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Autobiography and the documenting
of life in central Kenya
By Derek Peterson
Presented at the African Studies Association (UK) biennial meeting, Goldsmith's College, London, September 2004. (This paper is a product of the research presented in Peterson's recent book Creative Writing)
Autobiography was surely the most widely practiced literary genre in colonial Kenya. Christian missions were schoolhouses for colonial-era autobiographers, and church archives are today full of their writings. Ex-slaves were the first autobiographers; their life stories, written at missionaries’ behest, were used as abolitionist propaganda.1 First generation converts were inveterate autobiographers. They practiced their autobiographies in vernacular-language classroom essays, assigned by missionaries to encourage self-examination and to teach compositional skills. Some converts and clerics got their autobiographies published, in English, on government or missionary presses.2 Kenya's nationalist movement was likewise an engine for autobiographical production. Over a dozen memoirs have now been published detailing the authors' participation in the Mau Mau movement of the 1950s.3 Liberal politicians wrote their memoirs as well.4 And today, in post-colonial Kenya, East African Educational Publishers and other publishing houses are again producing biographies and autobiographies for sale on the school market.5
While literary scholars have published dozens of expository works on Kenya’s novelists, Kenya’s much wider body of autobiographical literature has largely been ignored. James Olney’s Tell Me Africa today stands as the only book-length analysis of Africa’s autobiographies.6 Olney argues that autobiographies offer a unique means of accessing authentic African experience. Where a western anthropologist’s perspective can only be partial, the African writer "gives a complete rendering of interior, subjective, and African experience: how it feels, as an African, to look out at an African world and to look back over African experiences".7 For Gikuyu authors in particular, argues Olney, the writers' artistic and political agency is inconsequential, since "the autobiography of a Gikuyu individual is virtually co-terminous — identical in spirit, in pattern, and in significance — with the autobiography of the Gikuyu people".8 Gikuyu authors, in fact, "all seem to write the same autobiography: for them there is one archetypal Gikuyu life lived in turn by each successive embodiment of the Gikuyu spirit".9
This essay compares two very different Gikuyu autobiographies. The first, typed out by Rev. Charles Muhoro Kareri during the 1970s, is purposefully reticent about the intimacies of private life.10 Born in Nyeri district, in northern Gikuyuland, Muhoro was one of the earliest students at the Church of Scotland's Tumutumu mission station; later, he became the first African moderator of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. His autobiography poaches shamelessly from missionaries' archive. He re-crafts missionary-authored biographies, clips pages from church minute books, and devotes whole chapters to listing churchmen's duties. Muhoro hopes that his readers will cast themselves into the text. His collection of lists and pithy biographies is meant to get Gikuyu people acting purposefully for the good of the church.
Like Muhoro, Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki grew up in Tumutumu's classrooms. The daughter of an early convert, she schooled during the 1920s, became a teacher, and served with Charles Muhoro on the government's District Education Board.11 She wrote her autobiography in longhand during the 1980s.12 Where Muhoro's autobiography is a catalogue of lists and morality plays, Cecilia's life story is about her personal torment and salvation. Cecilia was an early convert to the East African Revival, which reached Tumutumu from faraway Rwanda during the late 1940s. Her autobiography is a testimony, a revelation of personal failing and religious redemption. It opens up Cecilia's private life for public discussion.
Where Olney sees a single archetypal story being retold by Gikuyu autobiographers, this essay illuminates the variety of ways Gikuyu writers cast their characters. There is no one representative story that autobiographers tell, because Gikuyu could never agree on how their controversial past ought to be recounted.13 These autobiographies are more than windows into a static ethnographic reality. Olney's functionalist interpretation of autobiographical writing ignores the political and moral work that African authors seek to do with their texts. Muhoro's text works like a casting call: it summons readers to join in on the projects outlined in the book. Cecilia, in contrast, is an agitator. Where Muhoro works to propel readers to act on principle, Cecilia's testimony lays bare the controversies that set Gikuyu people at odds.
Charles Muhoro and Cecilia Muthoni wrote their autobiographies differently because Gikuyu people could not agree about how their private interests should be balanced against the homogenizing demands of political consensus. These autobiographies illuminate how controversial, how political, was the composition of life history in colonial Kenya.
Casting characters
The history of Muhoro's autobiography begins in the library and classrooms of Tumutumu mission. Tumutumu was established in 1908, when Henry Scott and John Arthur, Church of Scotland missionaries from the older mission station at Thogoto, secured a five acre freehold plot from Gikuyu landholders around Tumutumu Hill.14 The son of a landholder, Muhoro began schooling at Tumutumu in 1913. He was immediately immersed in a world that revolved around biography. For missionaries, biographies were instructional material par excellence. The earliest catechism course at Tumutumu concentrated on "the lives of extraordinary people".15 In 1918, the year that Muhoro was baptized, the syllabus for the weekly catechumens' class began like this:
1. Birth of Jesus Christ. 2. Story of the flight of Jesus to Africa. 3. Story of leaving his heavenly for his earthly father. 4. Story of Jesus the carpenter. 5. Story of the Jordan Baptism. 6. Story of the wilderness temptation.16
Missionaries taught moral lessons by telling pithy biographical stories about Christ and other characters. The standard reading primer for Standard III students was Mohoro ma Tene Tene, "Stories of Long Ago", composed by the missionary Arthur Barlow and printed in 1909 (with several editions thereafter). The story of Nebuchadezzar, the proud king who was humbled by God, was prominently featured. So was the story of the strong man Samson, whose weakness was his pride. Missionaries told stories like these to induce readers to reflect on their own lives, to measure themselves against the characters in the story. As the missionary Marion Stevenson explained in 1910,
[The stories] can be used as a help to raise their ideas. I remember the almost amused surprise with which tales of self-sacrifice used to be received; the other day the story of the Roman soldier at the gates of Pompeii roused a very different emotion. They are being helped to realize that a man's greatness is not always and everywhere measured by the number of wives he possesses.17
Biographies were the means by which missionaries modeled morality, good conduct, and self-sacrifice for their students. The stories made for good reading. In 1929, one missionary thought Mohoro ma Tene Tene had "the largest sales in this Kikuyu tribe apart from the New Testament…Every pupil aims to buy his own copy before leaving school so that he may take it away with him".18 As they advanced through the upper standards of Tumutumu's schools, students were expected to master the biographical genre for themselves. In 1930, prospective elementary school teachers at Tumutumu had to write an array of short biographical essays in their qualifying examinations. Their subjects, chosen by the headmaster, were Dr. Krapf, Mr. Wakefield, Sultan Barghash, Mbaruk, Sir William McKinnon, Carl Peters, and David Livingstone.19 In the early 1920s, Tumutumu missionaries established a library for the use of ex-students who wished to continue their education. They hoped that "the common herd who leave school at a less advanced stage [will] continue to educate themselves" using the library.20 In 1922, there were no geography books, nor were there history books.21 Tumutumu's library was crowded with biographies. It contained English-language biographies of the missionary David Hill in China, King Khama of South Africa, the ill-fated Anglican bishop James Hannington, Mary Slessor, the educationalist Dr. J. Aggrey, and Apollo the apostle to the pygmies.22 In Swahili, the library held "Stories of Africans who are Christians," "David Livingstone and the travels of Henry Morton Stanley", and biographies of Richard Burton, Booker T. Washington, and several other individuals. It also held Pilgrim's Progress, both in Swahili and in English.23 By 1943, some 200 ex-students at Tumutumu were members of the library, having paid a small fee for borrowing privileges.24 Success in Tumutumu's schools meant mastering the biographical genre. Missionaries hoped Gikuyu readers would come alongside the characters portrayed in these stories, using their examples to chart the course of their own lives.
