Prophets and Rebellion in Eastern African History

The contest between religious and political leadership dominated early literature on anti-colonial resistance in Africa (see Ranger Reference Ranger1968, Reference Ranger1986). More recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which these categories overlapped and the role of prophetic figures as social reformers in longer historical traditions in eastern Africa (Adas Reference Adas1979; Shadle Reference Shadle2002; Becker Reference Becker2004). And yet, the historical study of prophecy has fallen out of fashion—though some attention persists in the fields of anthropology, religion, literature, and sociology—and has perhaps been replaced with the growing interest in the related field of “witchcraft.”

The persistent popular fervor around prophetic figures, however, alerts us to their continuing relevance and potential new cross-disciplinary insights. While Audrey Wipper’s Rural Rebels (Reference Wipper1977) remains the only extensive study of the Msambwa movement, many scholars have debated its role in nationalist histories (Were Reference Were1972; de Wolf Reference de Wolf1983; Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs, Binsbergen and Schoffeleers1985; Ogot Reference Ogot, Odhiambo and Lonsdale2003). Masinde himself has been subject to an array of characterizations: sage-philosopher, folk hero, public healer, cultural nationalist, moral crusader, and delusional fanatic (Odinga Reference Odinga1967; Presbey Reference Presbey, Graness and Kresse1997; Alembi Reference Alembi2000). What this literature lacks is Masinde in his own words: Masinde as litigant, as secular social critic, as cultural innovator. The richly detailed court transcript from Masinde’s trial, never before examined by scholars, allows Masinde to “speak” into the historical record.Footnote ¹

As David William Cohen and E.S. Atieno Odhiambo (Reference Cohen and Odhiambo1992) demonstrated in their seminal text Burying S.M., deconstructing court dramas provides a unique opportunity to examine competing representations of truth, knowledge, and justice. Such trial transcripts should not be viewed as direct, unmediated records, and Masinde well understood the need to carefully calibrate his self-representations. Reinforcing the oral, and thus legally “hearsay” nature of prophecy, Masinde skillfully capitalized on David M. Anderson and Douglas H. Johnson’s (Reference Anderson and Johnson1995:1) observation that “far from monopolizing the conversation, prophets frequently have words put into their mouths.”

Elijah Masinde marshaled a long tradition of Bukusu prophets in support of his messianic and anti-colonial message. In the late eighteenth century, Maina wa Nalukale prophesized that the Bukusu “will keep on migrating and fighting with aliens& You will trek round mount Masaaba [Mount Elgon] twice, and on the third round, you will meet with a snake called Ya-Bebe which will stop you from drifting further. You will soon be engulfed in wars of dispersal” (Makila Reference Makila1978:150). Prophet Mutonnyi wa Nabukelembe predicted that strangers would come from the east, defeat the Bukusu in battle, and force them into servitude (interview, Bokoli, Bukusu Elders, March 13, 2007). These prophets offered secular, more than religious, guidance to their communities, and performed multiple functions as healers, “war-prophets,” community leaders, and sources of communal identification. Prophet Wachiye wa Naumbwa wove together prophecy, healing, and military leadership, leading bands of Bukusu warriors and performing miraculous feats (Makila Reference Makila1978). Many disappeared for lengthy periods into the rivers and caves of Mount Elgon, for religious pilgrimages or to escape the local antagonisms their social critiques at times provoked. In the 1930s, anthropologist Gunter Wagner (Reference Wagner1949:214) noted that, unlike other traditional specialists, the “dream-prophet is always consulted in the open, and there is no secrecy about the things he tells his client.” While religious practices were often private and familial, prophecy among the Bukusu represented a public practice that permeated everyday life.

Figure 2.

