Conclusion
The chapter explored how Il Chamus Christians at the Kiserian mission in the Baringo area, who belong to a predominantly rural Il Chamus society, understand and frame their personal biographies as Christians. A key concern was to understand what futural orientations our Christian interlocutors associated with their conversion to Christianity. For Il Chamus to adopt a Christian ‘faith’ means to envisage new notions of futurity, notions that rest on spatiotemporal metaphors of ‘advancement’, of moral refinement, and communal progress. While scripture-based Christianity hints at the future in two separate modalities, an immediate future in the here-and-now and one relating to 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).
As a key structuring principle of their conversion accounts, Il Chamus Christians posit a clear divide between ‘church’ and ‘culture’, describing their personal biographies as a gradual move and ‘growth’ toward ‘the church’. Il Chamus Christians’ ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (Keane 2007) depends on a discursive rejection of ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ as the realm of backwardness becomes the contrast foil to express a particular ‘futural orientation’: the aspiration to achieve personal moral and material advancement and family and communal well-being. At the same time, Il Chamus Christians constantly negotiate their relationship with ‘culture’: while distancing themselves from certain practices, they seek to maintain other elements. In a political setting shaped by politicized ethnic identities, in which Il Chamus claim political representation as a marginalized ethnic minority, Il Chamus Christians’ futural orientations emerge through a constant tension between the discursive rejection of ‘culture’ and the struggle to claim ethnic specificity and belonging. Their highly ambivalent positioning toward the realm of ‘culture’, as the realm of backwardness but also as the source of an authentic ethnic identity and of future political rights as a minority appears as a characteristic element of the specific futural orientation articulated by this segment of a rural society.