But it was more than missionaries' prompting that fed Gikuyu students' interest in biography. Many Tumutumu students adopted exemplary biographies to orient their own life course. Catechumens in search of baptismal names ransacked Tumutumu's library, dug through the Bible, and read biographies voraciously. Arthur Kihumba read English history for his baptismal name, and chose Arthur "because it was the name of king".25 Jedidah Kirigu, baptized in 1934, similarly named herself after royalty. She chose the name Jedidah – the mother of the Old Testament King Josiah – from a list prepared by a friend, who had "looked for those names in books".26 Others were less inclined toward royalty in their naming strategy. Monica Muumbi read the Gikuyu primer Akristiano Omîrîru a Afrika, "Brave Christians of Africa", and chose her name from a biography of Saint Augustine.27 The book, she said, "provided a great number of names from which Christians could chose their names". Monica, Augustine's mother, interested her because she "used to pray for [Augustine] very much". The name, therefore, would "be a constant reminder" to pray. Other catechumens similarly derived moral benefit from their names. Jotham Muturi explained, "Names – Peter, for example – were chosen by the baptismal candidate after understanding the works and life of a certain person in the Bible. So by choosing that name, the candidate would have wished to be like Peter."28
In writing his autobiography, Muhoro elaborates on a literary genre that Gikuyu converts have practiced for almost a century. Indeed, The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri grows directly out of the autobiographical essays that Muhoro penned as a student in missionaries' schools. The first iteration of his life story was published, in English, as "An African's Autobiography" in the 1938 edition of the missionary journal Kikuyu News.29 In it, Muhoro told Scots readers about his father's reluctance to let him attend school, about the fascinating writing games that two evangelists used to interest him in education, and about his own dangerous decision to run away from home in order to attend school at Tumutumu. Muhoro draws on these earlier accounts in writing his Chapter Three, which narrates "How I Became a Reader". He also draws on his earlier autobiographical writing in Chapter One, when assessing his father's work as a mûndû mûgo, a "wise man".30 In 1932, Muhoro wrote a series of ethnographic essays to advance to the status of "senior preacher" at Tumutumu church. Prompted by his tutor's questions, Muhoro wrote at length about the "second birth" ceremony, about the ritual "sacrifices" that elders carried out, and about the Gikuyu theology of God.31 His criticisms of "wise men's" practices in his autobiography elaborate on these 1932 essays. Muhoro rehearsed this autobiography over the course of his life. The text is a tour through Muhoro's autobiographical writings, a compilation of texts written, revised and re-revised at different stages of his life.
But Muhoro inherited more than snatches of prose from his school days. He writes biography for the same moral purpose as missionaries and Gikuyu converts of the 1920s and 30s. His autobiography is a book of names, meant to introduce new role models to inquiring Gikuyu readers. In Chapter Two, for example, Muhoro reflects on the life of his missionary teacher Marion Stevenson, known at Tumutumu by her Gikuyu name Nyamacaki. Muhoro dwells on her virtues: her sense of discipline, her comparatively liberal politics, her love for students. He offers vignettes to highlight her qualities: we learn that "from the mission to wherever we were going, she went reading religious magazines, even though the paths were narrow and slippery". And he concludes, "She offered herself to serve God and the people of this country."32 Here Stevenson's biography develops into a moral lesson: Muhoro writes, "This should challenge many women to offer themselves for the service of this country." Muhoro invites his readers to measure themselves against Nyamacaki, to align themselves with her self-sacrifice, to take her moral character on themselves. Indeed, he notes that:
Many women named their baby girls Nyamacaki. The nickname stuck, because when the baby girls named Nyamacaki grew up and got married, their children were given the name Nyamacaki. Nyamacaki is today remembered for her work among women and for teaching people how to read and write.33
Muhoro's biographical and autobiographical sketches elaborate on a literary genre already in play among Christian converts and Protestant missionaries. Missionaries asked their charges to read biographies in order to impress them with the need for self-sacrifice, honor, and discipline. Gikuyu converts of the 1930s and 40s read biography strategically, to tap into the political and moral resources of British and Christian history. Muhoro invites similar personalized readings of his biographies. His pithy sketches of Marion Stevenson, Stefano Kiriamburi, Dedan Kimathi, and other notable characters open up biographies for readers to invest themselves in.
As a biographer, Muhoro works to recast his readers' characters. As an archivist, too, Muhoro makes claims on his readers' loyalties. Muhoro became Tumutumu's part-time archivist in 1936. It was hard work:
I began by writing church registers, transferring the names of the people who had been baptized from the old record books to new ones. There were two books, one of those people – children and adults – baptized up to that time and another listing people who had been confirmed by the church. [...] Anybody interested in seeing them can find them today at the Presbyterian church office at Tumutumu. It was an arduous task, spanning a period of over twenty-five years.34
Muhoro's autobiography is a digest of the archives he knew so well. The book is packed with lists: lists of first baptisms, lists of ordinations, and lists of church members among others. Muhoro also gives us clippings from Kirk Session minute books, church constitutions, reports, and sermon notes. And, in the penultimate chapter to the book, he reconstructs the hierarchy of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, listing the duties of church officials and admonishing each to perform the tasks well.
