10 ‘Joining the church’ as a Form of Future-making? Il Chamus Christians’ Futural Orientations in Baringo County, Northern Kenya

Detlef Müller-Mahn#Michael Bollig

‘Joining the church’ as a Form of Future-making?

Il Chamus Christians’ Futural Orientations in Baringo County, Northern Kenya1 We would like to thank all the Il Chamus research participants and their families in Baringo County for their knowledge, patience, and hospitality. Special thanks are reserved for Wilson Tiren, Glen Nakure, and Maurine Keis, our research assistants who guided us through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork and made the research possible. Thank you to the African Inland Church (AIC) in Kiserian for hospitality, the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi for logistical assistance, and the ‘Future Rural Africa’ Collaborative Research Centre at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn for research support and funding.

Dorothea Schulz, Uroš Kovač

1 We would like to thank all the Il Chamus research participants and their families in Baringo County for their knowledge, patience, and hospitality. Special thanks are reserved for Wilson Tiren, Glen Nakure, and Maurine Keis, our research assistants who guided us through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork and made the research possible. Thank you to the African Inland Church (AIC) in Kiserian for hospitality, the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in Nairobi for logistical assistance, and the ‘Future Rural Africa’ Collaborative Research Centre at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn for research support and funding. »

Previous Next

Details

African Futures in the Making

Stable URL:https://openaccess.boydellandbrewercms.com/?id=-311370

Open Access license

What lies ahead for rural Africa, given a rapidly increasing population, climate change, poverty, inequality and projections of an increasing vulnerability to natural hazards and food shortages?

Bringing together scholars in ecology, agriculture, economics, human geography and cultural anthropology, from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK, this book focusses on social-ecological transformation and future-making in rural Africa, especially in areas of rapid land-use change following the establishment of development corridors, conservation areas, and large-scale infrastructure projects. In Africa, discussions on the way forward are particularly conflict-ridden because people do not agree about desirable goals, because the gap between winners and losers seems to be bigger than elsewhere, and because the struggle for desirable futures is embedded in a problematic history of foreign domination and exploitation.

Focussing on eastern and southern Africa, topics examined range from the history of conservation initiatives and wildlife protection to visions of green development, from the gender implications of extreme climate events on pastoral economies to the use of information and communication technologies on farms and mobile money in geographically remote territories, from large-scale energy infrastructure projects and growth corridors to local ways of managing risk. The volume opens with reflections on African utopic registers of the future and conceptual decolonization in African futurity.

Published in association with the Collaborative Research Centre FUTURE RURAL AFRICA, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center "Future Rural Africa", funding code TRR 228/3.

Author

Detlef Müller-Mahn#Michael Bollig

PublisherJames Currey

Print publication date Jan, 2026

Print ISBN 9781847014221

EISBN 9781847014863

Base text size -

10 ‘Joining the church’ as a Form of Future-making? Il Chamus Christians’ Futural Orientations in Baringo County, Northern Kenya

African Futures in the Making

Chapter illustrations ()