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Kenyan traditional religion against the Bible: the monotheist high god the missionaries borrowed, circumcision as covenant, and the Meru Exodus.
Kenyan traditional religion against the Bible: the monotheist high god the missionaries borrowed, circumcision as covenant, and the Meru Exodus.
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Circumcision is very old in northeast Africa. A relief in the tomb of Ankhmahor at Saqqara, from around 2300 BCE, shows the operation being performed in Egypt. Scholars trace a long spread of the practice through the region, which places both the African initiation rite and the Hebrew covenant within one wide and ancient tradition rather than making either the source of the other.
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The Maasai centred their faith on Enkai, one creator god who owned the cattle and sent the rain. Enkai had two aspects, a kindly black god and an angry red god, yet remained a single supreme being. Prayer and sacrifice went to Enkai rather than to a crowd of rival deities.
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The Kikuyu worshipped a single supreme creator, Ngai, also called Mwene Nyaga, the possessor of brightness. He was said to dwell on Kirinyaga, Mount Kenya, the sacred peak people faced when they prayed. This high god made the world and gave the people their land, and stood apart from the lesser ancestral spirits.
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The Luo called the supreme God Nyasaye, and among the Luhya he was known as Nyasaye or Were. He was the creator and giver of life, approached through prayer and sacrifice. As with other Kenyan peoples, one high god sat above the ancestral and nature spirits.
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The pattern of one supreme creator ran across Kenya's peoples. The Kalenjin honoured Asis, tied to the sun; coastal communities spoke of Mulungu; the Borana and Oromo prayed to Waaqa; and the Turkana looked to Akuj in the sky. Each people had its own name for a single high god above the lesser spirits.
Across most Kenyan societies, circumcision at initiation turned a child into an adult and a full member of the people. It was the rite that bound a person to the community and its laws, much as circumcision in the Hebrew Bible marks the covenant between Abraham's line and God. Observers have long noted the parallel, though the two rites grew up in different settings.
Meru oral tradition tells of an ancestral home called Mbwaa, near the sea, where the people lived in bondage under the Nguo Ntune, the red people or red clothes. Their overlords set cruel tasks and are said to have killed newborn sons. Told as sacred history, the account echoes the Hebrews' slavery in Egypt, and it is kept as legend rather than dated record.
In the tradition, the Meru fled their masters and reached a wide water they could not cross. A seer struck the water with a staff and it parted, opening a path of dry land along which the people passed before the water closed behind them. The parallel to the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus is striking, and the crossing is held as legend.
The Njuri Ncheke, the council of Meru elders, have long preserved and retold the Mbwaa migration. Scholars disagree over what it recalls. Some read a real escape from a coastal slaving power, perhaps Arab or Swahili; others see a travelling motif or a story reshaped by later contact with the Bible and the Quran. The historical core is contested.
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Missionaries often arrived calling Africans pagans without knowledge of the true God. Yet most Kenyan peoples already held to a single creator above all spirits. This existing high god sat awkwardly with the missionary charge, and observers later pointed to it as evidence of a prior African belief in one God.
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When missionaries translated the Bible, they usually took the existing high-god name for the Christian God. Kikuyu scripture used Ngai, Luo and Luhya texts used Nyasaye and Were, and so on. This eased conversion, since the God preached seemed to be the God already known, and it quietly conceded that the people had worshipped one creator before the missionaries came.
In 1929 Protestant missionaries, led by the Church of Scotland Mission, demanded that converts renounce female circumcision. Many Kikuyu saw this as an attack on the initiation that made them a people, and thousands left the mission churches to found independent churches and schools. The clash hardened African resistance and fed the later nationalist movement.
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