The Impact of Christian Education and Cultural Conflict Among the Kikuyu Community
Introduction
The first missionaries to settle on the East African coast were Portuguese Roman Catholics. By 1557 they had established monasteries at Mombasa and Lamu, Kenyan coastal towns. The second wave of Christian missionaries included the Lutherans, who were sent to Kenya through the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Among these were Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johann Rebman, and Jacob Erhadt. As the missionaries established themselves on the mainland, they started schools as a means of converting Africans to Christianity. The missionaries learned the native’s languages in order to facilitate better communication and evangelization. Their first project was to translate the Bible into the native languages. Along the coast translation of the Swahili Bible was inevitable for people to read God’s word in their mother tongue.
A little later, the missionaries began to move inward especially after the Scramble for Africa Berlin Conference that divided the African continent to the Europeans in 1844 . Kenya and Uganda were allocated to the British, and a need to construct a railway was inevitable as the Europeans wanted to tap the raw materials that would feed the industrial revolution in Europe.
The writer of this paper entails to limit himself to the mission work which was done particularly among the Kikuyu community of central Kenya. Special preference will be focused on the role of Western education which was conducted by missionaries, and how the evangelization and education turned sour after what the kikuyu community termed as oppression, marginalization, segregation, racial prejudice, and forceful eviction from their lands in favor of the colonialist.
Early Missionaries in Kikuyu Land
One of the earliest mission stations in the interior of Kikuyu heartland was started by the Church of Scotland Mission in Thogoto. It was actually a transfer of an earlier mission station which had been planted in Kibwezi, but owing to malaria and the man eater lions of the Tzavo, the
The first missionaries to settle on the East African coast were Portuguese Roman Catholics. By 1557 they had established monasteries at Mombasa and Lamu, Kenyan coastal towns. The second wave of Christian missionaries included the Lutherans, who were sent to Kenya through the Church Missionary Society (CMS). Among these were Johann Ludwig Krapf, Johann Rebman, and Jacob Erhadt. As the missionaries established themselves on the mainland, they started schools as a means of converting Africans to Christianity. The missionaries learned the native’s languages in order to facilitate better communication and evangelization. Their first project was to translate the Bible into the native languages. Along the coast translation of the Swahili Bible was inevitable for people to read God’s word in their mother tongue.
A little later, the missionaries began to move inward especially after the Scramble for Africa Berlin Conference that divided the African continent to the Europeans in 1844 . Kenya and Uganda were allocated to the British, and a need to construct a railway was inevitable as the Europeans wanted to tap the raw materials that would feed the industrial revolution in Europe.
The writer of this paper entails to limit himself to the mission work which was done particularly among the Kikuyu community of central Kenya. Special preference will be focused on the role of Western education which was conducted by missionaries, and how the evangelization and education turned sour after what the kikuyu community termed as oppression, marginalization, segregation, racial prejudice, and forceful eviction from their lands in favor of the colonialist.
Early Missionaries in Kikuyu Land
One of the earliest mission stations in the interior of Kikuyu heartland was started by the Church of Scotland Mission in Thogoto. It was actually a transfer of an earlier mission station which had been planted in Kibwezi, but owing to malaria and the man eater lions of the Tzavo, the