On Valentine’s Day 1969, Attorney General Charles Njonjo, Kenya’s shrewd and ruthless éminence grise, banned a church. By executive fiat, the African Independent Pentecostal Church (AIPC) was deemed prejudicial to the “good government of the Republic”—prohibited from organising meetings, collecting funds, or attesting new members.Footnote 1 This action was taken after security officials saw the Church escalating its agitation for redress of colonial land seizures and forcibly occupied the halls of their Protestant and Catholic rivals. Through these acts, they threatened a carefully cultivated discourse of unity that had underpinned national politics since independence in 1963. Nevertheless, the ban was not well received by those who had a lot to lose from the discourse of unity. In the National Assembly, MP and AIPC lay-leader Waira Kamau claimed that all of Central Province, the heartland of the Church, was “in chaos and panic because of the closure of these churches.”Footnote 2 Even the Provincial Security Committee, regional arbiter of security issues, ruled that the ban was difficult to enforce as most local politicians were AIPC members.Footnote 3 After meetings between church leaders and President Jomo Kenyatta’s envoys, Njonjo withdrew the ban. He said to the Assembly:
The Church was, of course, in the vanguard of our independence struggle, and it is only fitting that it should never have been declared to be dangerous to the good governance of Kenya - a cause for which the Church struggled and preached and practised.Footnote 4
Within a year, President Kenyatta laid the foundation stones for new AIPC churches and pledged support for the Church’s demands to restore land it had lost during the 1950s.
This article seeks to unravel this puzzle: how did a church/educational society banned in 1952, resurrected after independence in 1964, again prohibited (albeit briefly) in 1969, and then publicly praised by a president in the 1970s survive and articulate itself in the intervening years? How did conjoined issues of land, education, and post-conflict justice animate the AIPC’s continued existence, and what caused the oscillations in state attitudes towards them? Most importantly, what can the movement tell us about local politics during Kenya’s decolonisation? This article posits that Kenyan politics in the 1960s, from the presidency to county council halls, was fundamentally marked by debates about post-conflict reconciliation and decolonial state-building. This is particularly evident in Central Kenya, where intra-community conflict was central to the Mau Mau uprising (1952–60). Controversies that only periodically appear in newspapers but fill local administrative archives allow us to foreground the debates about post-conflict justice and the terms under which reconciliation could occur. What constituted a just transition and compensation for the suffering of the previous decade enraptured communities and drew in national elites seeking to build a political constituency. Local actors were not just acted upon in this context but played a vital role in the compromises that established the boundaries for acceptable opposition in the postcolonial state.
Throughout its history, the AIPC reflects the quest for Gikuyu unity, which John Lonsdale has argued was central to the history of colonial-era regional politics. Overcoming fractures within the community was a primary objective for colonial-era writers like Jomo Kenyatta and Henry Muoria.Footnote 5 Scholars have accounted for the divisions wrought by colonialism and the introduction of colonial capitalism: landowners and landless, educated and illiterate, adherents of the missionary churches and followers of indigenous religious systems. None of these categories were discrete or binary, but they did feed into the factions that opposed one another during the Mau Mau conflict.Footnote 6 What scholarship has broadly ignored is what happened to these divisions after the Emergency. This article posits that the politics of Gikuyu unity were central to the postcolonial state-making in Central Kenya during and after the transition to independence, made only more painful and significant by the bloody struggle of the 1950s. Analogous disruption and local conflicts about ethnic unity took place across Kenya, but only in Central Kenya had so much blood been shed and property seized. The Legio Maria provides a clear example among the Luo in Nyanza. During the 1960s, the Luo politician Oginga Odinga mediated the conflict between the Catholic Church and Legio Maria followers over their registration in 1963—a politics of reconciliation in a different place. Over the following years, as they (and Odinga) were associated with opposition to the central government, they met with “heavy state resistance.”Footnote 7 Similarly, among the Luhya, the Dini ya Mswambwa movement was also penalised by the colonial state, which sought resurrection in the postcolonial period. Like the AIPC, they focused on building their schools and were eventually proscribed for their political involvement.Footnote 8
Existing historiography on Kenya’s postcolonial politics is principally engaged in explaining the consolidation of the colonially-inherited “ideology of order,” to use E. S. Atieno-Odhiambo’s apt phrase. Between 1957 and 1969, the state faced a wave of what he calls “rural radicalism,” a politics focused on restoring land lost to colonial processes, which was controlled by reasserting the power of the “bureaucratic-executive state” at the expense of local political party branches.Footnote 9 Vertical patronage networks were established by a “super-elite” of “big men” across the civil service and politics who aligned their (ethnically defined) constituents by controlling developmental resources and, particularly, land.Footnote 10 This article seeks to extend the scholarship, typified by Kara Moskowitz, that shows the role of citizens in the emergence of this system.Footnote 11 The crystallisation of the postcolonial settlement between 1960 and 1969 was not the straightforward reassertion of bureaucratic control but a complex negotiation in which the reconciliation of deep social conflicts was a primary objective. The intra-communal nature of anticolonial conflict encouraged postcolonial elites to prioritise ethnic unity to ensure stability and prevent a resurgence of earlier conflicts. In this manner, this approach can helpfully stitch together the literature on anticolonial nationalism and the making of the postcolonial state.
