The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (review)

Since the publication of David Jenkins' Next Christendom (Oxford University Press 2001), it has become widely known that Christianity is now more widely practiced in the Third World than the First. For readers who have never been to Africa and who hear mostly about tribal warfare, oppression, poverty, and the AIDS pandemic, it may be difficult to comprehend fully what it means to be Christian in Africa today. Just as difficult is to imagine the existence of peaceful societies such as Hodgson describes as characterizing a real face of Africa. Hodgson says that knowledge about Africa requires detailed case studies such as her own, and she invites other scholars to join her in ground-level research on Christianity there (260).

Hodgson's book pulls together insights from history, anthropology, and theology in a gender-sensitive inquiry about Maasai members of a Catholic Church. She begins by demolishing the generalization that the Maasai are nomadic people who do not mix with other tribes, stick to old customs, and refuse to modernize. The Maasai, she argues, share histories of migration with other Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa; they mix with other tribes, exchange ideas, trade, and marry into other groups and change (6–13).

Hodgson visits a group of Spiritan (Society of the Holy Spirit) members of the Catholic Church that has a growing number of members among the Maasai (69). She is quick to note the difference between the Second Vatican Council's approach to evangelization employed by the Spiritans and attitudes of Lutheran and Pentecostal missionaries in the same territory. Maasai people complained that these other missionaries denigrated their culture and religious beliefs (127, 253). The Spiritans, according to Hodgson, attracted more followers among the Maasai because they followed the Second Vatican Council ruling that missionaries must respect the cultures in which they plant the seeds of the gospel. This transformation was not easy. Hodgson reports that one day during mass, Father Kholer was confronted by a woman who suddenly "sat on the floor with legs extended . . . started trembling, moaning in a rhythmic groan, swaying up and down and collapsing to the floor" to dramatize affliction by Satan. Her behavior disrupted the quiet tone Father Kholer sought in the service. He lost his temper, saying to the woman "Quit that foolishness." At the end of mass Father Kholer realized that his reaction came from prejudice, giving Hodgson a chance to get the priest to laugh at himself (218–219).

Hodgson shows that the Maasai were ambivalent about some of the activities organized by the church (160–161). On one occasion a group of women resisted an order to fetch firewood intended for use in an Easter ceremony. The women concerned were wearing their best customary clothes, so they were not pleased that the deacon wanted them to go out and find firewood (160–161). In the photograph on page 208, the man who was supposed to lead a group of women in prayers sat quietly in a corner of a room while the women took part in their own catechism. Maasai women were not passive in their acceptance of Christian teaching.

The Maasai response to the gospel is rooted in a number of factors worth noting. For example, the name that they used for God is Eng'ai, a word meaning "she who brings the rain," creator, and life-giver. The imago dei was feminine because women, as mothers and crop producers, were regular worshippers of Eng'ai and acted as her creative agents on earth. Milk, honey, beer, and grass are examples of phenomena used to symbolize the benevolence and the life-giving power of Eng'ai (25–28). Just as for many religious groups, water is an ancient symbol of fertility and life on Mother Earth; the Maasai used milk, honey, beer, and grass to express their sense of Eng'ai presence past and present. The association of these symbols of the divine presence of Eng'ai with...