Constructing the aspiring self: introspection and independent judgement
Studies of missionary Christianity, in Africa and elsewhere, have shown that conversion to Christianity implied a novel understanding of personhood (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 1997, van der Veer 1996, Robbins 2004). As Keane argues with regard to Dutch Reformed missionaries’ endeavours in Sumba, Indonesia, the new construction of the self implied a notion of interiority and individual conscience, and replayed the modernist division of belief and action, of interior motivation and outward signs of it. Along with the new understanding of personhood, agency was located exclusively in God and, by extension, in individual believers (Keane 2007: ch.2).
What views of personal agency do Il Chamus Christians formulate in their autobiographic narratives, and what future aspirations do these understandings reveal? When narrating their personal histories of conversion, Il Chamus Christians in Kiserian often recounted that their ‘finding (of) Jesus’ stretched over several years, even decades. For some, the shift in orientation evolved through a back-and-forth movement between ‘accepting Jesus’ and ‘backsliding into culture’; others described the process primarily as an inner struggle. Common to all accounts was that a life-threatening or miraculous event prompted the final, dramatic shift to Christianity. This turning point, modelled on the Paulinian conversion paradigm, was presented as a doubly life-saving transformation. One of the pastors at the Kiserian mission started his account of his turn to Christianity as follows:
I came into contact with Christianity in 1981, when the two missionary ladies came, Betty Allcock and Lorna Eglin. They had a Dutch background, they were from South Africa. I was then in primary school. They preached, and I was one of the students who accepted Jesus. I was baptized in 1983. There were around 28 people that were baptized. I had to struggle, because of the young men of my age-group, the lmopoye. They did not accept me to be a Christian and fail to attend their meetings. I remember they were trying to convince us not to go to church.
Later on, the pastor’s story became more dramatic, identifying a singular conversion moment, a watershed event with dramaturgical elements that resonate with figures and scenes from the New Testament.
… before these ladies came … a preacher came to this area … I think it was early 1980. And I was a student at the same time as a fisherman. And he came to visit us when we were on the shore of the lake, doing fishing. I remember it was Saturday evening. A preacher just came and preached. And then after the preaching he told us, he talked about the second coming of Christ, whereby he will come and separate people, those who have accepted God will go to Heaven, and those who did not will go to Hell. And then later he just called, an out call, that who wants to accept Christ. I just felt like I just have to step up and accept. But something, like a fight within me. Accept, or not … I did not accept that day. But one day … I went fishing inside the lake, and it was evening. I had this local boat. And then it happened to be so windy, inside the storm, on the lake. And it was like almost my boat was to throw me over into the lake. But that word of the preacher came to me. You have missed the opportunity. What will you do if you died now? Because, you had an opportunity, but you didn’t take it seriously. So, like, I prayed. God gave me another chance. And you know I was on the lake, no one could save me, and the lake was very rough. I did not think I will come out of the lake. But I remember just praying ‘God give me another chance, to leave’. So when these ladies came, I still had that … I didn’t go to any church again, I didn’t have any contact with any preacher, until the ladies came. So I became one of them, those who accepted Christ … That is why I later decided that … I am a Christian, and I should be obedient to what the Bible says.
Conversion is presented as the outcome of a protracted struggle, between one’s ‘inner calling’ and the external pressure not to convert. This narrative framing involves a particular spatio-temporality of conversion, as a gradual advance, a ‘growth’ toward Christianity.
1 Interviewees used the term peebulu ltung’ai to refer to their personal growth (literally, ‘to grow as a person’). The same dramaturgy of conversion as a struggle of conscience informs the following, third-person account by a man in his late 30s who was baptized into the African Inland Church in 2007.
Deep down in his heart he felt that God was calling him. Like for example, when they were still going to war [with the Pokot], he could pray in the bushes when they were fighting. That was his little secret. He used to pray and he would just escape death. People were killed, but he could just escape every time that he would go to war. So, as much as he was not in church, he really loved the word of God. That is what motivated him.