The politics of reconciliation and debates around Gikuyu unity permeated Central Kenya during these years, with the Independent Church as a central protagonist within these discussions. Crucially, this paper is not about the internal theology of the AIPC but focuses on its leaders and members’ status as significant political actors in Central Kenyan localities. As landowners and former education providers before 1952, the Church was inevitably drawn into contests over where power would lie. Denominational rivalries were not primarily about theology but about who held power in a community. As David Sandgren points out, from a theological point of view, little distinguished the AIPC from the Anglicans by the time of the Emergency. However, they attracted recruits from across the mission churches, especially the Church of Scotland.Footnote 12 Significant theological debates in the AIPC, especially about the influence of Pentecostalism with prohibitions on overt involvement in the state and politics, date to the 1970s and beyond.Footnote 13 Before the 1970s, what made the Church significant, therefore, was its representation in the minds of many as a participant in the struggle for independence, prior owner of coveted plots of land, and a potential provider of nationalist education. The AIPC’s political role has been further augmented by a Kenyan religious history marked by flexible attachments, as people moved denominations multiple times in their lives, forcing churches to be politically responsive. As Terence Ranger suggests, independent churches were not irrational or pre-political, nor could they be pressed into a standard nationalist sequence (as Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham did for the AIPC). Rather, they had their own politics “in the sense that they generate power and flows of patronage which are eminently worth contesting.”Footnote 14 Their role in the politics of reconciliation and decolonisation forms the focus here.
The AIPC in Kenya, after independence, has suffered a lack of historical attention despite the rich literature on its (primarily educational) activities before 1952.Footnote 15 Beyond notable unpublished dissertations, there is no discussion of the efforts to restore the schools.Footnote 16 Lonsdale does argue that the independent churches were, in fact, deeply conservative: rooted in missionary traditions, defending a “true Kikuyuness,” and valuing education, wealth, and land in a manner associated with Kenyatta’s conservatism.Footnote 17 This article documents how significant struggles did occur before this attitude took hold, as the Church represented a political body in which ex-detainees could articulate a demand for post-conflict justice. Still, it was this shared moral basis that eventually allowed for the reconciliation of the AIPC to the colonial loyalists who had seized their land and churches. The cost was the repression of a politics of redistribution in favour of a politics of recognition, making the AIPC a consciously ethnic church for an increasingly ethnicised polity by the 1970s.Footnote 18
As primarily an examination of the local, political struggles of the AIPC, this article draws mainly on official archives in both Britain and Kenya. The post-2011 release of the so-called “Migrated Archive,” colonial files spirited away to Britain in the twilight of colonial rule, reveals much about the crackdown on the independent churches in the 1950s. This forms the first section of this article, tracing how the colonial state deepened social ruptures in its battle against Mau Mau. In the postcolony, the legacies of these actions formed the basis of a debate about the terms for intra-ethnic unity. I made use of the records of county councils, district education boards, and district commissioners, who were most concerned with land, religion, and education issues, especially in the Central Province District of Nyeri. It was here that the AIPC had the most adherents, the Emergency was severest, and, in 1964, where the initiative was taken to resurrect the Church. Another article on Central Kenya is justified precisely because of the rich scholarship on Gikuyu literate activism before 1952, which provides a foundation for investigating what follows.Footnote 19 Moreover, the Gikuyu were the central constituency of Kenyatta’s regime, magnifying the importance of the politics of reconciliation. With careful tracing of controversies, these archives can reveal much about internal division, sectional claim-making, and how a form of politics emerged to resolve these. Through the local archive, these controversies appear not as episodic (as they might be in newspapers) but as a continuous battle that formed a primary way in which everyday citizens engaged in the politics of a decolonising state dealing with the legacies of colonial stratification and the question of post-conflict justice.
Emergency Schisms
As this study foregrounds the politics of postcolonial reconciliation, we must first understand the divisions that emerged through colonial rule and came to an apotheosis in Mau Mau. Almost from their arrival on the continent, Christian missions in Africa divided communities. By the 1920s, in Central Kenya, they had already encouraged a generation of “readers,” who used the Bible to engage in debates about the effects of colonialism on their community. The exodus of Gikuyu from the Presbyterian missions by the end of that decade, amid efforts to restrict female circumcision, should be seen in the context of internal discussions around the comprehensive embrace of European Christian culture.Footnote 20 Christian religion and moral education were envisioned as crucial weapons in the battle against the “moral storms of modernity” which tore at the community.Footnote 21 Unearthing this has been the focus of several generations of scholarship spearheaded by the work of Lonsdale and Derek Peterson. Crucially for this study, hostilities within Gikuyu society erupted in this controversy, battling over mission out-stations as “bitter struggle ensued with each group sabotaging the other’s attempt at church services or school lessons.”Footnote 22 From the onset, who had the right to guide the Gikuyu commonwealth—mission-aligned, traditional elders, cultural-nationalist, and so on—was contested.
From the 1930s, under the auspices of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association (KISA), the headlong drive to establish a distinct educational system was in place, with elected school committees, donated land, and community fundraising.Footnote 23 KISA was closely entwined with the Kikuyu Central Association, a political body agitating for land restoration. KISA leaders, by 1935, sought to form a formal religious denomination to structure their services and provide religious instruction in the schools. This would be the African Independent Pentecostal Church,Footnote 24 although it was immediately riven by schism as a rival group formed their own church and school association.Footnote 25 As Peterson argues, these schisms were structured around deeply rooted debates around Gikuyu unity and the morality of associational politics.Footnote 26 For this study, they are of particular interest as these divisions would carry into the postcolonial period and shape its politics of unity and reconciliation. From its foundation, the AIPC would be tethered to the idea of an independent, Gikuyu-led education system, and would not have been of any significance without the revolutionary and popular idea of a break with missionary education. After KISA’s banning in 1952, only the AIPC survived, growing in confidence as an exclusively religious body, albeit with the continuing ambition to influence schooling in Central Kenya.