For Presbyterian church elders of the 1920s and 30s, taking minutes and making lists was more than a bureaucratic formality. Record books literally constituted the membership of the church. Children or adults who passed through the catechumens' class had their names entered into a "book of the sacrament". This entitled them to take Holy Communion, to contract a church wedding, and to participate on church committees. Any member who transgressed church law was banned from communion. In the record book, the word githengio was carefully written against the sinner's name. The Tumutumu elders' book, for example, listed elders' names, their abode, their parish, the date of their ordination, and their status.35 The book was Muhoro's work, compiled by him during the 1930s and 40s. Of the 17 elders ordained in September 1920 – Tumutumu's first elders' court – no less than six were banned from communion. Keeping these record books updated was a vital business. In 1933, missionaries drew up a list of responsibilities for Tumutumu's Gikuyu pastors.36 The first item on the list, before preaching, Bible study, or any other spiritual vocation, was "Carefully entering up all church rolls, and seeing that those in the central station are also kept up to date". The second item was "Keeping a diary or a log book". Only in item three did missionaries discuss other responsibilities, admonishing clerics toward "Constant, systematic visiting, ridge by ridge". Bookkeeping was a critical aspect of pastoral work.
These church record books did not merely reflect already-existing loyalties among Nyeri people. Keeping records was for church organizers a way to create a political community. In 1929, for example, Presbyterian missionaries toured churches in central Kenya asking members to sign a pledge promising to forgo circumcision for their daughters. John Arthur, head of the Scots' Kenya mission, began the campaign in the northernmost Presbyterian station at Chogoria. Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki, then a teacher at Chogoria, remembers what happened in this way:
At Chogoria there was a doctor called Dr. Arthur. He was very tough, that guy. Very authoritarian. He went and got a book, and put it in front of the church, and said "From today in Chogoria there will be no-one circumcised, and that is an order, and anyone who agrees with that order come and write here." And the ones who were refusing were saying "We do not want our girls circumcised because the Europeans want to marry our daughters." After a while Jonothan Muriithi went and signed, and after that ten people signed.37
Arthur's record book literally constituted a political division among Gikuyu people. Those who signed the book, at Chogoria and elsewhere, came to be called kîrore. The term means "thumb-mark", the mark that Jonothan Muriithi and others put on Arthur's book.38 Those who rejected the anti-circumcision program were called iregi, the "refusers." Gikuyu people's political identities were defined by their willingness to sign church record books.
At Tumutumu, the circumcision controversy never generated much heat. Only at Mahiga church, over the Tana River in Othaya division, did significant numbers of members refuse to sign the pledge. In April 1930, the Tumutumu Kirk Session ruled that the names of 200 church members at Mahiga should be removed from the communion rolls.39 Three months later, it established the policy whereby excommunicated members could be returned to the communion list. The procedure went as follows:
a. If a person requests readmission, he should first rectify the sins and other non-Christian activities. He has to show repentance.
b. Upon attending the elders' court, he is given time to confess his misdeeds and his repentance. After this, the minister will point a sword at him and tell him that he is readmitted. His name is then re-entered in the baptism book.
c. The person is kept on probation for a period of not less than a month, during which time he learns the sacramental lessons again.
d. After the probation ends, his name is entered in the book of the sacrament.40
Record books were more than a formality. These books were the pivot around which contending Gikuyu political communities formed in 1929-30. Who signed what, whose name was written where, who refused to sign – these were the questions around which this political controversy was mobilized. Record books were for church authorities a means of constituting political communities and demanding obedience.
The iregi learned their organizational technique from mission churches. With their names erased from Tumutumu's communion roll, the "refusers" at Mahiga created their own roll books. In the wake of the circumcision controversy, they founded an "independent" church/school just down the hill from the Presbyterian church, at a place called Kagere. By October 1931, the church roll listed some 465 members.41 The secretary titled the roll "Mariitwa ma Athomi a Mahiga [Names of the Members at Mahiga]: New Promise". The roll book was a statement of purpose, a promise of commitment. Some of those who signed up were shop owners at the nearby trading center in Kamakwa. Others were part-time wage earners, working as clerks for European planters in the Rift Valley. In 1931, this group of entrepreneurs banded together to form the Kikuyu Traders Association (KTA) to raise funds for a proper school building at Kagere. Some 58 men joined the KTA at its inception. Their names were carefully arrayed in columns in the association's books, with the amount they had donated listed beside the name.42 Someone typed up a separate list, with the name names of members "who have joined but who have not yet received proper receipts".43 List making was a serious business at Kagere. In August 1932, the secretary of the KTA drew up a building plan for Kagere independent school.44 It listed the amount of timber, the number of doors, and the amount of stones and masonry that would be required for the new building. The plan laid down the gauntlet for the men listed in the KTA's membership book. The association's "Rules to Members", penned in the midst of the 1932 fundraising campaign, went like this:
1. Anyone who wishes to join the school should put a signature that he is willing to assist with its work and abide by its rules.
2. He should agree to be like a strong soldier prepared to develop the country, willing to agree with what has been agreed upon. Who agrees can sign voluntarily, and those against will not be forced. Every signature is one shilling.
3. All deliberations by members should be put into writing. All agendas should arrive at the secretary prior to meetings and any agenda that does not arrive will not be discussed.45
In its lists and roll books, the KTA identified contributors and, in so doing, created a political community. Record books sifted patriots from traitors. Members who refused to give had their name cancelled from the books.46 Those who contributed became soldiers, joined in common pursuit of development, progress, and education. Record books, in other words, helped the KTA enlist supporters as partisans of the cause. Like Dr. Arthur's anti-circumcision signature book, the bookkeepers of the KTA used lists to define and solidify changeable human loyalties.
Charles Muhoro's autobiography works in the same fashion as the KTA's membership lists and Tumutumu's record books. In Chapter Thirteen, Muhoro describes the "matters of the church and how it conducts its affairs". The chapter is simultaneously a roll call and a call to action. Muhoro begins by tracing the history of the church, starting with Christ, through the twelve apostles, and up to the Great Commission: "Go and make disciples." Christ's commission is a statement of purpose for Muhoro. Just as the KTA commissioned its members to be "like a strong soldier prepared to develop the country", Muhoro obligates contemporary church members to carry out Christ's command. The rest of the chapter calls officials to account for their actions. Muhoro lists the duties and responsibilities of church elders, deacons, and ordinary church members. Like the KTA's record book, this list of responsibilities is a call to action. Muhoro is enlisting his readers as partisans obligated to perform duties for the good of the church. Elders and deacons have a role to play, says Muhoro: their names are entered on record books in Tumutumu's church office. His lists of duties and responsibilities invite officials to play the part they have been assigned.
