>> Edward Miner: On behalf of the Library's African and Middle Eastern Division, I wish to welcome you to the next talk in our symposium, Religious Practices, Transmission and Literacies in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. I am Dr. Edward Miner, head of the African section. For more than 60 years, the African section has served as the focal point for Africa-based research collections and services at the library. Within the division, it is one of the three sections, including the Hebraic and Near East that provide access to research collections of unmatched depth and breadth, documenting the literatures, cultures and histories of regions, extending from the southern tip of Africa to the Mediterranean coast, across the Middle East to Central Asia, and down to the Indian Ocean islands. The Library holds rich collections in major African languages such as Hausa, Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Somali, Kiswahili, Malagasy and Zulu, as well as hundreds of lesser-known languages. Today I am pleased to present to you Dr. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women of Fire and Spirit, History, Faith and Gender in Roho religion in western Kenya, and is currently completing a manuscript on Islam in western Kenya during the colonial period. Cynthia's scholarship concentrates on the interaction between indigenous religions, and the two major missionary traditions embraced by Africans, Christianity and Islam. Her course offerings reflect this tripart focus too, as they seek to do justice to the traditions of Africa as vital systems of thought and practices that are today largely sustained, revived and transformed within Christian and Muslim contexts. She also offers thematic and comparative courses in the study of religion, and is interested in theory and method in the history of religions. Dr. Hoehler-Fatton will present to you a talk entitled Conversion in Context, Rethinking Religious Change in Colonial western Kenya. Cindy, over to you. >> Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton: Thank you, Edward, for that kind introduction. I'd also like to thank all the other librarians in the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress for helping to make this research possible. My presentation today is drawn from my current book project, which traces the introduction of Islam into western Kenya in the late 19th and early 20th century, and attempts to situate this history within larger patterns of religious change. As understanding such patterns by necessity includes discussing religious conversion, we need to step back for a moment and consider that concept. In common parlance when we speak of conversion, we tend to think of a sudden personal transformation, a definitive rejection of one's prior beliefs and practices in favor of the adoption of another religion or system of belief. This standard view is grounded in a long-standing paradigm, perhaps most quintessentially captured in the biblical account of the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. According to the story, Paul, who was still known as Saul at the time, experiences a blinding light and hears the voice of Jesus calling to him. Paul abruptly turns his back on his identity as a Jewish Pharisee and his campaign to persecute the Christians and instead joins them. When the Western academic field of conversion studies emerged in the 20th century, it sustained certain aspects of this ancient trope. For example, in his seminal 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, American psychologist and philosopher William James emphasized the sudden inner transformation that takes place during conversion when in James's words, the center of one's energy changes decisively. In recent years, however, scholars have criticized William James for the narrowness of his data, which was largely derived from the testimonies of Christians, and failed to capture the way that conversion or entry into a new faith community is understood in other religious traditions around the world. Today, scholars are seeking to expand the discussion by utilizing approaches from multiple disciplines and incorporating perspectives and voices from a diverse array of religions. In my own work, I apply several insights from this new wave of scholarship as I seek to map the ways in which people in western Kenya adopted Islam a century ago. One such insight is the recognition that there are continuities, as well as discontinuities between peoples pre- and post-conversion orientations. A main argument of my book is that becoming Muslim in colonial western Kenya drew on indigenous assumptions and practices pertaining to spiritual forces throughout the Great Lakes region of East Africa at the time. Second, this new wave of scholarship highlights the complexity and diversity of motivations impelling people to convert. In colonial western Kenya, social pressure and alliances, changing cultural values and epistemologies, not to mention the pursuit of healing and spiritual efficacy, were all at play as converts sought to navigate the shifting political and economic climate of their times. A third helpful trend in today's conversion studies is engagement with historical material. In other words, we need to emphasize the contingency of conversion and show how elucidating conversion processes can in turn shed new light on historical events, which is