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.