect of restricting his audiences to young males. To his listeners, however, the language was "secret," in that it spoke of things that they felt were suitable only to men. Thus, the number of listeners grew.

Eventually, the telling of biblical tales was broadened, in turn, to include an introduction to reading. At this point evening sessions were no longer of use, and special messengers were sent out to nearby villages with a school proclamation inviting anyone who wished to come and learn. Few came, but enough for Irvine to decide school could begin.

The first school teacher was Daudi Makumi, recruited from the Kikuyu Mission to take up the work he had begun with such enthusiasm back in 1915. The first group of readers fluctuated between five and ten.^[24] For every youth that came, however, there were many others who wished they dared. On one hand they too were fascinated by the Europeans' knowledge and the sudden opportunities it seemed to offer in a world beyond the walls of their homeland. On the other they feared the scorn, contempt, and ridicule that would be heaped upon them by their age-mates, kin, and indirectly, every member of the tribe. One informant recalled: "One needed to be bold enough—just not care about people insulting you. I myself would have gone to school if it were not for those people who were laughing at others. Almost everyone was laughing at the Wasomaji [readers], insulting them, calling them names, and singing songs against them. In fact, at first I was among those who sang the songs."^[25]