The AIPC always had a bargaining relationship with the state, seeking support to expand their control of education and foster the project of Gikuyu reconciliation. As happens repeatedly in this story, however, the quest for unity under one leadership or another often drove internal division over how best reconciliation could be achieved. One factor that had energised internal schisms was the willingness of KISA leaders like Johanna Kunyiha in Nyeri to negotiate with the state and missions. In 1936, KISA agreed with officials to accept the government’s teaching syllabus.Footnote 27 This concretely meant delaying teaching English until the third year of primary school, a significant issue to the link between the language and the advancement opportunities of the individual and the community. The crown jewel of KISA was the Teacher Training College at Githunguri, founded in 1939, functioning at once as the AIPC’s seminary. A cause célèbre across Central Kenya, the college would be a source of anxiety for colonial officers as the heart of political resistance. While KISA was remarkably cooperative with the state (its leaders, like the more radical Willy Wambugu, even sat on the Nyeri District Education Board), there was a deep suspicion of its associations with nationalist politics and Githunguri.Footnote 28 This impression was strengthened when the nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta became headmaster of the college in 1947.
Scholars seeking to understand the causes of Mau Mau have at length described the complex splits among the Gikuyu, which marked the run-up to the uprising. Chiefs and their clients focused on progress through collaboration, while constitutional nationalists sought to pressure the colonial state through political organisation. At the same time, a cadre of radicals expanded a nationalist loyalty oath to the whole population, an effort which was soon labelled Mau Mau.Footnote 29 These splits similarly divided KISA and AIPC members and created the complex social picture that Gikuyu leaders and citizens had to contend with at independence. In KISA’s 1950 internal elections in Nyeri, Wambugu’s slate in favour of political resistance ousted Kunyiha-aligned education-focused moderates.Footnote 30 One additional fracture point was the government’s Beecher Report on the future of African education, a package of reforms that attempted to halt educational institutions’ spiralling expansion by exercising more control through the District Educational Boards. These boards were chaired by the district commissioner and staffed by missionaries, chiefs, and others aligned with the colonial state. Kunyiha was willing to accept Beecher, conscious that it would increase government funding and perhaps prevent Mau Mau activists from influencing schools even further. Wambugu’s faction opposed the report, fearing that the only four years of primary schooling it prescribed to the vast majority would doom children to illiteracy.Footnote 31 The question of the power of district boards also meant the anti-Beecher opposition stood in as a proxy for debates about who should wield power in local communities: government-aligned elders or the elected leaders of KISA schools. Many took the oath, associated by the colonial state with adherence to the Mau Mau cause, in opposition to Beecher specifically. By 1952, KISA’s hundreds of schools were in chaos, with multiple bodies claiming to be official school committees. With school and church indistinguishable at this point, the metaphor of schism was regularly employed. A colonial report called the situation “Gilbertian, Pope and anti-Pope hurling anathema at one another, and KISA split into two warring factions.”Footnote 32 This disruption characterised Gikuyu intra-communal debate about how best to advance towards self-government, crystallised into intimate local struggles.
When loyalist supporters began to be killed by Mau Mau guerrillas in 1952, the colonial state responded with a State of Emergency. Many prominent leaders in the KISA-AIPC movement, including Kenyatta and Wambugu, were detained.Footnote 33 Accused of organising Mau Mau, the violence of the movement was intimately linked in the colonial mind to the independent schools. Bishop Beecher blamed Mau Mau on “the products of the independent schools movement.”Footnote 34 With this front of mind, colonial decision-makers would decide to purge Central Kenya of the “Mau Mau religion.”Footnote 35 The existence of the AIPC, despite its lack of revolutionary theology, allowed colonial theorists to claim it was more than a political movement or educational reform effort, but something darker and more totalitarian. In response, the Gikuyu were to be guided back to the missionary churches, where a newly-energised “muscular Christianity” was to provide spiritual leadership.Footnote 36 The missions were to be the agents of the reconciliation of the Gikuyu tribe, the eventual objective of all the policies of the colonial counterinsurgency campaign. Yet, like all elements of that campaign, it would be underpinned by severe repression that undermined its eventual objective. New documentation in the migrated archive allows us to follow the colonial state’s efforts to encourage reconciliation of the Gikuyu under missionary and loyalist control, a project whose debris the postcolonial successor would have to contend with.
Within weeks of the declaration of the Emergency, KISA was proscribed. The first thirty-four schools were ordered closed.Footnote 37 Yet, there was no initial blanket assault on schools; instead, a scalpel was initially wielded as every school was individually examined for Mau Mau penetration. Schools found clear of “infection” would be allowed to continue if offending managers were purged, the KISA title abolished, and government management through the District Educational Boards accepted.Footnote 38 This saw local officers intervene directly in the internal conflicts within KISA. For example, a school at Kabiruini had a pro-Wambugu and pro-Kunyiha faction, with Nyeri’s education officer writing: “a show of force will be required to evict the malcontents, and place the school definitely under [Kunyiha],” who had agreed to go under the District Educational Board.Footnote 39 The missions pressed for a more rigid policy. The Nyeri Catholic school supervisor wrote: “I voiced my disapproval of a gloved policy of compromise towards the KISA schools. I firmly believe that all of them should be mercilessly closed.”Footnote 40 Local missionaries need not have worried. Public meetings, barazas, were held to get communities to accept the reopening of their formerly KISA schools as government-run. In the first weeks the policy was tried, in November 1952, only one school accepted out of fifty-two polled.Footnote 41 The colonial state blamed Mau Mau threats against parents who sent their children to government schools. Exasperated, the chief native commissioner ordered all uncooperative schools closed, leaving only the Kunyiha-controlled schools open.Footnote 42 Crucially, as the schools were also prominent meeting places of AIPC congregations, and their leaders often preachers of the church, the independent church similarly suffered almost total eradication.