something that my own study aims to do. western Kenya in the early colonial period offers a particularly rich context for exploring patterns of religious change, because Islam and Christianity were introduced into the region within a few decades of each other, at a time when a variety of vibrant local and regional African spirit possession and healing cults we're also developing in certain ways. My challenge has been how to approach these interreligious influences, and how to do so in a way that doesn't essentialize these diverse traditions. Until recently, historians of the church in Africa avoided saying much about Islam, while Islamicists use were reticent to comment on Christian movements. Researchers' professional training militated against their going outside their respective areas of expertise. As one scholar puts it, this meant that most Africanists have not been able or willing to discuss Christians and Muslims within the same analytic frame. Fortunately, scholars are beginning to move beyond this bifurcated approach, but much work remains to be done. Moreover, investigating religious change in western Kenya involves bringing not only Christianity and Islam into focus simultaneously, but expanding the analytical frame to include indigenous religions as well. As historian Felicitas Becker observed, religious change in East Africa often comprised, quote, three strands. Islamization was intertwined with Christianization, and with change in indigenous practice, end quote. It is these strands that I seek to understand and delineate in my current analysis of religious change in colonial western Kenya. In doing so, I will build upon the work of the famous East African historian Ali Mazrui, who coined the notion of the triple heritage to refer to the mutual salience of Islamic, Western and/or Christian, and indigenous cultures in Africa. Mazrui always stressed, however, that it was the indigenous component that had the most determinative influence on the other two prongs, if you will. I would say that this certainly held true in the early 20th century in Kenya. I hope the foregoing introduction has given you a sense of the broader purpose and framework for my study. Now, let me provide a bit of background on the region where I have been conducting my research. When people speak of western Kenya, they are referring to that part of Kenya that abuts the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, enveloping the Winam Gulf, which is sort of a 40-mile inlet extending from the lake eastward to the port city of Kisumu, and I should point out that western Kenya comprises over 7,600 square miles. During the colonial era, which lasted from the British declaration of the East African protectorate in 1895 until Kenya gained its independence in 1963, the territory which used to be called Kavirondo, was devided into Nyanza Province inhabited primarily by Luo and Kisii peoples, and western Kenya, where the Abaluya or Luo people's predominated. As of the 2019 census, the population of western Kenya was a little over 11 million, or 21%, of Kenya's total population of 52 million. Today, over 96% of the people in western Kenya self-identify as Christian, with only 1.5% professing Islam. The people of western Kenya have been exposed to Islam since the second half of the 19th century, when caravans brought Muslim traders from the Swahili coast. These caravans came into the heart of Luya country where coastal merchants forged favorable relationships with local rulers, like the famous Mumia, who assumed the throne in 1882, and would become paramount chief under the British. Some of these rulers converted. Others allowed coastal merchants to create enclaves and/or to function as advisors to the court. In 1905, however, most inhabitants of western Kenya were still practicing indigenous religions, while some were Muslim and a few had adopted Christianity, which was introduced around the turn of the century. While the history of Christianity in the lake region has received considerable attention, the story of Islam in this area remains largely untold. In truth, western Kenya has for a long time been seen as a kind of Muslim backwater in comparison to the more celebrated ancient Swahili civilization on the coast. This idea was supported by 20th century models of Islamization, which maintained that the process whereby African communities converted to Islam occurred in three generalizable stages, the preparatory or germination stage, the conversion or crisis stage, and finally, the stage of assimilation. Along this normative spectrum, from the near on one end, to Orthodoxy on the other, Muslims in rural areas like western Kenya were seen as stuck in the first phase. This slanted model reflected a decidedly urban bias, as practices of Muslims in the countryside were described as customs or mila and Swahili, in contrast to the religion, or dini, of the Swahili urban elites. This bias has to a large extent prevented scholars from appreciating or exploring the dynamics of Islam in western Kenya. Moreover, the fact that Muslims comprise such a minority today leads people to assume that this was always the case, eclipsing the extent to which Islam had an impact on the region's religious landscape in the early 20th century. Thus, when I stumbled across some records in Kenya's National Archives in Nairobi that suggested that a Muslim revival with anti-colonial