Tumutumu's church office today is filled with record books: baptism books, Kirk Session minute books, books of marriage licenses, and receipt books. Muhoro's autobiography is a tour through Tumutumu's record books. Like the fundraisers of the KTA, like Presbyterian missionaries in 1929, Muhoro reads record books as cast lists. Gikuyu political organizers of the 1930s used record books to define and solidify human loyalties, to lay out programs of political action, and to call members to account. Muhoro's memoir builds on this strategy of political mobilization. As an archivist, Muhoro uses Tumutumu's record books, constitutions, and lists of church members to summon modern-day church members to action.
The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri is something more than a catalogue of names, places and dates. Muhoro's life story is an intervention in Gikuyu intellectual history. His autobiography builds on pre-established literary forms, winding through plots already worked out by earlier composers. As a biographer, Muhoro asks readers to invest themselves into others people's exemplary life stories. As an archivist, Muhoro reminds church members of their duties and, in so doing, holds them to account. His autobiography is an aid to the political imagination.
Autobiography and Testimony
Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki grew up alongside Charles Muhoro. Baptized at Tumutumu in 1920, she earned her English leaving certificate in 1924, and passed the junior teachers' examination in 1927.47 In 1930, missionaries posted her to the Chogoria mission station, there to serve as a nurse and teacher for girls and women.48 Her autobiography, written longhand in a school notebook, is an instructive primer on moral conduct. When once a white settler invited her to become a domestic worker in his household, she refused. "Such whites would look for girls to be baby sitters," she explained, "and would then make them their lovers and so I would not like that." Her mother is a key figure for Cecilia the moralist: despite her lack of education, "she was able to guide and counsel her children such that there is no child of hers you could hear that has gone astray". She refused to allow her daughters to walk with boys, and barred passersby from whistling seductive Gikuyu songs near her home. "I lived with this fear of boys which would have made me be on a collision course with my mother," writes Cecilia. Like Charles Muhoro, Cecilia teaches her readers prudence by drawing lessons from exemplary biographies.
But where Charles Muhoro's autobiography is silent on the details of his personal and marital life, Cecilia fills her text with an intimate story of her personal sin and redemption. At the center of her autobiography is the story of her conversion to the East African Revival. The first large-scale Revival convention was convened in 1935, at the Anglican mission station in Kabale, Uganda.49 At this as at later Revival meetings, converts publicly confessed to private sins: adultery, thievery, drunkenness, and other vices. In the Ankole region of Uganda, where Revival evangelists were preaching by 1936, converts were known for their never-ending sermons.50 In December 1947, the Anglicans at the Kahuhia mission station organized a Revival convention that drew some 3,000 people. Among the attendees was Doris Nyambura, the sewing instructor for the Tumutumu Women's Guild. She became the first evangelist for the Revival in Nyeri district. By 1950, Tumutumu churches were filled with revivalists, many of them women.51
At conventions, in fellowship meetings, and in private conversation, revivalists made a practice of narrating how God had saved them from sin. A number of these "testimonies" (as they were called) have now been published.52 They are an intensely personal autobiographical literature, embarrassingly intimate in their catalogues of private sin. But an effective testimony was not an unrehearsed inventory of private life. A missionary described a 1949 convention in southern Gikuyuland in this way:
Imagine at the end of the day, member after member of the audience coming forward, making confession of sin, and relating what Christ has done for him. Some of these, men and women known to be devout, are received quietly. The signature chorus of the Revival is sung, and here is an occasional word or handshake from those nearby. Others known or felt to be insecure or partial in their witness are received in silence or by the singing of a hymn enjoining them to seek salvation. Still others, known to be careless or evil livers, whose witness rings true, or those hitherto opposed to the movement, are received in scenes of great enthusiasm. People start to their feet, singing. They throw their hands in the air, and crowd round the person, all trying to shake his hand. His relatives and friends embrace him.53
Giving an effective testimony meant giving a good performance. Testimonies were a carefully practiced literary form. Converts had to structure their life stories according to the formulas of the genre. Those who spoke without regard to convention or form were liable to be met with silence, or with admonishing hymnody.
In Nyeri as elsewhere in central Kenya, a depiction of marital disharmony was an essential backdrop in any testimony of conversion. Tales of warring husbands and wives populate revivalists' life stories. Geoffrey Ngare, for example, converted while attending a revival convention in 1948. He described his past life in this way:
I saw that there were times when I say with my wife and she faced one way and I faced the other, we were angry to speak to one another, perhaps because of something a child had done. Then if we heard someone knocking at the door, immediately we began to smile and talk normally…When I was angry I would beat her with angry words, I threw them at her violently until she cried bitterly. But I was content, because if anyone heard her or saw her, I could say, I don't beat her.54
In Murang'a district, Alice Wanjeri testified how she contemplated suicide after her husband married another wife in 1948. Instead, she joined the Revival at the urging of her friends.55 Abinjah Wanjeke, from Murang'a, described how she joined the revivalists after her husband married a second wife and began to treat her as a "slave."56 She eventually settled with another revivalist family and was given a plot of land to farm. Male converts, too, described how revivalism resolved marital tension. Phares Wahinya testified that he began to "hate himself" in 1936, having realized that he was an adulterer and a heavy drinker.57 He was "saved" in 1946, and immediately ran home from church to beg forgiveness from his wife. Frances Ndigwa was saved in 1942, but spent three years in continual argument with his wife. In 1945 he and his wife celebrated a new marriage, this one consecrated by other revivalists.58
Revivalists identified themselves by their vocal confession of sexual or marital sin. Many revivalists were converted after hearing a Voice reminding them of their sins.59 Walter Mwangi Rurie of Murang'a, for example, was eating at table when he heard a Voice tell him, "Walter, you are full of sins – very many sins".60 He lost his appetite, went to his room, and pleaded for forgiveness from God. Bedan Ireri was lying in bed after an intimate encounter with a young man when he "saw a big light, and a cloud. Then the Voice spoke to me and said, 'You commit fornication,' and I said Yes. 'You are a liar.'…'You are a thief.'"61 The next morning, Ireri repented of his sins in prayer with other revivalists. Heshbon Mwangi, an early leader from Murang'a, enjoined the "saved ones" to be forthright about their talk in 1949:
We must not joke or talk lightly of sin or play with it. Worldly people speak soft words like butter and those who have not wisdom to discern what they are after are deceived and fall. The Lord help us to go on! Walk in the light always, make use of the precious blood that you may conquer daily and hourly in this battle.62
Revivalists literally created a new grammar of Christian faith. They sang, in Luganda, the hymn Tukutendereza Jesu to open their meetings.63 The phrase became a password for the group. Missionaries reported in 1949 that they used "Tukutendereza Jesu" continually in conversation.64 Revivalists greeted one another by calling out "Tukutendereza Jesu," and identified other "saved ones" based on their reply.65 Their speech was also littered with the phrase Mwathani arogocwo, "Praise the Lord". Revivalists' critics at Tumutumu complained that they spoke to one another in a "foreign dialect," and faulted them for using the name of God over the slightest matters.66 Critics elsewhere in Gikuyuland similarly complained that converts "try to speak a new language to deceive people into thinking it is the language of the Spirit".67 Public talk constituted the Revival at Tumutumu, marking converts off from church bureaucrats like Charles Muhoro.
Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki's autobiography is a transcript of a testimony she composed, practiced, and polished in public gatherings. Like other revivalists, she plots her testimony around marital strife. She married schoolteacher Eustace Mugaki in 1937, to the delight of her mother, who had supposed that she would never be married. But marriage did not bring Cecilia happiness:
The devil became jealous of us in 11 Sept. 1937, when we got married. The happiness which we had enjoyed was destroyed by the devil and we became a couple of fighting people, complaining again and again, until I declared that the devil had come into our prayers, that this was not my real choice….. We spent ten years with domestic problems which were uncalled for such that love and joy between us ended completely.
In June 1938, the Tumutumu Kirk Session heard testimony that Cecilia had married Eustace while pregnant by another man.68 She denied the accusation, and the Session ruled that the couple should be admonished to live together in peace. But Cecilia could find no satisfaction in marriage. Her only pleasure in marriage was in procreation; "there was nothing in our home that attracted me apart from getting a child which I could not get on my own," she wrote.
In January 1948, though, she met Doris Nyambura, who was then returning from a Revival convention in Kahuhia. At an evening meeting with Nyambura and three other revivalists, Cecilia was discomfited when she was asked "Teacher, how is your relationship with Jesus?". When she half-heartedly confessed to having lost her passion for Bible-reading, the revivalists sprang to their feet, singing Tukutendereza Jesu and rubbing her head. "I was so afraid that I kept silent," wrote Cecilia. "I was saying nothing for I felt very foolish of what was being talked about." That night, though, Cecilia's mind moved to the hereafter:
I started understanding what the whole thing was about. I thought that if I died a Christian, I would be buried in great joy saying we shall meet in heaven, now that my name is written in the book of life….Its me who woke them up at 6:00 am to pray. I told the Lord to forgive me for I was a sinner. Tears poured out.
It was then that Cecilia began practicing her testimony:
From there I got a testimony which I never knew I would have….I told them how I feared for myself when thoughts of death visited me, when my name had not been written in the book of life. I confessed that I had no Bible or hymn book for I had left them to the children…I confessed how I fought with my husband for thinking that he is stupid and I was clever. I thought he was not clever because he had come from school much much later than me, and he had not traveled as much as me. He would then think I was belittling him, that I did not think he was supposed to be the head. I confessed all this, and the fruits of pride. As I said all this they would praise.
Her husband was suspicious when Cecilia asked for his forgiveness for despising him. On 27 November 1948, though, Eustace too was saved. Revivalism offered relief from their marital disagreements:
With both of us being brethren, our work for the Lord became lighter and lighter with time. Now it is very light and I praise the Lord when I see in retrospect my foolish attitude to issues. I used to say that it was devils who had invaded our home, yet it was me who failed to commit everything to the Lord.
Charles Muhoro and other Tumutumu elders would have heard this testimony many times. Eustace and Cecilia were leading revivalists at Kiriko, a church/school supervised by the Tumutumu Parish. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, they organized days-long meetings at Kiriko, often without the pastor's permission.69 In 1953, missionary Donald Lamont reported that the revivalists at Kiriko were causing trouble for church leaders. "Unsaved teachers [are] held in contempt by children," he wrote, "a little child of Standard One will tell a Form One (unsaved) where he gets off. In short, very factious."70 At Kibirigwi, a church/school near Kiriko, revivalists were banned from using the church building for their meetings. They broke into the church building despite the pastor's injunction, and during their testimonies they likened Pastor Johanna Wanjau to the devil himself.71 And at Tumutumu, some revivalists called Presbytery moderator Charles Muhoro Kareri "gum tree" and compared him with the walls of Jericho.72 Others dismissed his faith as "salvage Christianity" and accused him of preaching only for his pay.73 Muhoro, in reply, ordered church members to "beat them, excommunicate them, and imprison them".74
There was more than personal animosity at stake in church leaders' confrontations with revivalists. Revivalists were scornful of church bureaucracy, and dismissive of church leaders' claims to authority. In January 1948, six months after her conversion, Cecilia publicly accused Charles Muhoro and other bureaucrats of mishandling their duties. She listed their failings in this way:
1. Conducting classes was not done properly because the teachers came directly from the gardens [without preparation].
2. No receipts were issued for money collected in the church.
3. That church laws be reviewed especially on the issues of marriage, female circumcision, and taking of beer, for these are not longer observed by the church.
4. That church elders extend their discussions outside their meetings.
5. That those working for the church should not do other work—cultivating, or sitting on land tribunals, businesses, herding. People might think the money they contribute [to the church] could be used against them.75
Revivalists doubted whether church leaders could be trusted. When in 1949 Charles Muhoro spoke to a group of revivalists about the church's position on the revival, revivalists argued that "he must not speak as he is full of sin". Missionaries, they thought, were "greatly deceived by [his] collar".76 Revivalists refused to take communion from the hand of Muhoro or other of Tumutumu's pastors, except Solomon Ndambi, who had been "saved" at a Revival convention at Kabete in 1949.
Church elders were appalled at revivalists' incendiary talk. We can hear something of elders' worries in one ex-teacher's critical description of revivalist sermons.