Map of Western Kenya (Wipper Reference Wipper1977)

This prophetic tradition deeply influenced Masinde and his Msambwa followers. As its name implied, Dini ya Msambwa was a call to return to the religion of the ancestors. Masinde reinvigorated traditions and forms of worship that had fallen out of practice among the Bukusu, including sacrificial shrines, wooden prayer sticks, and warrior dress (KNA 1948b). A popular Msambwa hymn called up the great Bukusu prophets of the past to “help us so that these Europeans may be driven away” (Makila Reference Makila1978:220). While dream-prophets such as Joash Walumoli gained legitimacy through their lineage and clan reputations, others such as Elijah Masinde had to prove their abilities. Other than that he was born sometime between 1909 and 1910 and achieved a rather unremarkable performance at the Quakers’ Friends African Mission schools, little is known of Masinde’s early life before he rose to prominence with the Msambwa movement. As Masinde had neither the clan credentials nor the wealth or status necessary to be accepted as a traditional authority, he combined his growing reputation for prophecy with more overt religious and political roles. Masinde transformed private familial religious rites, often practiced in shrines placed in the doorways of houses, into public political action, hosting large prayer meetings, making public sacrifices and encouraging open displays of religiosity. Msambwa made the social critiques reserved for prophets and traditional authorities more widely available; Masinde encouraged and empowered his followers to publicly challenge and hold African chiefs, white settlers, Asian traders, and their African neighbors to account. Importantly, the movement was not primarily millenarian, as it focused on the renovation of the present through appeals to past orders rather than its restoration through confrontation.Footnote ² As Jennifer Wenzel (Reference Wenzel2009:3) has argued in the case of prophetic movements in South Africa, in many ways Msambwa was better framed as “acolonial—impossibly, simultaneously, pre- and postcolonial” (on the subject of time and prophecy, see Peterson Reference Peterson2012b).

Msambwa incorporated diverse religious influences that had penetrated western Kenya over the previous fifty years: the drums of the Salvation Army, the hymns of the Quakers, the crosses of the Roman Catholics, and the dress of Islamic traditions.Footnote ³

Figure 3.

Dini Ya Msambwa “Equipment” and “Regalia” (TNA:PRO 1956)

The objects and symbols captured in Figure 3 reflect the mixing of different religious influences with local Bukusu practices (ritual use of sticks), locations (holy site of Mount Elgon), and material culture (Kanzu robe with distinct insignia—the front carrying initials related to the movement and the back displaying parodies of Christian idioms). While Masinde was calling for a pan-African religious revival and incorporating symbols and practices from global religions, his praxis remained firmly rooted in Bukusu traditions.

The appeal of religious revivals reflected the deep moral anxiety of the 1940s in Kenya (see MacArthur 2016). Elijah Masinde and his fellow leaders Samson Wafula and Benjamin Wekuke exemplified an emerging cadre of young political leaders, all mission-educated and active in the local administration. While the exact origins of the movement remain contested, by the late 1930s Masinde and others had begun to meet in secret. By 1943, the existence of a new religious movement became public knowledge, and its followers were associated with increased political activism targeting local structures of authority, new religious institutions, and threats to local livelihoods. Fired from his position as a clerk at the Kavujai Native Tribunal, Masinde led his followers in campaigns against soil conservation and forced agricultural work, challenging agricultural officers, resisting cattle inoculations, and destroying agricultural project plots. In 1945, colonial officials arrested Masinde on charges of assault. While Masinde was being held until he would agree to sign a bond of peace, colonial officials with no medical training declared him insane and committed him to Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi. Despite Masinde’s absence from the district, Msambwa followers continued to challenge the colonial order.

After Masinde’s release from Mathari in May 1947, a series of dramatic Msambwa gatherings and increased political activity spread across North Nyanza. Colonial officials identified Masinde as the source of the disorder. When Masinde failed to appear before District Commissioner C.H. Williams in October, officials issued a warrant for his arrest, and Masinde disappeared, following the tradition of Bukusu prophets of the past. Nyanza Provincial Commissioner Kenneth Hunter first hoped to have Masinde detained and reclassified as insane, in contravention to the determination of the Mathari psychiatrists. Two events during Masinde’s absence prompted local administrators to seek a more permanent solution. First, on February 7, 1948, a group of Msambwa followers occupied the grounds of a Catholic mission at Kibabii, dancing, singing, and demanding the removal of the European priest. Three days later, a riot occurred in Malakisi over the jailing of Msambwa followers; police opened fire on the protesters, killing eleven and injuring dozens more.Footnote ⁴ This event led to an immediate crackdown on Msambwa members and an inter-territorial manhunt, coordinated between Kenya and Uganda, to capture Elijah Masinde, who was found hiding in the traditional refuges of the caves of Mount Elgon on February 16, 1948 (“Found in a Cave” 1948). The following day, an Official Gazette proclaimed Dini ya Msambwa an illegal society, providing the legal justification to pursue a criminal case against Masinde. After a few months in Kisumu Prison, Masinde’s deportation trial began on May 17, 1948.