millennialist prophecies had emerged near Mumias in 1926, I didn't know what to make of it. In this memo, D.O. Brumage the Assistant Commissioner for North Kavirondo reports that during a tour of the district, he learns that paramount chief Mumia and some of his assistants were actively promoting Islam, and that, in Brumage's words, quote heathens and lukewarm Christians were being snapped up fast, end quote. The memo identifies three mens, all members of Mumia's ethnic group, the Wanga, who were spearheading the proselytizing campaign, including one of the chief's own sons, Mutachi. What alarmed the British official the most was the anti-colonial thrust of the movement's millennial prophecies. In his words, itinerant preachers have been proclaiming that quote, Mohammed or some other of Allah's chosen will soon arrive to exterminate all infidels. In his infinite mercy, Allah gives African non-believers the opportunity now of joining his only fold. The time is short and there must be no wavering. Europeans are absolutely damned. A great war, the most terrific of all wars, is approaching. All races will eventually join in it. As a finale, Allah's representative will step onto the stage to bring down the curtain to the everlasting glory of Islam. The plot includes the further settlement of Europeans on native lands in this country, followed by its sudden and forced abandonment by them. The Assistant Commissioner goes on to add, I was seriously told that all this had created much impression, and that many women even, both pagan and Christian, and anxiously insisted on receiving the necessary splash of water to place them on the right side of the dividing line, end quote. Let me pause for a moment and comment on the terminology here, which is problematic to say the least, especially to our present-day ears. Throughout the British Empire at this time, officials erroneously referred to Islam as Mohammedism, and Muslims as Mohammedans. They also use disparaging terms such as heathen or pagan to refer to practitioners of African traditional religion, which for the colonizers was no real religion at all, but only superstition. Finally, British authorities were wary of popular religious moments in gatherings, whether they were groups coalescing around African traditional healers, or indigenized Christian movements led by charismatic African preachers, or Muslim movements, colonial authorities saw them as potentially disruptive and subversive. Part of the worry that Islamic movements caused for British officials in East Africa stemmed from the colonizers' desire to avoid a situation like the 1882 modest revolution against the Ottoman Egyptian government in Sudan. A 1919 memorandum from Uganda that bears a striking similarity to the Kenyan memo I just read, is another case in point. In it, the district commissioner of West Nile District in northwestern Uganda, alleges that an anti-colonial Muslim movement known as yakan, or the Allah water cult, was part of a violent conspiracy against British imperial rule. Recent research however, has shown that much of the information contained in the Uganda memo was either exaggerated or downright false. Could it be then that the 1926 Kenyan memo is a fabrication. Was the so-called Mohammedan movement in western Kenya, simply the product of some assistant commissioner's imagination running wild, as was likely true of the akan allegations a few years earlier in Uganda? Possibly. Admittedly, the 1926 Kenyan memo seems farfetched on several counts. First, few if any primary or secondary sources on colonial western Kenya attest to the presence of a millennialist or messianic strain in popular Islam, much less one that was taking shape in the very heart of the Wanga Luya kingdom and affirmed by the paramount chief himself. Second, the blatant anti-colonial content of the reported prophecies seems out of step with the accommodationist collaborative stance that Chief Mumia and his agents adopted toward the British during his long reign. Nevertheless, despite the tendency of many colonial officials to view Muslim activity with unfounded alarm and suspicion, I would argue that, barring the surfacing of evidence to the contrary, we shouldn't dismiss this Kenyan memo as a total fabrication, for the phenomena it points to make sense if we take into account, first, the legacy of Islam in East Africa, and second, the urgency of the times, and third, a long standing indigenous religious option, which I will spell out below. First, let us consider the apocalyptic or millennialist vision. I use the term millennialism here to refer to religions that expect an imminent end of the world as we know it, and await the transition to a holy or blessed age. Just as many Christians believe that Jesus will return at the end of time, Islamic traditions assert that God will send a Messiah, the Mahdi, or a guided one, who will lead the forces of good in a massive struggle against the forces of evil prior to the Day of Judgment when God's reign or kingdom will be established on Earth. These Muslim apocalyptic beliefs, especially the anticipated -- the anticipation of the expected Mahdi, enjoyed wide currency across Africa for centuries. They have been elaborated differently by various Muslim communities, and are part and parcel of the Islamic worldview. One example was the late 19th century Mahdist movement in Sudan that I mentioned above. Another was