The Presbyterian Church of East Africa: An Account of Its Gospel Missionary Society Origins, 1895–1946 (review)

This book, which originated as a PhD dissertation for the University of West Virginia, is a study in missionary failure. After a half-century of work the Gospel Missionary Society, the only mission in colonial Kenya not to have founded an African church, had to merge with the Church of Scotland Mission, one of Kenya's most successful and the parent of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, now with more than 4 million members. There were many reasons for the GMS's failure, but one was fundamental—its origin in a tiny, conservative evangelical church in New England that with great faith but less wisdom founded missionary enterprises in no less than three continents. The work of the GMS in Central Kenya was never free of financial constraints. Its few American missionaries—thin on the ground, often ill, and lacking home leave—showed extraordinary devotion, as did their early Kikuyu converts and evangelists who could have found much better paid employment elsewhere. But missionary devotion can inspire a retentive paternalism as much as strategic generosity; moreover, the missionaries' pre-millennialist beliefs placed less store on church-building than on evangelization. Wamagatta also notes the striking contrast between the two main British Protestant mission societies at work in Central Kenya (the Anglican Church Missionary Society and the Presbyterian Scots Mission, which early ordained an African clergy) and the two American societies (the Africa Inland Mission and the GMS, which did not)—the former had long imperial experience to draw upon; the latter did not.

Otherwise, the GMS's difficulties were similar to those of the other Protestant missionary societies of their time and place, not least the decline in missionary vocations after the spiritual catastrophe of World War I and the financial difficulties of the 1930s. To these general setbacks to evangelization Kenya and Kikuyuland added their own particular disadvantages. In Kenya, a colony of British farm settlement, white missionaries never escaped the suspicion of being surreptitious allies of land-grabbing white settlers—and GSM missionaries had to cultivate to supplement their stipends. Conversely, the comparatively rapid expansion of the African clerical labor market, whether for private employers or in government departments, made it hard for missions to retain their ablest adherents. Wamagatta also gives good accounts, from missionary journals and government correspondence files, of the challenges to evangelization posed by indigenous medicine; the taint attached to handling the dead; polygyny; and, above all, the so-called "female circumcision crisis" of 1929–30 in which most Protestant missionaries, including those of the GMS, tried to forbid the practice of clitoridectomy to its adolescent female adherents. (The Catholic missions wisely regarded the practice as a social rather than spiritual problem, the Anglicans were divided, and government deplored any missionary enthusiasm for interfering in "native custom").

One sad consequence of the GMS's failure to establish an African church is that Wamagatta is able to give his readers little idea of the Christian life led by the mission's African adherents or their thoughts and prayers. For such insights, one must turn elsewhere in the growing historiography of Kikuyu Christianity.