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Trudging through the jungle to set up a Catholic Church

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Published on Saturday, 03 December 2011 12:54

It was a daunting mission through a torturous route trudging past dense jungles where beasts roamed the wild freely, playing hide and seek with loin-clothed spear-wielding masters of the land.

As the estimated 200 porters shouldering 80 pounds of luggage struggled, bare footed, along the narrow winding paths followed by red-faced strangers, little did the caravan know the hardships awaiting them.

By sheer luck, the group that had set off from Mombasa on June 22, 1895, avoided the dreaded Maasai moran, but unwittingly walked into a full blown war in Kedong Valley.

According to recorded accounts of the lead missionary in the caravan, Father Henry Hanlon, the Nandi warriors were on a revenge mission after their warriors were senselessly murdered.

The warriors were avenging the killing of two of their colleagues who had been drowned by a white man, Dick, after they failed to protect his cows from being mauled by lions. They killed Dick and attacked any caravan that passed their territory.

The Catholic priests had departed from Algiers, Algeria on June 28, 1894, on the Popes orders and their mission was to travel to Uganda, through Mombasa and set up a church.

Some of Hanlon’s porters were attacked and 27 of 34 men annihilated while their luggage was looted. This, according to Hanlon, was the most traumatising part of the 795-mile journey that took them to Mengo on September 6, 1895, heralding the establishment of the Hill Mills Fathers Mission in accordance with papal orders that four vicariates be created around Lake Victoria.

Then, Nyanza region was shared out between Uganda and Tanzania, and Kenya at the time did not exist and the whole of western Kenya, extending up to Naivasha was under Uganda protectorate.

Tough journey

The journey from Mombasa to Mengo was undertaken in 60 stages and the caravan walked for between nine to ten hours daily, at times going without food when supplies ran out. Hanlon and his brethren got an opportunity to expand the church to Kisii, when they were invited to soften the locals who had violently resisted the coming of the white man, leading to military expeditions of 1905 and 1908 where hundreds were massacred.

Author Hans Burgman, in his book, The Way the Catholic Church Started in Western Kenya explains that the political officer accompanying the troops to Kisii, G A S Northcote, (popularly known as Nyaigoti) invited Father Brandsma.

Father Brandsma visited the area in 1909 and selected Nyabururu, as his site for the church and appointed Michael Butiko, a Ugandan catechist to construct some buildings. Consequently, Brandsman selected 12 sons of chiefs to a special school in Mukumu that had been established for the sons of African chiefs.

There was a major setback for the development of the church in Kisii when Bishop Hanlon, who was stationed in Uganda, effected some changes directing the closure of Kisii and Kisumu and closed the missions in favour of Mumias.

However, the relocation was rescinded after Bishop Hanlon who had gone through hell to establish Catholicism in Uganda resigned.

Father Brandsma, who was now in charge of the mission held the first service for the church in Kisii on December 13, 1911, constructed with goodwill of the chiefs who contributed building materials and donated 20 acres of land in Nyabururu.

In a letter dated March 30, 1912, Father Brandsma stated that the Church was permanently established on December 15, 1911, with no converts, while 12 boys were attending school.

The pioneer scholars who were sons of chiefs are Isaboke Ongori, Odera Mairura, Kitembe Nyamau, Otieno Okech, Nyaborero Ombati, Manduku Mitongia, Ongeri Nyakoe, Mogeni Matara, Chogo Mokono and Okero Okech.

The fruitful start of the mission was, however, short-lived after the newly appointed Bishop of Uganda, Bierman, posted Father Wall to shepherd the young Nyabururu mission. The locals were bitter with the intimacy of the Catholic fathers and their tormentor, Northcote, refused to provide labour for the mission.

They also refused to work as porters, but had an appetite for education. By 1912 the entire flock of the struggling church consisted of only six Goans and 12 Bagandans. But even as the locals shunned the mission, the missionaries started experimenting with coffee, with the first six acres under the crop being established around this time.

Like in their spiritual pursuits, the missionaries were unlucky as the crops failed even as the relations between the locals and the men of God soured. Things came to a head when the local chiefs issued a decree to the effect that no villager would be allowed to sell any foodstuff to the missionary or any of the boys who were schooling at Nyabururu.

At one time Father Wall, wrote to the Bishop," I want to put it on record my sincere regret at having to leave what I foolishly fancied would have been my life’s work: the conversion of Kisiis and kindred spirit."

When in October 1913 when Father Nicholas Staum replaced Wall, things fell apart as the parents withdrew their sons from the mission school and all the Kisii catechumen fled. At the time, the parents were fearful that the Catholic Church, missing a chance to marry and have their own families, would force their sons into a life of celibacy.

In December 1913, just a year after its establishment, Father Staum conducted three church services in English, Luganda, Dholuo and Lugusii to preach to the only one white man, two Goans, seven Bagandans, and four Kisiis. The church’s fate was sealed in February 1914.

Borrowed students

Records show that one of the only three students was arrested for stealing and his colleagues dropped out. To sustain the semblance of a school, four students were borrowed from Asumbi, in Luoland, as Father Staum contemplated closing down the mission.

Things deteriorated after the Second World War erupted and German troops descended on Kisii from neighbouring Germany East Africa Tanganyika, to the delight of the locals who gleefully cheered as their tormentors got a hiding.

When Father Staum and Father Ross were hurriedly evacuated from Kisii to Kisumu after the British were vanquished on September 13, 1914, the locals who flattened the buildings raided the mission. There was a heavy price to pay for the British troops later regained the town and punished the Kisii heavily, leaving thousands of houses torched, 120 locals dead, and 2,000 impounded by the British authorities.

"When Staum returned to Nyabururu, the local residents were very hostile. They threatened him all the time and he had to buy a pistol which he kept loaded, under his pillow at night," Burgman narrates. During the day the man of God relied on the loaded gun in his holster, and the protection of a dog, which was unfortunately killed by leopards.

"There is no hope for Kisii Mission. Perhaps when this war is over and people have been properly subdued," Staum wrote in his report of February 28, 1915, to his Bishop in Uganda.

When the last of the Kisii converts deserted and the locals imposed a food embargo on the mission in April 1915, Staum sought permission to close down the mission.

His parting words to the Bishop before he was transferred to Mumias were: " I advise to evacuate the mission for two years until the Abagusii have been dealt with. There is no work in Nyabururu and no food can be bought."

Four years later, and in a strange twist of events the Kisii people sent an emissary to Mumias with a message to Father Staum to return, saying they were now ready to accommodate him. In June 1919, the mission was reopened by Father Jack Wall and soon had a strong following with 26 Kisii Christians, 112 students, and 12 catechists.

The opening of the church was not without some incidence for in 1921, a hyena raided the father’s residence and allegedly dragged away a typewriter, dismantling it into pieces.

"It is unfortunate that the early missionaries mistook the locals’ bitterness for barbarity. They were simply hostile because their people had been killed and livestock confiscated," Nyabururu father in charge Lawrence Mandere explains. The church, Mandere adds, has grown tremendously in the last 100 years and now boasts of a medical school, teachers college, three convents and 65,000 parishioners.

Nyabururu has also sired Kisii Catholic Diocese that has since been split into Homa Bay Diocese. As the church marks 100 years on December 8, its black baptism register book, where the first Catholic to be baptised in Kisii, Nery Felicious De Souza by Father Wall on June 3, 1912, lives on.