something dubbed the Mecca letter affair in 1908, in which members of the Qadiriya Suki [phonetic] brotherhood on the coast, on the East African coast, disseminated several copies of a letter supposedly authored in Mecca, foretelling the imminent end of the world. I could add examples, but we should ask why would the people of western Kenya in 1926 feel that the end-time was near and hope that God would send a deliverer to expel the European overlords from the land? Why would a millennial strain of Islam gain strength at that particular time? As historians have thoroughly documented, the period following the First World War was marked by an intensification of repressive imperial policies throughout East Africa. Of the 180,000 Kenyans forcibly conscripted into the British colonial forces as porters part, of the Carrier Corps in World War One, nearly 40,000 lost their lives, losses that were compounded by casualties suffered among African infantry forces, known as The King's African Rifles. Throughout the colonies, communities were further decimated by the influenza epidemic of 1918 and famine precipitated by drought. The resulting labor shortage prompted the government to pass the Native Authority Amendment Ordinance of 1920, which empowered chiefs to round up able bodied men and women to work on state projects such as building roads and bridges. The same year, the hated kipande, or pass system, was put into effect which sharply curtailed people's movement. Finally, as Professor Bethwell Ogot observes, the annexation order of 1920 on top of the 1915 Crown Lands ordinance, essentially turned all Africans in Kenya colony into tenants on their own land. Widespread anger and suffering due to the intensification of the colonial regime was thus acute during the period immediately preceding the emergence of the so-called Mohammedan movement. Thus, while this prophetic discourse drew on themes derived from medieval Islamic mystical traditions that were developed over centuries, within the oppressive colonial contexts, these ideas gained a heightened urgency and relevance. Prior to World War One, the Wongasa [phonetic] tribe had achieved hegemony throughout North Kavirondo through its cooperation with the British. Early on, when European explorers and adventurers began arriving at the end of the 19th century, they were permitted to pitch their camps near the Wonga capital just as the Muslim coastal merchants had done a few years earlier. And when the British Foreign Office sought to set up a permanent administrative station in 1894, they chose Mumias, which is short for Mumia's Village. They chose Mumias as the site. Bolstered by the security provided by colonial soldiers and guards, who had been brought in to protect the station and ensure the safe caravan passage to Uganda, commerce in Mumias flourished. One British administrator would later go so far as to assert that Mumias was to the colony of Kenya, what ancient Baghdad had been to Mesopotamia, so it really became a thriving hub, a commercial hub. However, not all of the district subjects benefited from the British policy of proxy rule through Chief Mumia and his relatives. By the mid-1920s, campaigns to replace Wonga overlords with local men were gaining ground. Moreover, the prosperity of Mumia's capital had been declining since 1901, when the new 600-mile-long railway reached Kisumu, rendering the old caravan routes and contingent trading centers obsolete. To be nearer to the new railroad station, the provincial government moved its headquarters to Kisumu downscaling Mumias to a district station. A plague later swept through the area, and the district commissioner, in search of a healthier climate, relocated his district headquarters to the Kakamega hills, abandoning Mumias altogether. Many of the merchants residing in Mumias at the time follow the DC and his staff to Kakamega because trading opportunities were more numerous and more secure in the vicinity of colonial stations. The eclipsing of the power of the Wonga Dynasty and the economic decline of Mumias township coincided with a change in the colonial posture towards Muslims and Islam in general. Government administrators who had previously appointed Swahili Muslim men as assistants and tax collectors in many parts of Kavirondo, began to replace them with local Africans educated at European mission schools. At the same time, Christian missionaries were arriving in western Kenya in growing numbers following the First World War. By the 1920s, as one historian put it, Christian influence was rapidly outstripping Muslim influence. The millennial Mohammedan movement of 1926 thus arose in a locale experiencing sharp political as well as economic marginalization after years of relative prestige, power and prosperity. The practice of Islam moreover, which had previously afforded converts a certain degree of respect and advantage, was now less of an asset. Such losses and uncertainty may have helped fuel the millennialist's hope that African Muslims would soon triumph over their European Christian oppressors. To wrap up this section, my argument is that while it is important to appreciate the roots of the so-called Mohammedan movement's millennial vision within the broader context of Islamic eschatology, this was a vision that responded to and took shape within the urgency of the particular historical moment. I hasten to add that we can still