We would tell them "we are not interested in what is coming from Rwanda." We hated them because of the way they used to jump and some other funny things. It was funny because it appeared like child's play. You know preaching in that time was cool. We were used to the Scottish way — the Europeans had come in a cool and decent manner. They would not speak harshly to people. They preached slowly and in an orderly manner — also in a mature manner and they would not cheat you. The Revival was disruptive.77
One former deacon remembered that the revivalists "recited Bible verses like poetry but they were empty in [their] hearts".78 Revivalists' many words ignited private vendettas. Charles Muhoro condemned the revivalists in 1950 for "preaching because of existing disagreements".79 Other critics complained that revivalists "have filthy conversation in their meetings in secret".80 Their preaching about private sins reminded some elders of the gossiping busybodies condemned in I Timothy Chapter 5.81 At some point in the 1940s, Nyeri people began using the verb – goco, the root of the revivalists' oft-repeated Mwathani arogocwo ("Praise the Lord"), to mean "purposeless, idle talk; disturbing chatter causing disorder or discord".82 Thirty years later, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman remembered how divisive revivalists' talk could be. Muthoni Likimani's 1974 novel They Shall be Chastised recounted how, during a public preaching session, a revivalist "said things which were very embarrassing, mentioning the women's names, the children whom he had fathered, incidents which could create real problems possibly leading to divorces".83 Likimani spent two full chapters describing how revivalists ruined parties, broke marriages, and destroyed reputations with their never-ending public confessions.
In elders' view, revivalists' chatter undermined public order. They knew that "home affairs must not go into the open," in the words of one proverb.84 Soft words made homes cool and prosperous.85 Public argument between husbands and wives, in contrast, destroyed families. "Too much talk breaks marriage," warned a proverb.86 Revivalists' testimonies laid home affairs bare for public discussion. In 1949, Presbyterian elders complained that revivalists were undermining their right to wiathi, "self-determination" or "moral agency".87 There were rumors that traveling evangelists had sexual rights to women converts.88 At least one woman, from Murang'a, recounted sexual indiscretions among converts.89 Tumutumu elders attacked the group for destroying women's virtue. A Presbyterian committee appointed to investigate the revivalists in 1949 condemned the group for "their manner of greeting which involve kissing and hugging and ecstatic jumping".90 Moreover, revivalists called each other by intimate names reserved for the closest of kin. As a result, the committee maintained, they broke up marriages, "creating strife instead of harmony between husband and wife".
Converts' politics were as questionable as their morals. Revivalists were contemptuous of church bureaucracy, and disrespectful toward elders' laws. The investigating committee criticized the Revival on 21 counts. Fully thirteen of the committee's criticisms related to revivalists' disdain for church order. Revivalists were said to "fail to respect the church leaders," to "show disrespect for the various church councils," to "speak maliciously about the symbols God has given us to show salvation, for example Holy Communion and the sacredness of the church," and to "cause confusion in the church…as they are in the habit of rising up and staggering (in the fashion of drunks) when prayer is in session".91 To church elders, revivalists were subversives. Gikuyu politicians similarly doubted revivalists' integrity. In 1946, there were rumors that Revival evangelists traveling through Kiambu and Fort Hall districts were marking out Gikuyu land for expropriation by white settlers.92 In 1950, many people thought that the revivalists, meeting 15,000 strong at a convention in Kabete, had sold the Nairobi City Charter to the British.93 It was said that revivalists sang so happily at Kabete because they had auctioned their families' land to the Europeans.94 In their irresponsible wordiness, revivalists looked like traitors, or political dupes of the whites.
Tumutumu's elders disciplined the revivalists by shutting their mouths. Early in 1948, the Kirk Session ruled that the revivalists could not be allowed to speak in church gatherings.95 Later in 1948, the Session went further, ruling that revivalists should not meet even in private homes for prayer.96 At a meeting in 1949, the Presbytery removed Solomon Ndambi, the only Tumutumu cleric to convert to the Revival, from his Kirk Session and reassigned him to office work. At the same meeting they withdrew funding for Tumutumu's ordination students, some of whom had converted while training at theological school.97 The Presbytery's ban on revivalist speech was called the muhingo, the "closed door." Church discipline was meant to close revivalists' mouths, stifling their public preaching. There was a second, protective meaning to the "closed door". By closing converts' mouths, church leaders hoped to close off private household affairs from the public ear. To revivalists, the mûhingo felt like dehumanizing censorship. Peterson Muchangi described the ban in this way:
Ahonoku were not allowed to speak in church – I could not even greet people, or even tell them what I was doing. It was like I was completely an outcast. So in the church we were disciplined, but when we walked out we built our church outside under the trees, and we started singing, and giving testimonies. So outside we took advantage.98
In 1952 Tumutumu parish voted 91 to 4 to continue the muhingo. When pastor Meshak Muurage announced the decision at Kiriko church, Eustace Mugaki and Cecilia Muthoni rose to their feet and began singing Tukutendereza Jesu.99 Church leaders found it hard to keep revivalists quiet.
So did Mau Mau rebels. Silence was civic duty for Mau Mau partisans: the "oath of unity" demanded that oath-takers keep their mouths closed. Mau Mau organizers evidently sent spies to Revival meetings, learning converts' manner of greeting and listening in on testimony sessions.100 They used violence to silence revivalists who talked too much. The revivalist preacher Ephantus Ngugi was slashed on the mouth and had his front teeth knocked out by forest fighters. They also smashed his megaphone, saying that "this will never speak again".101 Heshbon Mwangi, another preacher, was struck repeatedly in the mouth by Mau Mau partisans.102 James Karanja, after taking the oath in Nairobi, was waylaid by Mau Mau loyalists when he attended a revivalist meeting. They told him that his head would be severed from his shoulders and grass would grow from his mouth should he speak about the oath.103
Mau Mau rebels' distrust of chatty converts illuminates how much they shared with Presbyterian church elders. Like Charles Muhoro, like the organizers of the Kikuyu Traders Association, Mau Mau's organizers sought to turn a divided people into "firm soldiers" dedicated to serving a purpose larger than themselves. Like Muhoro, Mau Mau's leaders sought to convince people that self-sacrifice was, in fact, a profitable investment. And like Muhoro and other church leaders, Mau Mau's organizers were deeply challenged by converts' insistence on making divisive, private matters subjects of public debate.