Soon, un-detained independents pleaded to reopen their churches and schools, arguing that people would be more likely to drift to Mau Mau with their closure. The civilian “prong” of the counterinsurgency was being sabotaged by disrupting the progressive, unifying force of education.Footnote 43 We can see in these petitions a continuing effort by educated Gikuyu, often sharp critics of Mau Mau’s methods, to restore Gikuyu unity and prevent the widening of social conflicts. They were unheeded. In one division of Nyeri alone, 26,535 children lost their schools, and only 780 could be absorbed in other schools within a year.Footnote 44 A group sued the government to protest the school closures, yet found that their plaintiffs were detained one by one.Footnote 45 With the loss of their buildings and coercive pressure from the counterinsurgent forces, many AIPC followers began attending missionary church services. Their preachers lost their churches and could only legally preach if they joined a registered (that is, missionary) church. Locked into barbed-wire Emergency Villages, the missions could easily “get at the people.”Footnote 46 Mau Mau had shaken the missionary churches, but encouraged by the counterinsurgent state, returned with a renewed evangelism organised by the Christian Council of Kenya.
Kunyiha expressed his desire for the remnants of the AIPC to fully “cooperate with Government in the overthrow of subversive activities.”Footnote 47 Yet when he was rejected from joining the Christian Council of Kenya, he formally re-joined the Presbyterians—the denomination from which he had once defected.Footnote 48 This narrowing of opportunities spoke to the escalation of the civilian counterinsurgency and pressure from the missions to use the Emergency as the final blow to independence. Yet it was not all good news for the counterinsurgents. As early as 1955, it was revealed that many Presbyterian church committees included ex-independent members and teachers. Formally driven underground by the heavy-handed counterinsurgency, it was reported that AIPC “church services are being held illegally in ex-KISA buildings which are now District Education Board schools.”Footnote 49 The desire for African control of education and religious service, which lay at the heart of the independent movement, had not disappeared during the Emergency. The mission churches themselves had begun to respond by Africanising the clergy. Yet, efforts beyond the state continued to be seen as subversive, which the colonial state sought to counter by controlling the school committees. These bodies were now mandated to have six elected members, who required screening by government officials, further counteracted by six government nominees. The composition of these committees, formally only advisory bodies, was important to the colonial administration because it believed they would be an “early target for subversion as the Kikuyu swing to their political front” after the violence of Mau Mau.Footnote 50 The question of who would control local school boards represented a continuing struggle over who would lead communities, and set the terms for the postcolonial, post-conflict future.
From the earliest stages of the Emergency, the question arose about the fate of the land and buildings belonging to the independent movement. Soon, it was decided by a meeting that included all top government officials including the governor that an ordinance would vest the property in the director of education for use in public purposes. Landowners who had donated land to the AIPC were encouraged to resume using it themselves. If this did not occur (for example, if the former owners were among the tens of thousands in detention), the government would formally gazette it for its purposes.Footnote 51 The Nyeri district commissioner assessed that local people had scavenged materials off the plots, with the land regularly sold to the missions.Footnote 52 This latter point is crucial, as missions soon started putting churches on ex-KISA land, which they had used for schools and AIPC church services.Footnote 53 Here was the kernel of the future politics of post-war justice, which would be less about the schools as educational institutions but about the theft of land and buildings, and who held political, moral, and cultural power within communities.
Rebirth and Conflict
The Emergency ended in January 1960, as negotiations opened between a new generation of nationalists, having sat out the Emergency, and the British Government over the transition to self-government. Yet, at the local level, a great deal of post-Emergency friction persisted within communities torn asunder by the conflict. These were simultaneously a continuation of deeper moral conflicts about unity and power among the Gikuyu and a new contest about the shape and meaning of postcolonial politics. These contests became overt in the intermission between the Emergency and Independence (1960–63), with groups like the Gatundu Parents Association and Nyeri Education Society, led respectively by prominent ex-detainees Gitu Kahengeri and Gakaara Wanjau, emerging in 1960 seeking to revitalise independent education.Footnote 54 These efforts were resoundingly refused by administration officers, who replied with various arrest sweeps and the stiff use of the Societies Ordinance, anxious that a return to power of the independent leaders would destabilise the gradual transition to independence. Christine Ogilvie rightfully suggests these independent followers had internalised a “neglected” status “because the image colonial officials had of the entire AIPC and KISA, as attached to Mau Mau, continued into the postcolonial era.”Footnote 55 Activism was thus set to continue and influence the quest for post-conflict justice.
At the national level, it was the Githunguri leader Jomo Kenyatta, whose release was the central political demand of Kenyan nationalism, who came to lead the largest nationalist party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) in 1961. Kenyatta’s policy would seek to build a reconciliatory settlement by maintaining the allegiance of both highly trained ex-loyalists in the civil service and the former Mau Mau detainees, all while not alienating leaders of Kenya’s non-Gikuyu communities by overly favouring his own group. This required careful management of ex-AIPC leaders and their claims to lost land and buildings. Mission churches were not static in this moment of rapid flux and consciously moved to “Africanize as rapidly as possible”—promoting lower-ranked indigenous Kenyans into leadership positions. These were inevitably loyalists, as mission-church clergy were the solid core of this movement. As a result, the issue of Kenyatta’s release deeply strained the Christian Council of Kenya.Footnote 56 A solution was found in the “gospel of reconciliation,” spearheaded by Anglican Bishop Obadiah Kariuki and the Council’s General Secretary John Kamau (an ex-detainee). This echoed Kenyatta’s desire to “forgive the past,” a policy almost universally welcomed by ex-loyalists as a way of surviving the return of Mau Mau detainees.Footnote 57 Kariuki acknowledged to his parishioners that “some of our Christians are frightened,” indicating loyalist fears of Mau Mau, but resolved that collaboration with Kenyatta (his brother-in-law and prime minister from 1963) would be the best policy.Footnote 58
This conceptualisation of missionary churches and the government in close alliance, bound by family and educational ties, has been the academic consensus on church-state relations in Kenya during the 1960s.Footnote 59 This echoes the pervasive sense in the literature of Kenya as a “loyalist”—that is to say, neo-colonial—state.Footnote 60 Yet this narrative is belied by the fractious reality on the ground, where the mission churches and their local followers continued to be associated negatively with the loyalism of the 1950s and the demolition of the independent movement. Many political leaders, as we shall see, were ex-detainee independents. These individuals were valorised as freedom fighters by many ordinary people, and the churches and schools they once managed represented a standing rebuke to any policy of historical amnesia. The fluid nature of religious identification in Kenya meant many would flow back to the movement if it represented their demand for reparation, education, and representation more effectively. A broader reconciliation beyond European-origin churches and the nationalist elite, represented by this theorised mission church-elite-state alliance, would be necessary to prevent the re-emergence of rural protest.