treat the district commissioner's claims in his 1926 memo with a degree of skepticism. We don't need to accept all of the details, nor buy into the DC's alarmist views. Instead, this Muslim movement in Kavirondo with its emphasis on baptism using protective water, the involvement of women, and the local relevance of certain prophecies, should be seen as producing not so much an ideology of resistance or protonationalism, as a mode of religious discourse that draws on existing local prophetic traditions and ritual practices, as well as Islamic concepts. Now, let me move into the final section of my paper, which focuses on the most foundational part of the religious triple heritage that I mentioned at the outset of this talk, African traditional or indigenous religions. What can we say about African indigenous religion in this region of the continent? It's a vast topic whose surface we can only begin to scratch. Nevertheless, for starters, I would point out that in pre-colonial East Africa, there were few broad-based hegemonic religious institutions. With the exception of some centralized kingdoms such as Buganda, Bunyoro, Rwanda and Burundi, the entire region was characterized by a certain degree of religious pluralism that produced diverse rituals and devotional practices, even among members of the same ethnic group. The religious landscape of the Luya and Luos of western Kenya fits this pattern and was quite diverse. In addition to the creator deity, these communities engaged a variety of invisible powers including ancestors and nature spirits. One form of such engagement is what scholars have called the spirit possession cult. It is this religious option that I wish to concentrate on now. In a nutshell, individuals who are called to serve a particular spirit are taught by relevant experts how to appease, accommodate, and channel that spirit's power. Devotees of the same spirit often gathered together in groups to hold ceremonies and sponsor initiates who become adept at managing the force of the spirit in question. The main aim of these spirit-centered groups is usually to provide healing or protection to others, but may also include the deepening of religious lives of the participants, as well as accessing certain material resources or exercising social or political influence. Within western Kenya, these calls tended to feature first, spirits who were seen to move from place to place when taking possession of people. Second, initiates who dispensed a spiritually charged liquid or substance. Dawa is the term in Swahili for this medicine or powerful substance that was used for healing or protection. And three or third, the practice of the preaching safari, whereby initiates would travel to the countryside, disseminating their particular message and medicine. Let me provide just one example. Among the most widely invoked spirits in this region were the spirits of Lake Victoria. These water divinities went by different names including Sumba or Suba, or Mumbo. Sumba was a mythical sea creature or python who lived in Lake Victoria was said to own a herd of goats with long silvery hair. Sumba was sometimes paired with Mumbo, a giant snake divinity, who according to the Luo migratory myth of origin, lead the Luo ancestor Ramogi and his people out of Sudan and up the Nile into the northeastern part of Lake Victoria, where they would settle. The cult of Mumbo dates back to at least the 19th century, when a man named Obondo who lived in Sakwa in what is today's Siaya County, became possessed by Mumbo. He claimed to have been carried by the giant serpent deity into the lake from where Obondo amerged with the ability to see into the past and foretell the future. Obondo became a prosperous and powerful ajuoga, a diviner healer, who used various kinds of mystically recharged substances or dawa to treat possessed people contributing to the expansion of the cult throughout many parts of western Kenya. By 1913, and 1914, there were growing numbers of adepts, including both men and women who had mystical experiences of Mumbo. These adepts began prophesying the imminent departure of the Europeans and claiming that those who believed in Mumbo would no longer have to work and would be amply rewarded with cattle from the lake. Mumboism called for a rejection of Christianity and Western dress and called for a return to traditional African culture. Despite colonial repression, the millennialist cult did not completely die out, resurging periodically over the decades and continuing on a much-reduced scale, as was true of the other spirit cults well into the independence period. Now that I've given you a thumbnail sketch of Mumboism, let's consider or reconsider some of the details of the 1926 memo about the Muslim movement in the Mumias region. In another paper, I've discussed the nexus between powerful messages and mystically charged water or dawa that Muslim sheiks carried across considerable distances. In Mumboism and other spirit cults, consuming the dawa also bound the individual to others who partook and to the charismatic figure who owned that particular healing or protective substance. In many instances therefore, the act of contact with the potent water effected conversion, membership, and allegiance. The same was true for people who joined Islam in western Kenya in this period. Numerous oral accounts and interviews suggest that conversion to Islam was often