Christianity and the Kikuyu: religious divisions and social conflict

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Book

Title:	Christianity and the Kikuyu: religious divisions and social conflict
Author:	Sandgren, David P.
Year:	1989
Volume:	45
Pages:	201
Language:	German
Series:	American university studies. Series IX, History (ISSN 0740-0462)
City of publisher:	New York
Publisher:	Peter Lang
ISBN:	0820407321
Geographic term:	Kenya
Subjects:	Christianity missions social conflicts Kikuyu
Abstract:	The author, drawing heavily upon oral evidence collected in 1970-1971, reveals that the 20th-century encounter of the Kikuyu of Kenya with Christianity, notably the missionaries of the Africa Inland Mission (AIM), produced a series of religious and culturally based conflicts, which in time caused deep, serious, and irreconcilable divisions in their society. At the centre of these conflicts were the differing and increasingly antagonistic points of view that grew among three groups: the 'Aregi' or those Kikuyu Christians who refused to accept AIM authority, the 'Kirore', those Kikuyu Christians who remained loyal to the mission, and the 'Arathi', who despised both groups and struck off on their own in defiance of Western and Kikuyu cultural conventions. In the mid-1950s these conflicts, central to the Kikuyu society, played a role in the Mau Mau rebellion.