From 1961, there were clashes in Nyeri against continued mission school management, with resistance from local KANU committees, often dominated by ex-detainees, who argued that all new schools ought to be government-run. With political power in their grasp, government management now represented a victory against their loyalist enemies. Chiefs were particularly targeted, often associated with a particular mission denomination. One specific case at Karangia saw the local district officer complain that he found it “morally repugnant” and a “danger to security” to force people to accept a Catholic school management, which had been allowed to build a school during the Emergency, against their will.Footnote 61 His superior, the Nyeri district commissioner, while insisting on continuing Catholic management, was particularly worried as the religious conflict had “been pretty quiet for the last few years,” which he didn’t “want to stir up at this particular stage” in the delicate transition to self-government.Footnote 62 Here is a clear example of the politics of reconciliation at the twilight of colonial rule. Administration officers were conscious of strains in society, worried that conceding on school management could unpick the sutures of the Emergency’s half-healed wounds, but equally concerned that the demand for reparations might escalate to serious resistance.
These controversies erupted in full in the months before independence in December 1963, with KANU in government nationally and its local branches claiming authority from colonial-appointed chiefs. An illustrative example among many is given by ex-Mau Mau fighter and regional legislator Babu Kamau, attacking a headman who had given eleven acres to the Presbyterians for a mission station.Footnote 63 Similar reports came in from across Nyeri, with the now Africanised provincial commissioner warning Education Minister Mbiyu Koinange (erstwhile principal of Githunguri) that an organised campaign was underway to reclaim KISA schools.Footnote 64 Soon thereafter, the ministry announced that it would not be in the interests of educational standards for schools to be handed over to independent bodies.Footnote 65 The contradiction between ex-KISA Koinange opposing this process is explained by the politics of post-Emergency reconciliation—all schooling was to be moved to a government-controlled and non-religious basis. The dream of KISA, African-controlled education for Africans, had been fulfilled by independence. Moreover, there was genuine anxiety that an attempt to restore these schools would severely disrupt the unstable communal peace between different denominations that had emerged since the Emergency. However, alienated ex-AIPC leaders did not share this vision of reconciliation. Several months earlier, they resurrected the Church as a religious body to effectively claim the lost land and schools. It wasn’t, however, until two months after independence that the AIPC was formally registered under the Societies Ordinance.Footnote 66 Wambugu, fresh from detention across the Emergency’s camps, was back as AIPC manager of schools and soon “very busy planning schools on the old KISA places.”Footnote 67 Thousands of people returned to their pre-Emergency religious allegiance in a great “exodus” from the mission churches among the Gikuyu.Footnote 68 Kunyiha re-re-converted, writing to the Nyeri district commissioner in September 1963 that “all the faithful followers of [the AIPC] have already met and have come to the conclusion that they should go back to their old Church, and start to continue praying and adoring in these churches.”Footnote 69 Implicit in this letter was the demand for a restoration of the land on which those churches had stood, a remaking of the political balance within communities.
Soon, the petitions flowed in, reclaiming churches and schools, as AIPC adherents now had a prime minister (Kenyatta) who had suffered the excesses of the colonial state. They sought identification with the struggle for independence and consciously associated themselves with the country’s leaders. AIPC leaders were conscious of the sensitivities, one in Embu assured: “the independent [church] is not political but only religious.”Footnote 70 Like trade unionists in the 1950s, these lay-officials wanted to avoid association with political activism and thus subversion, a link forged by colonial security thinking. These assertions did not make their demands any less political in the febrile post-conflict atmosphere of Central Kenya—nothing was more political than demands for land or control of schooling. Kenyatta had personally told an assembly of independent church leaders: “Anyone who… mixed religion with politics will not be tolerated.”Footnote 71 It was precisely this allegation cited by the Nyeri security committee in October 1965, who felt the AIPC was a subversive organisation that was intimidating other denominations, and crucially, “more political than religious.”Footnote 72 This committee, comprised of predominantly ex-loyalist security officials, represented the belief that the Church’s activism would disrupt intra-communal stability (and their personal position in the Gikuyu commonwealth). What emerges here is a particular understanding of the “political,” deemed to be anything that involves overt resistance to government policy in terms of education and land. The AIPC was to be allowed re-admission to the Gikuyu community, but only if it did not breach the unity of the community. Nevertheless, continuing activism illustrates that many Gikuyu were unsatisfied with the extent of reform at the time of independence, a position for which they would find allies in the newly established local government organs.
A crucial local change after independence was the handing over of the running of government schools from district education boards to county councils. Nyeri’s council was distinctly radical. Samuel Kagotho, an ex-KISA leader and a detainee of nine years standing, was elected and became its chairman.Footnote 73 As early as November 1963, the council asked the lands commissioner to explain what happened to plots confiscated during the Emergency “from the then-called Mau Mau terrorists” to arrange compensation, while individual council members pressed for free education for children orphaned during the struggle.Footnote 74 In this sense, the council was a site of resistance against the Kenyatta government’s stated national policy of “forgiving and forgetting” the colonial past. Yet this reality was always more complicated on the ground, with radicals seeing the value of reconciliation and national policymakers wanting to mobilise independents as a political constituency. Councillors, many of them ex-KISA themselves, were conscious of the difficulties of excavating land disputes that had been settled coercively during the Emergency. A compromise settlement was reached. Whenever they dealt with a complaint from a local community, a select group of councillors would visit an area and canvass opinions, willing to rule in favour of the missions if found to be the most popular.Footnote 75 They also ruled that all denominations would get two acres for a church if there were a dispute.Footnote 76 Conciliating the different factions was in the material interest of local politicians, and steering between factions within Gikuyu society became a hallmark of politics during the 1960s.