sealed through a kind of Muslim baptism or sprinkling of holy water, a phenomenon that has been documented by a number of historians of Islam in other parts of East Africa. Potent water, as well as the ecstatic fervor and notable participation of women in these movements in the first decades of the 20th century, were therefore not anomalous innovations, but widespread. They reflect a process whereby Islam as well as Christianity gained currency within existing idioms and ritual forms. One final example of the way in which aspects of indigenous spirit possession cults informed acceptance of and development of religion in western Kenya is drawn from the Christian context. I took this photo back in 1991, and it shows a reenactment of the role that women took in the inception of the Rohomalaya [phonetic] or Holy Spirit Church, which is one of Kenya's many independent churches. The founding women of this church integrated aspects of another spirit called -- known as the Longo cult, whereby women in pre-colonial western Kenya would become possessed by the spirits of slain warriors, slain Nandi warriors often, and then don -- wore regalia and exhibit these warlike or aggressive or protective abilities. To conclude, I argue that it was the flexible, and above all, mobile character of this multi-pronged religious option or program that largely shaped both the way Islam and Christianity initially took root throughout western Kenya. It was through the indigenous option that these imported missionary traditions took comprehensible form. This widespread loosely structured option gave rise to a dynamic pattern of faith that revolved around a bond between clusters of human devotees and their spiritual patrons manifested in the dissemination of healing and protective medicines, a pattern that held fairly consistent across confessional and denominational boundaries. Thank you. >> Edward Miner: Cindy, thank you for that deep dive into the history of syncretic practices in western Kenya. So a few questions, in thinking about your analysis of millennialist prophecies in the ritual conversion of Africans via anointment with protective water or dawa, do you see continuities with other regional anti-colonial movements such as the Maji Maji rebellion of 1905 to '07 in Tanganyika? >> Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton: Yes, in fact, I do. There's been a lot of scholarship in recent years that has moved beyond the examination of the Maji Maji uprising as simply -- or beyond an interpretation of this uprising is simply an anti-colonial revolt, and instead is look -- trying to look and understand its religious components and implications. So indeed, the water, the Maji, that was used as a protective measure in the Maji Maji revolt was was a transformative substance and it was akin to the kind of water that was being used, or it was akin in some ways, in any sense, to the water that was being used in other movements in this period in East Africa. So whether we can establish direct linkages between particular indigenous cults and the use of these protective waters in conversion rights is something that needs to be looked into very carefully. I think in some cases, you can establish those continuities, but certainly there is this broader pattern, and for sure, the Maji Maji uprising is -- the Maji Maji movement was part of that. >> Edward Miner: Thanks so much. So this is -- this next question is about the unexplored possibilities that remain in archives. What are the challenges facing the researcher in documenting the emergence of early 20th century clusters of spirit possession cult adherence? Are there any troves of documentation that remain unexplored, district archives, for example? >> Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton: There's always more digging to be done in archives, and I'm not sure that there would be troves, but there may be more archives that could be uncovered. My sense is that much of the relevant colonial documentation from the colonial era by colonial administrators has probably been explored. On the other hand, you know, I was mentioning in my paper some research fairly recently done by Mark Leopold on the Akan movement, and he, through his extensive searching for information about this movement, uncovered a diary of one of the key colonial administrators that had heretofore never been looked at, not been used, and it enabled him to reevaluate and critique the movement in a whole new way. So there's always that possibility. Unfortunately, the further we move away from this period, the less likely that our oral sources will be able to provide researchers with as much insight however, there is an amazing wealth of information in unpublished theses, dissertations, master's theses, even BA theses in -- at the University of Nairobi, and Kenyatta University at St. Paul's University that -- and some of these theses that were written in the 1970s, there they were conducting -- the researchers, the students, were conducting interviews with people who grew up and lived through the colonial era and who had clear memories of aspects of these movements, so there are resources available, but one really, really has to dig. >> Edward Miner: Cindy, thank you so much for this wonderful presentation. >> Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton: Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been my pleasure.