Conclusion
In his recently published review of The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, Wunyabari Maloba complains that Muhoro "does not succeed in helping us explore the interior lives of African individuals and communities".104 Muhoro is evasive about key historical issues: he makes no mention of the "cultural and political divide that haunted Gikuyuland" during the 1929-30 circumcision controversy, and deals with the Mau Mau rebellion in a few short pages. Moreover, Maloba suggests, Muhoro is derivative: he makes "very minimal deviation…from the details, examples, and emphasis already set by white missionaries in their accounts". About his personal life, too, Muhoro is silent: save a short description of a railway-station parting with his wife, Muhoro has virtually nothing to say about his marriage.
Muhoro's silence about his personal life surely makes his autobiography dry reading. I argue, though, that his reticence itself has a history. Muhoro has little to say about a divisive, contentious past because he and other organizers were committed to papering over the disputes that divided Gikuyu people. Like the fundraisers of the KTA, like the organizers of Mau Mau, Muhoro sought to turn people into activists. They used lists, record books, history lessons, and biographical writing to convince people to join in on a project, to overlook the personal, private issues that set them at odds. Revivalism attacked this discipline by opening up sexual and marital disputes for public discussion. Where Charles Muhoro invites his readers to be single mindedly devoted to a cause, revivalists' testimonies made long-kept secrets public, dividing families and destroying concord.
The qualities that make Charles Muhoro's autobiography different from Cecilia Muthoni's are the same issues that divided Gikuyu people more generally. How far should personal life be subject to public discussion? Could Gikuyu people overlook their private differences and enlist themselves, as partisans, in imagined communities? Cecilia Muthoni and Charles Muhoro disagreed over these and other questions. Their contending autobiographies illuminate how far life history work is, also, a casting of characters.
Derek Peterson is assistant professor of history at The College of New Jersey, Ewing, New Jersey.USA
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Endnotes
1. See Marcia Wright's collection Strategies of Slaves and Women (New York: Lilian Barber, 1993).
2. Obadiah Kariuki, A Bishop Facing Mount Kenya: An Autobiography, 1902-1978 (Nairobi: Uzima Press, 1985); Festo Olang', Festo Olang': An Autobiography (Nairobi: Uzima, 1991); and E.N. Wanyoike, An African Pastor: The Life and Work of the Rev. Wanyoike Kamawe, 1888-1970 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1974).
3. See, among many others, Waruhiu Itote, "Mau Mau" General (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967); Kahinga Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1975); Mohammed Mathu, The Urban Guerilla: The Story of Mohammed Mathu, ed. Donald Barnett (Richmond, B.C.: Liberation Support Movement, 1974); and, most recently, Wambui Otieno, Mau Mau's Daughter: A Life History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). Marshall Clough has analyzed the Mau Mau literature in his Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory, and Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
4. Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru: An Autobiography (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1967); Harry Thuku, An Autobiography (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1970); Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 1921-1963: The Autobiography of Bildad Kaggia (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1975).
5. I refer here to EAEP’s "Makers of Kenyan History" series, which now runs to thirteen volumes. See, for example, Tabitha Kanogo, Dedan Kimathi: A Biography (Nairobi: EAEP, 1992); Simiyu Wandiiba, Masinde Muliro: A Biography (Nairobi: EAEP, 1996); Peter Wanyande, Joseph Daniel Otiende (Nairobi: EAEP, 2002); Peter Ndege, Olonana Ole Mbatian (Nairobi: EAEP, 2003). Sasa Sema Publishers in Nairobi has likewise published several biographies, including portraits of Bildad Kaggia, Ronald Ngala, Nelson Mandela and Elijah Masinde.
6. James Olney, Tell me Africa: An Approach to African Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
7. Olney, Tell me Africa, 10.
8. Olney, Tell me Africa, 85.
9. Olney, Tell me Africa, 248.
10. Charles Muhoro Kareri, The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, ed. Derek Peterson (Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Center, 2003).
11. PCEA II/B/1: Tumutumu Annual Report, 1949.
12. Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki, "History ya Eustace Mugaki na Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki" (unpublished ms., n.d.).
13. John Lonsdale, "Contests of Time: Kikuyu Historiography, Old and New," in Axel Harneit Sievers (ed.), A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South-Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2002),201-254.
14. PCEA I/A/1: Land Office to Scott, 15 October 1908.
15. PCEA I/A/19: Stevenson to Barlow, 2 Feb. 1915.
16. TT "Ministers" file: "Syllabus for instruction of those being prepared for baptism", 14 Jan. 1918.
17. Stevenson, "Widening Horizons", in Kikuyu News 21 (July 1910).
18. AIM "Government Education, 1930-33" file: Government returns, "School textbooks", 1929.
19. PCEA II/E/6-8: Headmaster at Tumutumu to Director of Education, 2 July 1930.
20. R. Philp, "A Literary Experiment at Tumutumu", in Kikuyu News 166 (Dec. 1943).
21. PCEA I/C/7: Grieve to Watson, 22 Feb. 1922.
22. This list is derived from TT "Presbytery ya Tumutumu: Maciira maria maingi" file: "Mbuku maria ma library ya kanitha Tumutumu", November 1941; and TT "Presbytery ya Tumutumu, 1938" file: "Books in the Library of Tumutumu Presbytery", 1938.
23. For a study of Pilgrim's Progress in African colonial literature, see Isabel Hofmeyer, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim's Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
24. PCEA I/B/7: Tumutumu annual report, 1943.
25. Interview: Arthur Kihumba, Othaya town, 7 July and 16 Sept. 1998.
26. Interview: Jedidah Kirigu, Magutu location, 12 August 1998. For King Josiah, see I Kings 22:1.
27. Interview: Monica Muumbi, Magutu location, 12 August 1998. The book that Muumbi read was Akristiano Omîrîru a Afrika (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1931)). Besides Monica and Augustine, the book profiled Samuel Crowther, the Uganda Martyrs, King Khama, and Mary Alolo.
28. Interview: Jotham Muturi, Ngorano location, 15 May and 10 August 1998.
29. The autobiography was published in two parts: as "An African's Autobiography" in Kikuyu News 143 (March 1938); and "An African's Autobiography continued" in Kikuyu News 144 (June 1938).