These mediation sessions, reminiscent of the colonial barazas, were sites of local dispute and claim-making on the state.Footnote 77 They were, moreover, the local dramas in which the politics of post-conflict reconciliation took form. Before these clashes reached the county council, officials regularly reported cases of AIPC members invading mission churches built on their erstwhile land and holding their own services. Fist-fights also occurred between Sunday congregations when an AIPC and a missionary church had been carved out of the same plot.Footnote 78 AIPC members were regularly imprisoned for these actions. Administrators intervened periodically to make sure that the public meetings fairly represented opinion in the community when decisions about school committees were made, seeking to avoid open denominational clashes.Footnote 79 The situation became easier to manage after the 1968 Education Act, which brought all schools under the jurisdiction of county councils, away from direct church control, with the option for “sponsorship” by a particular denomination.Footnote 80 However, this did not stop school grounds from being interfered with when the AIPC demanded churches on the land. Schools had so often been built on land seized from the AIPC that it was a regular occurrence that their followers forcibly broke into classrooms to hold services.Footnote 81
One specific case of a secondary school at Gikumbo is indicative, revealing the political complexities accompanying AIPC claims. A Catholic primary school had been built at the former KISA site when, in 1965, concerns were raised that Wambugu had told followers that he was raising money for an AIPC-run secondary school there.Footnote 82 Catholic parents claimed this came exclusively from a desire to reclaim Emergency-era losses, with no AIPC followers in the village.Footnote 83 Bishop Caesar Gatimu, Kenya’s predominant Catholic prelate, protested that Catholic parents had already built the first four classrooms of a new secondary school.Footnote 84 There was particular anxiety about guerrilla construction by the AIPC, who “want to take our school by force” and had claimed “[Catholic] children will be sweeping the latrines of [AIPC] children.”Footnote 85 Nevertheless, a subcommittee of the Nyeri council visited and ruled for the AIPC to get the prospective Mt. Kenya High School.Footnote 86 The provincial commissioner became concerned, ordering the council clerk to withdraw authorisation “for security reasons.”Footnote 87 It was clear that the issue was creating deep rifts in the district; the council, in full session, refused to authorise the PC’s demands.Footnote 88 Minister Koinange weighed in on the side of the AIPC, claiming “the group that used to operate that [site] before the Emergency is the one that would take the first priority.”Footnote 89 The PC refused this conclusion, showing the capacity of the administration to resist political diktat. Instead, he appointed a committee which found that AIPC management would lead to fighting and “be creating a [unwanted] precedent” for the whole province. Administration officers had
been avoiding [re-allocation] in the past on the grounds that the circumstances that existed before and during the Emergency were completely different from today’s conditions. At present all schools do serve the public and as such I feel that any sudden changes should be avoided as much as possible for it rouses undesirable feelings.Footnote 90
Here was precisely the administration’s anxiety about upsetting the precarious community balance that had existed since the Emergency—prioritising a form of amnesiac reconciliation rather than more actively repairing deep-seated grievances.
The Gikumbo School Site Committee (after removing non-resident AIPC followers seemingly bussed in for the occasion) found in a public meeting that the community was predominantly in favour of the Catholics, who had been voluntarily given the land by the community in the mid-1950s. Yet the independents continued to claim this was a colonial crime, with villagers in the 1950s only allowing the Catholics to run the school until KISA leaders returned from detention.Footnote 91 When Kagotho reported this conclusion to the council, now ruling for the Catholics, he faced a no-confidence motion from AIPC-aligned stalwarts.Footnote 92 Later, in 1966, Kagotho purged his opponents from the council’s committees, alleging a “masterplan to undermine KANU” in which he cited the Gikumbo issue as the cause of the friction.Footnote 93 We can see in this turn of events, Kagotho, himself an ex-KISA-man and ex-detainee seeing that unity would be better preserved by ruling for the more popular local Catholics, even if it harmed his standing on the council, knowing he had the support of the local administration—who retained significant powers even in conciliar politics. Ultimately, Gikumbo was resolved with a fudge, which would see the high school jointly managed by a committee of the AIPC, Catholics, and the county council.Footnote 94 An informant interviewed for this study accompanied Gatimu to Kenyatta’s Gatundu residence, who personally brokered the 1966 Gikumbo compromise.Footnote 95 Besides indicating the significance of AIPC controversies to local political stability and Gikuyu political elites, this controversy should be read partly in the context of the Harambee (Pull Together) self-help movement. The desire for more secondary education, Kenyatta’s encouragement, and the ethos of the independent schools meant communities were quick to raise money to build them themselves. Contributing to these schemes became a critical way to acquire power in Kenya’s patrimonial political culture. Still, as this example shows, it was also a way to salve some of the wounds incurred during the previous decade. AIPC followers were directly involved in this process, setting themselves up as a political constituency seeking to correct historical injustices.
