In the beginning when the two cultures met, the construction of the missionary shelters used the labour and the materials that were available in the environment. The labourers being Kikuyu and the materials those found in the Kikuyu environment, the Kikuyu were surprised that the white man did not want to build as they did. Huxley records how this encounter happened when her father erected their first structure in a settler farm near Thika and the exchange between her father, Robin and Njombo, the Kikuyu in charge of the laborers.
After Robin marked out a rectangular house with pegs, Njombo and his friends were incredulous and he said;
“We cannot build a house like that.”
“Why not?”
“It will fall down.”
Later after the Kikuyu agreed to go ahead and they began the construction using vegetable twine to tie the various elements together, it was Robin’s turn to be amazed; “Its roof was a major difficulty: the structure of rafters, purlins and a
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ridge-beam was a total novelty and Robin’s explanations got nowhere.” Robin gave up arguing and let them proceed in the manner they knew how.
“The house will fall down without nails”, Robin said.
“Those things, … they are useful but it is wrong to put iron in a house.”
Njombo answered
“So Robin agreed to let them try, and they bound the poles together with twine in their customary fashion. The house was standing when we left the farm fifteen years later and never caused us any trouble, and the roof withstood many storms and gales” (Huxley, 1998:36-37).
The Consolata Fathers too used the local materials in their natural form at least until the sawmill arrived and some of their structures were quite an
interesting blend between Kikuyu constructive techniques and Italian construction. A favorite wall construction was the Kikuyu granary gikonjo method which the Italians exploited to construct a huge (in the eyes of the Kikuyu) Church. They were also able to use banana bark for roofing, something the Kikuyu also used in temporary constructions.
Fig 4.9. Early Church built in traditional gikonjo style. (Source: Cagnolo, 1933) The roof was beautifully done in banana bark.
Later with the acquisition of a block making machine the clay soil was used to make sun dried soil blocks which produced a more permanent wall when plastered in cement. The stone for the foundations was readily available and the Italians trained the first stone masons in the area. The buildings, some
constructed using mud blocks at around 1920 in the mission are still standing to
date. The soil blocks were plastered on the outside and inside and given a whitewash.
Fig 4.10 Students in an early missionary construction class making mud blocks.
(Source: Rigamonti, 2001)
It is not the intention of this thesis to offer an exact chronological
timetable of when each of the new constructive techniques was introduced but to show these techniques and how they would later influence the Kikuyu
architecture thus transforming it.
Most of the examples of this early Church architecture can only be glimpsed through photographs and several of the outstanding examples are shown below.
Fig 4.11 Examples of early Consolata Mission Architecture (Source: Mathew, 1952) Top left: Merely titled: a primitive church in Kikuyuland. Grass thatch roofing of the 1900s
Top right: Church at Karima. Grass thatch roof and galvanized sheets façade. (Karima mission founded 1904)
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Fig 4.12 Imposing Architecture
Left: Church at Nanyuki. Quarry stone walls and iron sheets roofing (1933)
Right: Church at Tetu. Front façade in molded galvanized sheets. (Tetu mission founded 1903)
4 . 5 . 0 T H E C O L O N I A L G O V E R N M E N T ’ S I N F L U E N C E The Colonial administration of government officials from the chief all the way up to the governor of the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya was in place by 1905 at least in most of Kikuyuland if not in the Northern and frontier districts.
“Colonization, however, would not have had such long-lasting effects if the confrontation between the rulers and the ruled had limited itself to a simple display of physical might. After conquest, a new element
manifested itself, and this was to leave an indelible mark on the minds of the subjected people. The British administration’s declared Laison d’être after the period under discussion was that theirs was a civilizing mission to the erstwhile benighted Africans…” (Muriuki, 1974:177).
All these administrators had of course to find what they needed to do in the new colony and it was not long before they clarified their mandate, as Muriuki (1974) says, to be a ‘civilizing mission’ drawing inspiration from Livingstone’s 3Cs – Christianity, Civilization and Commerce. Christianity being firmly in the competent hands of the Missionaries, the government took on the main responsibility for the two remaining Cs
The main vehicle for the advancement of civilization was education. In 1911 the government created a Department of Education and two years later appointed J.R. Orr as the Director in the newly created Department of Education.
Orr and his officials were not seeing eye to eye with the missionary ideas of educating the African and a lot of discussion went on as to the best method of educating the African. For instance in the area of women education, Orr “favored substituting what he called the three B’s for the three R’s: baby, bath and broom”
(Tignor, 1976:205). Another official, Hobley, wrote that as much as it was
necessary to teach the three R's, of Reading wRiting and aRithmetic, which the missionaries emphasized, “the real focus in regard to the natives should be the instruction in the “things that matter”. He listed them as:
1. The improvement of character, the inculcation of discipline, obedience and honesty, right ideas of life and duty.
2. Training in the better use of the soil and the better care of domestic animals.
3. The improvement of home life and manner of living. Better houses, better ways of utilizing the raw materials at hand.
4. The care of life and health, the virtue of cleanliness, sanitation and pure water supply.
5. Training in the healthy employment of leisure time, healthy recreations.” (Hobley, 1923).
Blacklock summarized the general thrust of the discussion in the introduction of her small hygiene primer for children. She wrote,
“And yet in the Tropics we may still see a schoolboy, ignorant of the cause of malaria, clasping a book of Euclid close to his enlarged spleen;
and may still hear a learned B.A. discoursing eloquently on the
philosophy of John Stuart Mill while mosquitoes breed in the roof gutters of his house and rats scamper over the refuse heap in his yard”
(Blacklock, 1935:7).
