KENYA-RELIGION: Charismatic Churches on The Rise

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 14 1996 (IPS) - Each Sunday, Ngonya wa Gakonya harangues his flock in the Uhuru (Freedom) Park here, urging them to rid Kenya, and Africa as a whole, of foreign religions and return to their traditional values.

“Why do we have to follow an imposed faith when we have our own,” the 50-year old spiritual leader shouts to his congregation, who all dress, like him, in long white gowns and carry long staffs, while the men and some of the women wear dreadlocks.

He claims he has 641,000 followers throughout Kenya.

“People come from all over Nairobi to listen to him,” says Kihu Irimu, a Kenyan academic who is doing research on Ngonya’s church, known as The Tent of the Living God.

Most of them, he says, are unemployed youths and other poor people who are attracted to the sect because, in addition to preaching a return to traditional values, Ngonya also focuses on their plight in his sermons, which he at times laces with criticism of the government’s performance.

Ngonya, who founded the sect in 1987, charges that the established Christian churches are against him because he encourages traditional practices such as polygamy and male and female circumcision. He feels the churches were behind a decision by the government two years ago to ban his sect.

“The Church leaders in Kenya don’t like me,” the 50-year old spiritual leader, who has three wives, told IPS. “They say I am anti-Christ.”

The ban put a temporary end to his prayer meetings, but the group has since reorganised. “We have been praying for the past seven months,” he said. “But we don’t know what will happen to us next.”

According to the National Council of Churches in Kenya (NCCK), an umbrella body of all mainstream Christian denominations, cults are on the increase in the East Africa country. There are some 1,000 churches listed at the state Registry Office but no one knows for sure how many unregistered sects compete with them for the souls of the 28 million Kenyans.

The established churches see them as a danger — from a religious point of view, they say.

“They are confusing Christians,” says Lucy Karimi, a member of a leading Protestant church here. “They misinterpret the Bible whenever it suits them”.

In a letter to a local paper, one worried Christian urged “our brothers and sisters in urban centres, especially in Nairobi, to be aware of cults which have sprang up in the name of Christian churches”.

And on Sunday, Bishop Arthur Kitoga of the Redeemed Gospel Church of Kenya told worshippers in Machakos, a town southeast of Nairobi that “some churches have been turned into devil worshipping dens.”

Allegations like these led President Daniel Arap Moi to form a commission last year to investigate the many cults in Kenya and to look into reports that the alleged Devil worshippers were linked to drug abuse and other crimes.

Sects probed included the Freemasons, a secret order that reportedly has more than 3,000 members in Kenya and which uses the Bible as its main guide. Their detractors had charged that they used human blood and flesh in their rituals, but the 12-member Commission found out nothing that justified the claim.

Kenya’s constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but Ngonya wa Gakonya’s church is not the only one to have been barred here over the past 25 years.

One of two sections of the Gospel of God Church, for example, was outlawed 10 years ago after it was accused of failing to spread the Gospel and of engaging in irregular business, including ‘importing’ girls into the country, some of whom ended up becoming prostitutes.

The Jehovah’s Witness Church has also had a turbulent life in Kenya. It was banned in 1973, allowed to operate for a brief period in the 1980s and then prohibited once more in 1987. The ban was eventually lifted in 1992 by the Attorney-General.

In the meantime, an undaunted Ngonya wa Gakonya says his struggle has just started. “My target is to destroy the churches and snatch away their followers,” he told IPS. “I am sure we shall win.”

This could prove more difficult than he appears to think since, at least for the moment, his following is reportedly confined to his ethnic group, the Kikuyu.