Closing the Wounds
As the intervention of Kenyatta and Koinange at Gikumbo illustrates, the seemingly peripheral struggles of the AIPC were significant to the increasingly Gikuyu-centric regime, which was concerned about stability. Nyeri, marked deeply by Mau Mau and somewhat alienated from Kenyatta’s Kiambu-dominated regime, was likely to be the source of any rural radicalism that disrupted the regime. A dissident core of politicians, including Wambugu, were all signatories to a 1966 petition which demanded £500,000 as reparations from Britain for 1400 churches and schools seized from the independent movement.Footnote 96 Reparations flew in the face of Kenyatta’s desire for cordial relations with Britain. The Cold War context was particularly visceral in Central Kenya with the perceived danger of the ex-Mau Mau leader and socialist Bildad Kaggia (who had himself been a dissident preacher as far back as the 1940s) leading away radical Gikuyu from Kenyatta’s regime. Kaggia, whose popularity stemmed largely from his Mau Mau credentials, was deemed to be using the AIPC as a base to recruit disillusioned followers. The district commissioner assessed that this meant the Gordian knot had to be cut: “It is high time that Government makes a ruling as to the future of these churches and where the [AIPC] will get their plots.”Footnote 97 When Kaggia’s party, the Kenya People’s Union (KPU), formally split from KANU under the Luo ex-Vice President Oginga Odinga, the government launched a consciously ethnic campaign to repress it. Gikuyu were reminded in so many ways, including through public displays of loyalty by Mau Mau generals, that while internal disagreements were one thing, in the face of the Luo threat, they must close ranks. In the judgement of the district commissioner, the traditionalist members of the AIPC: “people who mostly believe in circumcision, they could not agree to be led by an uncircumcised leader [Odinga], neither could they agree to leave KANU, which they claim to have suffered to possess for over forty years.”Footnote 98 The political identification of KANU with the struggle for independence, an attempt to reconcile rural radicals with the regime, was thus accompanied by cultivated anti-KPU ethnic sentiment, both factors which would only intensify over the following years. It was partly through ethnic politics that the AIPC would be integrated into Kenyatta’s Kenyan state.
Just as in the 1930s, divisions persisted within the AIPC that centred on the extent to which it was willing to cooperate with the government and accept the reconciliatory bargain it presented. The prominence of the lay leadership (often local politicians) in the AIPC and vibrant competition in Kenya’s parliamentary elections fostered these internal divisions.Footnote 99 After Wambugu died in 1967, a clash occurred again between Kunyiha and his detractors over the leadership.Footnote 100 Like its predecessor, the postcolonial government got involved by disapproving of Hezekiah Gatonyo as manager of AIPC schools, justified by the “difficulties created by the AIPC in other parts of Central Province.”Footnote 101 It was the adjacency of the AIPC to “subversive” post-Mau Mau organisations, linked in the postcolonial “official mind” with Kaggia and socialism, as well as the destabilisation precipitated by its land struggles, which led to its banning in 1969 in a crackdown on Gikuyu dissidents. The Nyeri security committee felt that the AIPC welcomed “with open hands… supporters of subversive organisations” and should be banned.Footnote 102 Unresolved Emergency grievances, the landlessness produced by 1950s seizures, the unrewarded veterans, and the continuing prominence of loyalists meant some Gikuyu were continuously drawn into oppositional organisations. Crucially, these were organisations primarily concerned with post-war justice. The AIPC, guardians of the legacy of KISA, represented a major post-Emergency grievance and was thus considered by security officials to be part of the same oppositional phenomenon.
However, the AIPC was simply too entwined with the political establishment in Central Kenya to remain banned. As illustrated at the beginning of the article, top AIPC leaders were able to get meetings with leading cabinet ministers and politicians around Kenyatta and achieve its restoration, promising loyalty at a time when restoring Gikuyu support for the state was a particular priority. This offers a crucial moment in understanding the crystallising emphasis on Gikuyu unity in Kenya, as politicians overruled the desire among administration officials to see the movement proscribed. Controlling and channelling AIPC school management, rather than allowing post-Emergency activism or simply banning them, was a crucial part of the emerging clientelist politics of postcolonial Central Kenya.
In the wake of the revocation of the ban in February 1969, the Daily Nation reported that the Church was tightening up its organisation, suspending individual members deemed particularly subversive.Footnote 103 The leadership of the AIPC thus moved clearly to become an explicitly pro-regime organisation, just at the time as Gikuyu leaders forcibly reminded their community of the need for unity. Facing Odinga’s KPU, rising opposition after the killing of the popular Tom Mboya, as well as Gikuyu grassroots resistance, leaders in the Kenyatta government, likely led by Koinange, began a campaign of mass oath-taking of the Gikuyu.Footnote 104 Loyalists and ex-detainees alike were corralled, many of them at Kenyatta’s Gatundu residence, and forced at gunpoint to take an oath never to let the presidency leave the Gikuyu community. Sandgren found that AIPC followers used the oath to settle scores with their mission-church neighbours, fining them large sums of money and even assaulting them.Footnote 105 As the oathing was revealed in August and September, and a Presbyterian lay minister, Samuel Mwai, was killed, the churches associated with the Christian Council of Kenya for the first time raised significant outcry.Footnote 106 They felt the oath assaulted national unity, violating their faith. In part, the oath was far too reminiscent of Mau Mau, which most of their leaders had opposed.Footnote 107 Political leaders’ far more favourable attitude to the AIPC after 1969 must be seen in the context of these events, when it stayed loyal to KANU, Kenyatta, and Gikuyu unity.
The AIPC would come to serve a growing role in Kenyan public life after 1969. Central to this process was Kenyatta’s assertion of his role in the founding of KISA, to the point that he was rhetorically presented as its sole originator. He now had personally initiated the founding of the AIPC, and despite the official discourse of “forgive and forget,” he said to AIPC-aligned audiences, “those who say we were given [freedom]…by whom? We fought for it, and we snatched it from the colonialists by shedding blood.”Footnote 108 He also claimed that he had backed the reopening of the schools as far back as 1960, telling 150,000 gathered AIPC members he would “offer any assistance towards the revival and running of the independent church movement.”Footnote 109 He stressed that their religion “should always be expressed in self-reliance, self-respect and self-discipline,” in line with his conservative ethos of Harambee, which was critical to Kenyatta’s philosophy and dovetailed with the AIPC’s theology.Footnote 110 As Lonsdale put it, “Kenya’s theology of emancipation is suspicious or contemptuous of the poor,” caring more for societal sin than political oppression, with the AIPC made complicit in these years.Footnote 111 A particular example of this integration was the rise to prominence in the lay leadership of the AIPC of Wanyoike Thungu, Kenyatta’s aide-de-camp and bodyguard, Kiambu KANU chairman, and ex-Mau Mau leader rumoured to have led the 1969 oathing.Footnote 112 Gikuyu political elites, especially Mbiyu Koinange, donated extensively to Harambee fundraising for AIPC churches in the 1970s. Kenyatta’s loyalty was reciprocated with the AIPC condemning Protestant churchmen who “destroy the unity built by our beloved leaders.”Footnote 113 The transformation of the AIPC into an instrument of state-led Gikuyu unity was complete.