… back then [in 2005–2007] he really used to love war and everything about it, and he remembers one day … Ok, the bandits, Pokots, used to play around with Il Chamus, they used to steal so much from them. And then the very first time they got their cattle back before they were taken there, he was in that team. And the second time they also brought the cows back, he was there. So to him it was like miracle …
The temporal sequencing of the account starts with the narrator’s responsiveness to God’s ‘calling’, followed by the recognition of being ‘already a Christian in his heart’, and culminates in the public profession of faith by withdrawing from age-group ceremonies. The speaker uses ltau, the Maa term for heart, soul or spirit (Hodgson 2005: 210), to refer to the site of inner torment, where the tension plays out between his sense of being a Christian ‘at heart’ and the desire to continue to be counted as a respectable member of his age-group. Dorothy Hodgson (2005), in her study on Maasai Christians in the Catholic diocese of Arusha, Tanzania , describes the conventional Maasai conceptualization of oltau as the site of moral agency, maintaining that a ‘person’s oltau could influence their actions, forcing them to do things or go places they might not otherwise choose’ (Hodgson 2005: 213). Although we could not soundly confirm this during our conversations with Il Chamus Christians, Hodgson’s argument would imply that, pace Keane (2007), to view ltau as site of individual agency and conscience is not the result of a novel, Christian conception of interiority and personhood.
References to the wonders of faith and Divine power also pervaded other conversion accounts, presenting miracles as signs of God’s superior truth that prompted a struggling self to become a ‘saved one’. One interview partner, a woman in her late 30s, identified as the first turning point in her conversion history the miraculous escape of her 10-year-old boy from a Pokot raid, before reporting on her baby daughter’s recovery from kidney cancer:
One thing that made her realize that diseases can be cancelled [through ‘faith’, iman] was (her) kid who was suffering from cancer … she took the kid to one of the hospitals in Kitengele, in Nairobi. So the baby was scanned, and the doctors realized that the child contracted cancer, kidney cancer … And people were saying cancer can’t be treated. But for her, she didn’t lose faith, she kept her faith. And then she told God, because you have given me three sons, and this is my only daughter, she is not going to die. You had a reason of giving me this daughter and she is not going to die … she survived with that one kidney … now she is in class 6 and she has everything.
Whereas the conversion accounts cited so far highlighted struggles of conscience, other narratives centred on the movement between ‘church’ and ‘backsliding into culture’, such as the following third-person account by a 43-year-old Christian:
… he started when he was a kid. He went to church until he was circumcised. And he said that parents made him go back to culture, during that circumcision period, so somehow he left church for a while. And then he went back there. Then after a while he left again, and he went now (to church) in 2014, for good … church wanted them to be circumcised the church way. But the parents wanted them to be circumcised traditionally, the culture way … So he decided to respect the parents. So he was circumcised traditionally … from there … he started drinking … He was in alcohol for five years, and then in 2013 ..he started now thinking of changing … He was not in peace, he was neglecting his children. And then he was fighting with people for no good reason … So after a while he started listening to the word of God, and then he saw that the church will protect him from doing all sorts of wrong things.
The biography evolves from youthful unsteadiness and a desire to ‘respect’ social norms to a self-assertive Christian subjectivity, characterized by introspection, independent judgment, and self-control. Other accounts also stressed self-control, suggesting an aspiration to belong to a community of enlightened Christians and, potentially, toward middle-class ideals of domesticity and marital partnership (see Ferguson 1999: ch.5). As one pastor of the AIC mission put it,
… [I became a saved one in 1992] … so that I inherit the Kingdom of God. Faith. Because Jesus Christ is coming back again. What made me to get saved, I was taught, and I was taught of goodness, of being a Christian, and good values I can access as a Christian. For example … I don’t do drugs, I don’t fight, I have that self-control …
Here again, personal growth is associated with notions of enlightenment, introspection, and self-control. These aspirations are tied to an immediate, ‘life-trajectory’ future, such as gaining peace at home and ‘respect’ in the community, and expressed through a (sometimes explicit) contrast to the realm of ‘culture’. We can interpret these dichotomous claims about ‘Christianity’ and ‘culture’ as modernist constructs insofar as they reveal Il Chamus Christians’ self-understandings as modern subjects and as agents of their own future. This leaves us with the question of how Il Chamus conceive of ‘culture’.