Rebel Prophets on Trial

Deportation had long been a favored option among British colonial officials for containing subversive figures. In colonial Fiji, deportation was a common tactic used against prophetic figures, anti-colonial activists, and even entire villages in the late nineteenth century (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1995). In 1887, the British enacted an ordinance for the removal of “Dangerous or Disaffected Natives” to deport the prophet Navosavakadua, whose name can be translated as “he who speaks but once” (Kaplan & Kelly Reference Kaplan and Kelly1994:131). While framed in punitive terms, the goal of such deportations was more often preventive. Colonial officials imagined local religious leaders as evidence of a psychological maladaptation to modernity (Mahone & Vaughan Reference Mahone and Vaughan2007). Deportation as governance strategy reflected the deep moral anxieties and judicial pragmatism inherent in dealing with anti-colonial dissent.

In Kenya, internal deportation proved an effective if controversial option for managing dissident political figures. The deportation of Harry Thuku in 1922 sparked massive demonstrations and a new generation of political activism. In 1923, the Nandi Orkoiyot (mantic or ritual expert) Barserion arap Kimanye was deported from Kenya’s western highlands for leading protests that echoed the 1905 Nandi uprisings (Ellis Reference Ellis1976; Anderson Reference Anderson1993). In a particularly resonant case, when Samburu warriors were acquitted of the murder of white ranch manager Theodore Powys in 1931, it was their laibon (diviner and ritual healer) Ngaldaiya Leaduma who was deported, not for his direct participation in the murder but for his seditious influence on the public (Fratkin Reference Fratkin2015). In colonial Kenya, deportation laws were made purposefully vague to provide a flexible legal option for removing “seditious” individuals where direct evidence for criminal prosecution or psychiatric confinement was lacking (for comparative debates over the deportation of white settlers, see Shadle Reference Shadle2018).

Masinde’s deportation trial was an exercise in creative colonial justice. Under Judge M.C. Nageon de Lestang, who would later preside over the trial of Mau Mau General Kaleba, the Crown charged Masinde and fellow Msambwa leaders Wekuke Sitawa and Joash Walumoli with being “persons who have and will conduct themselves so as to be dangerous to peace and good order, and … have and will intrigue against constituted power and authority” (KNA 1948d, emphasis added). Crown Counsel J.R. Todd provided a long list of charges extending back to 1942, most of which had already been tried in earlier court cases, including opposition to agricultural projects such as the uprooting of the kwekwe plant, resistance to army and labor recruitment, refusal to pay tax, and confrontations with local administrators. All three were further accused of organizing rallies and giving anti-colonial speeches. The prosecution also charged Pascal Nabwana, president of the Bukusu Union, for his role in the political campaign to oust the infamous Chief Amutalla and for his alleged support of Dini ya Msambwa. In his opening statement, Todd declared that “the Dini Msambwa Sect is a very virulent body, particularly as led by these four men.”

The prosecution built their case around three cumulative arguments: the Msambwa movement was spreading and growing in numbers; this danger was magnified by the inherent psychological instability and violent tendencies of the Bukusu; and these leaders were actively planning to remove white settlers and missionaries by force. Trying all four defendants together allowed the prosecution to accumulate speculative evidence into an overwhelming picture that tapped into colonial anxieties around “atavism” and the new political forces of the late colonial period. As John Lonsdale (Reference Lonsdale and Coss2000:222) argued in relation to Jomo Kenyatta’s trial, “It was a question of how many stones made a heap.”

For both the prosecution’s case and Masinde’s own defense, however, one point required expedient and unanimous disavowal: to support the prosecution’s claim of ongoing criminal behavior and to provide his own defense, Masinde needed to be declared legally sane. Dr. Robert Wiseman, Government Medical Officer stationed at Kisumu who met with Masinde eleven times “in connection with his mental condition,” testified succinctly that he was “of the opinion that Elijah Masinde is mentally sane.” In this abrupt manner, years of charges of “religious mania” came to an end.