The achievement of harmony across Gikuyuland, however, was relative rather than absolute, given the region’s multiple factions and unresolved tensions. Among the controversies that persisted into the 1970s was one between Catholics and the AIPC over church plots at Birithia. AIPC members had forcibly seized a church that Catholics had taken over during the Emergency. What made the situation particularly delicate for officials was that the AIPC leaders were “freedom fighters who ask for special privileges and restoration of what used to be theirs.” Footnote 114 In the new climate, however, officers were warned that these men and women “should be handled with reason and matters explained to them peacefully,” a far cry from the arrests with which more explicitly political groups were handled.Footnote 115 Correspondence from Minister of Finance (and future President) Mwai Kibaki indicates that Kenyatta got personally involved again in handling the situation through a private meeting with both denominations, in which he allocated both distinct plots.Footnote 116 MPs with backgrounds in the AIPC, like Waira Kamau, were deeply involved in continuing local struggles to reclaim land as a way to cultivate constituencies.Footnote 117 As government in Kenya became more personalised, with Kenyatta and his court at Gatundu arbitrating local concerns in their ethnic backyard, such intervention became far more common. In 1971, the Kandara district officer wrote:
Church conflicts involving the followers of AIPC, Anglican Church and Catholics continue to plague my office. The situation became so hot that the District Commissioner and myself had to be summoned by His Excellency the President to his Gatundu Home on 21 June 1971 where His Excellency amicably settled the conflicts.Footnote 118
Eight years later, the Murang’a county council noted that it was at this meeting that Kenyatta had ordered all AIPC sites restored. Yet it had not been “humanly possible to return all the church sites of this denomination after [Emergency-era] land demarcation, but where possible some sites were excised either in school compounds, nursery school sites, or on open space.”Footnote 119 Political intervention thus meant that the AIPC was restored as a major denomination in Central Kenya, from 18,000 members in 1966 to 496,000 in 1971, albeit never given back all its claims, limited by the permanent transformations wrought by the colonial counterinsurgency.Footnote 120
Conclusion
The shibboleth of Gikuyu politics after independence was unity, leading to remarkable ironies which only a focus on the politics of reconciliation can explain. Prominent colonial loyalist and Provincial Commissioner Eliud Mahihu praised the AIPC as “good freedom fighters” who should, nevertheless, continue to “forget the past.”Footnote 121 There remained a dissident flavour to the Church, partly due to its centre of power being in Nyeri, which remained a thorn in the side of the Kiambu-based elite. This manifested itself most clearly in 1975, after the assassination of Nyeri-born MP, ex-Mau Mau detainee, and frequent donor to the AIPC, J. M. Kariuki, by actors associated with Kenyatta. It was the AIPC which oversaw his funeral.Footnote 122 Clearly, a shift to the larger goal of reconciliation was not absolute; there was always a guarding of the parameters of Gikuyu unity, which Kariuki was violating by demanding wholesale land reform and offering himself as a potential successor to Kenyatta, unsupported by the Gikuyu elite. As the 1970s wore on, and especially into the 1980s, the church became involved in ever more vicious internal struggles over leadership, which the scholar Joseph Kariuki holds to be primarily related to the degree of loyalty displayed by contenders to KANU and Kenyatta’s successor, Daniel Arap Moi. As Moi sought to use Gikuyu ex-freedom fighters as a tool against the Kenyatta-era elite, the AIPC was useful.Footnote 123 This political entwinement, present since the Church’s very foundation in the 1920s, has also led to further divisions and loss of popularity in Kenya’s dizzyingly shifting political landscape since the restoration of democracy in 1992. The AIPC persists to this day, still demanding the return of schools and land, with politicians pledging support whenever election time comes around.
The overall story of the AIPC since 1952 is one of resistance, negotiation, and incorporation, a story which only makes sense in the context of febrile post-civil-war politics. Earlier conflicts over Gikuyu unity in the face of Western modernity were reinscribed into a battle over post-conflict justice. The influence of Emergency-era land seizures and intra-communal conflict on Kenyan politics during the 1960s has not been sufficiently examined, and the AIPC provides an essential example of the complex political forces it released. The postcolonial state sought to ensure stability at the cost of post-conflict justice, and AIPC activism was seen as fundamentally subversive. The political elite, however, had experienced intra-Gikuyu struggles and was invested in finding a working compromise that would prevent the re-emergence of rural radicalism and secure their power base. As the state became more explicitly run in the interests of Central Kenya, and the Church was drawn into political and patrimonial networks, it became a mainstay of the Gikuyu elite and a tool for political control. This story allows us to further engage the complexity of decolonisation at the local level, found in the minutiae of school committees, debates about the borders of church plots, and no-confidence votes in county councils.
Acknowledgements
Thanks go to the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Warwick for funding this research. Much of this piece was written at the John W. Kluge Centre at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. I thank them for their hospitality. Personal gratitude goes out to Professor David Anderson for advice on the original manuscript. The staff at the Kenyan National Archives in Nairobi and Nyeri made the project possible. I also thank the Journal of African History editorial team and the anonymous peer reviewers for their assiduous attention and assistance.
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