Envisioning Christianity as the future
In their accounts, Il Chamus Christians in Kiserian singled out social isolation as the severest repercussion of their conversion, both within their immediate family and in the community at large. By talking at length about how they braced themselves against peer and family pressure, they presented themselves as people who grow in independent judgement and who are oriented toward a better tomorrow. They thus claimed a particular temporality, for Christianity as a path toward a promising future, and for themselves as those forward-looking pioneers willing to endorse it and to pave the way toward greater communal prosperity and well-being.
Il Chamus’ discursive dichotomy of ‘church’ and ‘culture’ echoes conversion narratives in other African settings that portray conversion as a radical break with kin obligations and ‘the past’ (e.g. Meyer 1998). To understand the meanings Il Chamus Christians associate with ‘culture’, we take a closer look at Il Chamus Christians’ reconstructions of the social sanctions they faced. In a second step, we will explore how Il Chamus Christians construct ‘culture’ as the realm and temporality from which they seek to distance themselves.
For Christian men, the threat of social isolation was tied mostly to their withdrawal from age-group ceremonies, a decision they justified with reference to specific ritual details, such as slaughtering animals by suffocation. Older Il Chamus Christians recalled that in their youth, the most formidable social sanction was to curse a man, a step taken mostly by elders and age-group peers. The threat of cursing was exacerbated by parental pressure to conform to kin and age-group obligations and norms. One of the pastors at the Kiserian mission recalled:
My age-group one time approached me and my parents telling them .. that we should not be part of the church, but rather come back to our age-group. I resisted .. (One) Saturday, when we were coming out from the Bible study, my age-group came, and cursed me with two of my friends … (This) curse (ldeket), it is like wishing you to die … to go how the sun is going down, that manner of words. But, then, when I came home, when my parents heard that I was cursed, they told me to go away from home. Because you could not any longer, you know, they believe … that when you are cursed then you will die. So I went …That was ’85 … I was still a child. I was still under 18 … a teen … I went to that area of Marigat, to find a place to stay, and then to look for a kind of a job, and I went to someone … he hired me to look for his goats and … paid me something like 150 shillings per month. So, I stayed like for 4 months, and then I came back … And then, my parents, I talked with them, that I have decided to be a Christian, and I will not do some of the things which does not go along with the Bible … They accepted me back …
The speaker’s exclusion from his age-group was aggravated by his temporary expulsion from his family. His parents’ resistance faltered only when the efficacy of the curse became questionable. The point was reiterated by one of the pastor’s age-mates who talked about his participation in the alternative circumcision ceremonies organized by the church:
… when we were circumcised here, the age-set of my father, converged in one place … (and) cursed the boys who have been circumcised in the church. But since then, we don’t believe [in the power of curses] … We are the pioneers in the community who have been circumcised in the church. Those days, the church youth were circumcised in far away places, like Ravine, like Kabarnet .. (because) that way of circumcision was not accepted by the community. And there were few … during our time …1994 … So we experienced the same difficulties, because we are changing the culture, which people don’t want.
The argument that the powers of faith supersede the efficacy of practices that pertain to the realm of culture reappeared in other accounts of early converts:
[members of my age-group] cursed me the second time. But I didn’t believe that … curse can do anything to me. And for all those years people have waited for me to die, all those years. And I think that proves that people around are no longer fearing curse, especially if you have not done anything … (cursing) is no longer working today.
The above accounts attribute distinct temporalities to Christianity and to ‘culture’. By claiming that the efficacy of curses is something of the past, whereas those who adopt the Christian faith become ‘pioneers of the community’ and ‘change the culture’, these Christians present themselves as drivers of moral and material advancement.
For men to refuse participation in transition ceremonies deemed essential to age-group sociability meant to no longer fully belong to their age-group. In the eyes of their age-mates, Christian men’s withdrawal from certain age-group-related rituals disrupted networks of sociability and, notably, of material support. Peer responses varied from prodding and entreaties to social isolation, depending on the convert’s social standing. As an older man associated with the AIC mission explained,
… at first, they were ok with it … later on, they were … trying to bring … (me) back … I told them, that I will not join you, but … in other things we will be together, like when somebody is getting married, I will just chip in with my contribution. But other things we will not be together. And that is how they agreed…
In this instance, the pragmatic solution of continued material support made up for his withdrawal from ceremonies. Other Christian men confirmed that peer responses depended significantly on whether a man was respected by his peers and bowed to norms of reciprocity by supporting group activities materially. Male peer disapprobation tended to falter over time, when Christians proved their persistent sociability through material contributions.
What about the challenges faced by Il Chamus women in ‘joining the church’? Male and female Christians portrayed the risk of social isolation to be lower for women than for men, which they explained by a greater affinity between women’s ‘traditional worship’ practices and their ‘singing’ in church. This points to a conception of female religious agency that lends itself to easier ‘translation’ into Christian religious practices (see Hodgson 2005: ch.1). Given that many Il Chamus agree on women’s greater susceptibility to ‘worship’ and ‘the church ways’, their church attendance is considered less reprehensible in the eyes of peers and family. Yet even if the hurdle to ‘join the church’ is lower for women, they, too, face social sanctions. As an unmarried, educated woman in her early twenties put it, referring to the circumcision of girls, a practice that observant Christians usually denounce:
The problem is stigma … if there are some ceremonies your husband will go, but you will be left out because you are not circumcised … you will just be chased away from there … So sometimes people will [be] circumcise[d] to avoid that, or they would go completely to church and stay there, avoid the culture.
Overall, women tended to give a less antagonistic portrayal of the social pressure they faced. Instead, they often highlighted that their turn to Christianity offered them opportunities of personal growth and of breaking with norms and practices that held women back in a position of subjection to the directives of ‘elders’ and ‘culture’. Also prominent were references to the opportunity to access education through the ‘church’, and to portray it as the crucial step toward improving family life and communal well-being.
Women’s downplaying of conflicts surrounding their turn to Christianity could reflect culturally specific expectations about proper female behaviour as being more conciliatory and peaceful. But first and foremost, their portrayal of Christianity as the realm of future opportunities strongly aligns with Hodgson’s argument about the thoroughly gender-specific promises tied to Christianity for those Maasai that joined the Catholic mission in Tanzania (2005: ch.4,5). Hodgson shows in great detail that women found in Christianity new opportunities for personal advancement and for gaining respectability in the community, which, among other factors, explains the disproportionate rate of female conversion. Women also found in church-related activities and structures new opportunities for socializing and for gaining support for their personal aspirations. Future research in the Baringo area should specify how the gender-specific promises offered by a Christian infrastructure of material improvement are taken up and translated by Christian women and men into their daily struggles and aspirations toward a better future.