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Updated: May 27, 2025
Those of the reformed religion even held their services in the presence of the Indians, thus anticipating the scandals of Kikuyu. Though the Duc de Ventadour gave orders that there should be no psalm-singing after the outbound ships passed Newfoundland, this provision seems not to have been effective.
Simplest of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East Africa, who require that every boy, just before circumcision, must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed." Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
The Kikuyu young men frankly ape the customs and ornaments of their powerful neighbours. Even the British Government treats them very gingerly indeed, and allows these economically useless savages a latitude the more agricultural tribes do not enjoy. Yet I submit that any people whose property is in immense herds can more easily be brought to terms than those who have nothing so valuable to lose.
Near this were congregated a number of Kikuyu savages wrapped in their blankets, receiving each in turn a portion of cracked corn from a dusty white man behind the bars.
What is more disquieting to the rulers of orthodoxy is that we do not care, that we cannot believe in certain doctrines. Doctrines are at a discount just now. The Church may quarrel over Kikuyu, or the Apostolic Succession, or the Virgin Birth, or marvel at the new possibility of a canon of the Church of England preaching a sermon in the City Temple.
Civilization had touched him lightly, in fact it had barely waved at him as it brushed by. We tried him with several languages Swahili, Kikuyu, the language of flowers, American, Masai, and the sign language, none of which he was conversant with. Then we tried a relay system of dialects which established a vague, syncopated kind of intellectual contact.
The superstitious Wa Kikuyu were fully convinced that by this he bewitched their cattle, which at the time were dying in scores from rinderpest. So instigated no doubt by the all-powerful witch-doctor they treacherously killed him. For my part, however, I found them not nearly so black as they had been painted to me.
Anyone, for example, who was in the habit of meeting educated Indians at the time of the Kikuyu controversy could not have helped noticing the harm done to the cause of the Christian religion by that controversy.
A third question which must be asked is whether institutionalism in practice makes for unity among Christians, or for division. Too often the chief visible sign of the 'corporate idea' of which so much is said, is the rigidity of the spikes which it erects round its own particular fold. The obstacles to acts of reunion (which in no way carry with them the necessity of formal amalgamation) are raised almost exclusively by stiff institutionalists. The much-discussed Kikuyu case has brought this home to everybody. But for these uncompromising Churchmen, Christians of all denominations would be glad enough to meet together at the Lord's table on special occasions like the service which gave rise to this controversy. Anglicans are well aware that the differences of opinion within their body are far greater than those which separate some of them from Protestant Nonconformity, and others of them from Home. Allegiance to this or that denomination is generally an accident of early surroundings. To make these external classifications into barriers which cannot be crossed is either an absurdity or a confession that a Church is a political aggregate. A Roman Monsignor explained,
Then the second gunbearer, a keen-eyed Kikuyu, discovered the lion three hundred yards off to the right. After reaching the top of the hill the animal had swung directly off at right angles with the idea of reaching cover in a dry creek bed some distance away. I started to shoot at three hundred yards, but before I could take a careful aim the lion had disappeared in the grass.
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