Introduction

In interpreting Il Chamus Christians’ gradual reorientation toward a Christian community and worldview as a set of actions informed by ‘futural orientations’ (Bryant and Knight 2019), we bring together two strands of scholarship that have tended to run along parallel tracks: studies on conversion to Christianity in Africa, and recent work on ‘future-making’ and futurity. Since, roughly, the 2000s, anthropologists have made actors’ attitudes toward the future a guiding concern of empirical inquiry (Appadurai 2013, Salazar et al. 2017), and proposed analytical perspectives on the role of cultural conceptions of the future in shaping people’s daily lives and struggles (e.g. Pandian 2019, Cooper and Pratten 2014). An important insight of this work is that to reclaim the ‘future as a central dimension of our temporality’, we need to consider the diverse modalities and temporalities inherent to future-making and tie them to specific ‘futural orientations’ (Bryant and Knight 2019). However, with few exceptions (e.g. Roman 2019), scholars have paid little attention to religious practice as future-making. The blind spot is striking given that practitioners of numerous religious traditions, in Africa and elsewhere, link their expectations and projects of future-making to religious considerations.

Scholarship on Christianity in Africa, on the other hand, has dealt with notions of temporality and futurity, usually without framing it as a matter of ‘future-making’. Apart from work on millennial movements in Africa, studies on the ‘why and how’ (Robbins 2004: XXVII) of conversion to Christianity have shown that missionary education and the acquisition of literacy offered converts important incentives for and trajectories of future-making (e.g. Peel 1995, Jean and John Comaroff 1992, 1997). Drawing on van der Veer’s work on Christian ‘conversion to modernities’, scholars have argued that this involved a fundamental personal and social transformation tied to the prospect of becoming ‘modern’ (e.g. Luig 1997, Maxwell and Lawrie 2002, Maxwell 2007, Engelke 2004). The scholarship demonstrates that Africans’ decisions to espouse elements of Christian teachings and religious practices were and are intricately tied to visions of desirable futures and related temporalities (e.g. Engelke 2004).

In this chapter, we analyse how Il Chamus Christians, in their biographic accounts of themselves as Christians, make sense of their present life situation and envisage futures for themselves, their families, and sometimes their communities. Drawing on Bryant and Knight (2019), we consider ‘expectation’, ‘aspiration’, and ‘hope’ to constitute distinct ‘futural orientations’ that manifest in historically and culturally specific practices, which should be explored, rather than presupposed. Our contribution to existing scholarship is to explicitly distinguish between two kinds of futural orientation that inform religious practice: the first relates to aspirations in the here-and-now, the second centres on the aftermath (Schulz 2022). Our argument is that whereas scripture-based Christianity places much emphasis on the afterlife and eternal salvation, Il Chamus Christians highlight the importance of immediate material and physical improvement, thus echoing concerns articulated by Christians elsewhere in Africa (e.g. Luig 1997, Engelke 2004).

We also start from a view of narration as essential to actors’ construction of the relationship between the past, the present, and the future, and of their own position within this ordering scheme.

We wish to highlight from the outset that no exact equivalent to the term ‘future’ exists in the Maa language. Il Chamus articulate their understandings of personal growth and communal advancement through several metaphors of spatiotemporal movement, such as ‘to grow’ (abulu)1 As in utubulua Kiserian (‘Kiserian has grown’). and ‘to go forward’ (alokwe, also ‘progress’, ‘step ahead’), similarly to how notions of advancement or ‘development’ are articulated in other Kenyan national languages.2 Smith offers an excellent discussion of the Swahili term maendeleo for ‘development’, with its literal meaning of ‘moving forward toward a specific goal, in space and time’, and of fertility metaphors, such as ‘moistness’, that express the preconditions for personal growth and ‘for achieving communal well-being and civic peace’ (Smith 2008: XII, 4-6). Il Chamus therefore do envisage possible futures. They express their expectations and aspirations through metaphors of fecundity and productivity.

At the centre of our analysis is a particular category of Christians: pastors, catechists, and those who describe themselves as ‘dedicated Christians’, all of whom are associated with the African Inland Church (AIC) mission at Kiserian, an Il Chamus settlement on the south-eastern shores of Lake Baringo. Kiserian lies about 25 km east of Marigat town, a market centre located about 270 km north of Nairobi, at a distance of 100 km from Nakuru (Map 10.1). The statistical record indicates that the majority of Il Chamus identify as Christians today.3 According to the 2019 census, 91.5 per cent of the Kiserian population identify as Christian (4869 out of total 5321, 56.9 per cent of them as Protestant). These percentages resemble those for the total Il Chamus population of which 93.8 per cent identify as Christian (26,748 out of a total of 28,523, with 45.3 per cent of them identifying as Protestant). Still, Christians associated with AIC mission understand themselves as a minority, lamenting that Il Chamus are difficult to convert because of their preference for ‘culture’ (see below) and that even those who convert are often only nominally Christians. Also, similar to other Maa-speaking societies (see Archambault 2011, Hodgson 2005), the gender ratio of church attendance is highly uneven, with women forming the majority in the parish.