Again the finger was pointing at the homestead environment and in particular the house and its construction and form. The idea of cleanliness was preached with as much vigor as the Missionaries preached the gospel of ‘the clean ghost’, roho mutheru,‘the clean father’, baba mutheru, and ‘the clean Mary’ Mariamu mutheru, for ‘cleanliness is next to Godliness’ a mantra that was repeated ad nauseam. The issues of tropical hygiene and medicine became infused into the school curriculum with nature study and the life cycles of mosquitoes, flies and tapeworms being taught in the schools.
This hygiene programs of getting to the root cause of the diseases and demystifying them freed diseases from superstition and probably contributed more in the erosion of the belief in witchcraft and of the confidence in the power traditional doctors and shamans than the gospel, that is “the substitution of causal principles for magical explanations” (Freire, 2005:14). The government’s efforts in the area of public health in the villages were implemented by the chiefs who could organize the whole village in great sweepings from one homestead to another driving out rats and burning refuse. The chiefs also saw to it that every homestead had a pit latrine. Up to about the 2nd World War, very few people had changed the house form from the round, grass thatched huts or had pit latrines. It is after the 2nd World War that a few people had enough cash to be able to change their homesteads. Till then only a few changes in artifacts, like cooking
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utensils, tables, beds, and the folding chairs and these were in a few homes of the athomi and wage workers in Nairobi. It was after World War II that the
government intensified its efforts with the Department of Public Health taking an aggressive stance towards changing the villages.
Fig 4:13 The life cycle of the fly within the homestead described. (Source: Sanderson, 1932)
Blacklock writes, “This is a picture of rats. Rats live in holes which they dig in the ground, or in clefts between stones and rocks. Some rats live inside
houses and shops and stores, in the thatch in the roof or under wood floors or even inside the walls” (Blacklock, 1935:15).
Fig 4. 14 “This is a picture of rats.”
(source: Blaclock, 1935)
As an illustration, she tells the story of a school age young man, Momo and how he got sick; “Mr. Kamara and his wife and children lived in a small house made of mud and thatched with palm leaves …. It was a small house with no windows and when the doors were shut it was dark inside. Very little fresh air came in, so that after some time the air in the house got hot and stuffy, which made you feel tired and not want to work. … Insects crawled about the floor and bit them when they slept. … Momo’s mother kept food in earthenware pots and calabashes but most of these pots had no lids and flies used to go inside and rest on the food and sometimes they fell in and drowned” (Blacklock, 1935:25).
She goes on about the refuse and its disposal, the lack of sanitary facilities and then in the end in a contrasting picture of ‘before and after’, she describes the scene of Momo’s new environment.
“In a few years the Kamaras had a very comfortable house, for Momo had learnt how to make windows, and he put two nice windows at each side of the house, he made a wooden table on which Mrs. Kamara now kept all the food vessels, and he made well-fitting lids for the pots so that flies could not get inside them. The house and compound now looked very different from what they had before. You remember the house had been dark when the doors were shut; now, even when the doors were shut, the windows still allowed light and air to pass in. There were beds for the family to sleep on instead of on mats lying on the ground. They had clean water to drink and there was no badly-smelling refuse heap in the compound where ants and flies and rats lived, since all the refuse was burnt every day in the new burner. But the best improvement of all was that there were now no mosquitoes since all the water-containing pools, holes and tins had been removed” (Blacklock, 1935:43).
Not surprisingly Momo transformed from a sickly boy to a strong and healthy man. This ‘before and after’ method of presenting the two scenarios was used over and over again until the message was driven home. The ‘before and after’ method has been used very successfully in marketing and has been used for a long time to market skin lightening creams to African women.
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Another book on Hygiene “written in simple English for African schools”
and edited by Carey Francis17 aimed at shifting from merely describing symptoms into providing practical solutions. Some of the practical solutions illustrated are reproduced here.
Box 4.1 Principles for the construction and use of pit latrines. (Source: Francis, 1933)
17 Carey Francis was a well known schoolmaster and teacher of mathematics at the prestigious Alliance of Missions School in Thogoto just outside Nairobi that trained many of the early Readers who went on to be leaders in many spheres of Kenyan life. “He was not just a teacher, he was an institution. He made us what we are.” – former student.