30. Muhoro, Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, p. 6-7.
31. TT "Muhoro's exams" file: Chas. Muhoro, Senior Preacher's Certificate, "Christianity and Gikuyu religion."
32. Muhoro, Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, 16.
33. Muhoro, Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, 10-11.
34. Muhoro, Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, 61.
35. TT Ordinations book, elders.
36. TT "Ministers" file: "Pastoral Work", 1933.
37. Interview: Cecilia Muthoni Mugaki, Tumutumu, 25 July 1996 and 16 September 1998.
38. Beecher, Kikuyu-English Dictionary, 97.
39. PCEA I/Z/6: Tumutumu log book, entry for 19 April 1930.
40. TT Kirk Session minute book: Minute for 8 June 1930.
41. Mahiga "Mariitwa ma Athomi a Mahiga: New Promise", 26 October 1931.
42. Mahiga "Members, Kikuyu Traders Association, Kamakwa", n.d.
43. Mahiga "Members of the Kikuyu Producers Association who have joined but have not yet received proper receipts", n.d.
44. Mahiga Kikuyu Traders Association, "Mahiga Independent School", 1 August 1932.
45. Mahiga "Rules to Members," Mahiga, 1932.
46. Mahiga "Agenda", 14 June 1931.
47. TT "Government exams" file: Director of Education to Dickson, December 1924.
48. PCEA I/B/7: Tumutumu Annual report, 1930.
49. Joe Church, Quest for the Highest: An autobiographical account of the East African Revival (Exeter: Paternoster, 1981), Ch. 13.
50. E. Maari, "The Balokole Movement in Nyabushozi Country of Ankole," in Occasional Research Papers in African Religions and Philosophies, vol. 22, ed. A. Byaruhanga-Akiiki (Kampala: Makerere University, 1974).
51. PCEA I/C/2: Tumutumu Annual Report, 1950.
52. See Church, Quest for the Highest; Dorothy Smoker, Ambushed by Love: God's Triumph in Kenya's Terror (Fort Washington, Penn.: Christian Literature Crusade, 1994); Edith Wiseman, Kikuyu Martyrs (London: Highway Press, 1958); and Joe Church, Awake Uganda! The Story of Blasio Kigozi and His Vision of Revival (Kampala: Uganda Bookshop Press, 1957).
53. MacPherson, "The East African Revival," in Kikuyu News 193 (Sept. 1950).
54. Murray papers: Interview with Geoffrey Ngare, n.d.
55. Interview: Alice Wanjeri.
56. Smoker, Ambushed, 93.
57. Smoker, Ambushed, 104.
58. Smoker, Ambushed, 258.
59. Paul Mwangi of Nyeri, Bedan Ireri of Embu, and Geoffrey Kamau of Meru were "saved" after hearing a voice from heaven. See Smoker, Ambushed, 60, 208, 213.
60. Smoker, Ambushed, 195.
61. Murray interview with Canon Bedan Ireri, 26 May 1988.
62. PCEA II/D/30-34: Heshbon Mwangi to revivalists, 1949.
63. MacPherson, "East African Revival," KN 193 (Sept. 1950).
64. PCEA II/D/30-34: Robert Philp, notes on conversation with revivalists and Tumutumu elders, 1949.
65. Smoker, Ambushed, 161. See also Muthoni Likimani's novel They Shall be Chastised (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1974), where revivalists greet one another by shouting "Tukutendeleza!"
66. PCEA II/D/30-34: Muhoro, "Memorandum on the matters of the PCEA church: Confusion of teaching," March 1950. Reproduced in Charles Muhoro Kareri, Life, 97-99.
67. AIM "Papers on Isms" file: Harrison Kariuki, "Some errors of Ruandaism," Nov. 1957.
68. TT Committee of Tumutumu Presbytery, minutes for 27 June 1938.
69. TT Correspondence with Kikuyu file: Calderwood to Muhoro, 17 April 1951.
70. PCEA II/C/22: Lamont to Calderwood, 27 May 1953.
71. PCEA II/C/25: Muhoro to Calderwood, 9 April 1952.
72. TT Correspondence with Chogoria file: Muhoro to Irvine, 19 April 1952.
73. TT Marua makonii synod ona members acio file: Muhoro to Geoffrey Ngare, 1 June 1950.
74. PCEA II/C/25: Irvine to Lamont, 25 April 1952.
75. TT Presbytery of Tumutumu file: "Issues addressed at Tumutumu meeting," 25 July 1948.
76. PCEA II/D/30-34: Philp, notes on conversation with revivalists at Tumutumu, 1949.
77. Interview: Daudi Gachonde, Tumutumu, 22 February 1998.
78. Interview: Muriuki Kiuria.
79. PCEA II/D/30-34: Muhoro, "Memorandum on the matters of the PCEA church."
80. AIM "Papers on Isms" file: Harrison Kariuki, "Some errors of Ruandaism," Nov. 1957.
81. MacPherson, "East African Revival," in KN 193 (Sept. 1950).
82. EUL Gen 1785/1: Barlow, notes on -goco.
83. Muthoni Likimani, They Shall be Chastised, 51. Chapters 11 and 12 are titled "Confusion," parts I and II.
84. Barra, 1000 Kikuyu Proverbs, 4.
85. EUL Gen. 1786/6: Barlow, "Kikuyu Linguistics."
86. Barra, 1000 Kikuyu Proverbs, 6.
87. PCEA II/C/22: Lamont to MacPherson, 5 October 1949.
88. AIM Papers on "Isms" file: "Report on Ruanda Activities," 10 Aug. 1950.
89. Smoker, Ambushed, 261-63.
90. PCEA II/G/2: "Subcommittee investigating persons associated with the 'Ruanda' revival," 28-29 Oct. 1949. Reproduced in Charles Muhoro Kareri, Life, 100-102.
91. PCEA II/D/30-34: Subcommittee investigating persons associated with the "Ruanda" revival, 23 Sept. 1949; reproduced in Muhoro, Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, 99-101.
92. NLS Acc 7548/B/270: Calderwood to Beattie, 30 November 1946.
93. MacPherson, "East African Revival," KN 193 (Sept. 1950).
94. ACK North Highlands Rural Deanery file: Martin Capon, prayer letter for 1950.
95. TT Kirk Session minute, 21 Feb. 1948.
96. KNA MSS Bible Society 1/8: Philp to Barlow, 1948.
97. PCEA II/D/30-34: Lamont to Philp, 5 October 1949.
98. Interview: Peterson Muchangi, Tumutumu, 15 Sept. 1998.
99. PCEA II/B/5: Lamont to Calderwood, 23 April 1952.
100. Smoker, Ambushed, 78.
101. Smoker, Ambushed, 111.
102. Smoker, Ambushed, 89.
103. PCEA II/G/4: James Karanja to church elders, 22 Dec. 1954.
104. W. Maloba, "Christianity in Colonial Kenya," Journal of African History 45 (2004), 343-44.