This dramatic reversal of official, if not medical, opinion on the sanity of Masinde revealed deeper contradictions within historical accounts not only of Masinde but also of British colonial treatment of psychology and rebellion. In examining the “psychology of rebellion,” Sloan Mahone (Reference Mahone2006b) argued that Masinde’s treatment reflected the colonial government’s tendency to interpret African political dissent, particularly when manifested in religious terms, as a psychological pathology. Others have argued that this conflation has reinforced colonial binaries and subsumed all mental illness in colonial Africa under the problematic rubric of resistance (Swartz Reference Swartz and Eghigian2017). Both arguments, however, misread both colonial policy and Masinde’s own conflicted position. When understood alongside Masinde’s trial and the wider context of colonial policy, the reversed pronouncement on Masinde’s sanity revealed the discursive flexibility and pragmatic approach of colonial administrators to questions of dissent and disorder as they adjusted legal and medical categories in order to prosecute this “most famous example of the ‘mad prophet’” (Mahone Reference Mahone2006b:242).

The “Mad Prophet”

The contradictions in colonial psychiatric policy were evident from Masinde’s arrival at Mathari in 1945. British officials had adapted Kenya’s lunacy laws from the Indian Lunatic Asylums Act of 1858. For much of the colonial period, the laws governing psychiatric treatment remained ambiguous and arbitrary (see Vaughan Reference Vaughan1983; Mahone Reference Mahone2006a). Complicated and often contradictory regulations made the certification of lunacy, the pre-requisite for institutionalization, a difficult and bureaucratically taxing task. In the mid-1930s, H.L. Gordon, Kenya’s foremost psychiatric specialist, complained that Kenyan officials used psychiatric facilities as a dumping ground for questionable criminal cases and the confinement of any African disrupting colonial order. Gordon found numerous cases where colonial courts had certified African defendants as insane without justification, leading to many patients being “confined for up to a year longer than was deemed medically necessary or even, by the government’s own lax standards, legal” (Mahone Reference Mahone2006a:330). Into the 1930s, particularly in settler colonies, mental health care became increasingly interventionist, shifting its focus to curative rather than custodial functions, emphasizing recovery and reintegration rather than isolation (Jackson Reference Jackson2005; Jackson Reference Jackson2013).

Though the distinction between civil and criminal lunacy is absent from much of the historical literature, it proved critical to Masinde’s case, as it exposed these tensions in colonial approaches to dissent. From their foundations, mental hospitals were intimately linked to concerns over deviance, criminality, and confinement (Jackson Reference Jackson2013:80–81). The category of “criminal lunatic” reflected “increasingly racialized psychiatric discourses and practices” (Edgar & Sapire Reference Edgar and Sapire2000:34; see also Jackson Reference Jackson2005). The British government defined “criminal lunatic” as a person who was mentally unsound at the time of the criminal act. Institutionalization was thus preventive rather than punitive; if the patient regained sanity during their confinement, they would still be required to complete their prison sentence. Masinde’s time at Mathari coincided with a reconsideration of colonial psychiatric policy that culminated in a new Mental Health Act in 1949 (Njenga Reference Njenga2002). With increasing pressure on space in asylums and prisons, colonial officials sought to clarify their psychiatric and criminal categories. As Kenya had no “Broadmoor,” no dedicated facility for the confinement of criminal lunatics, officials aimed to separate criminal lunatics from rest of the asylum population (TNA:PRO 1941, 1950). These psychiatric categories determined the treatment and terms of confinement as well as the possibilities of release and the relationship between colonial courts and psychiatric facilities.

Across Africa, institutionalization became a “useful mechanism for managing criminal, deviant, or disturbed subjects” (Keller Reference Keller2007:89). While the practice of colonial psychiatry in Kenya confirmed earlier interpretations of its function as “social control…. in a continuum of disciplinary and custodial institutions,” it also demonstrated the active debates and fissures in relation to broader governance practices (Edgar & Sapire Reference Edgar and Sapire2000:xi; for counter-arguments on psychiatry and social control, see Sadowsky Reference Sadowsky1999; Swartz Reference Swartz and Eghigian2017). Although the purpose of this article is not to assess local or imperial understandings of madness, Masinde’s case uniquely demonstrates how the agency of both administrators and psychiatrists, as well as of those institutionalized, could reveal the contradictions embodied in the category of the “criminal lunatic” and the limitations of social control as governance practice.

Masinde’s case, according to Mahone, “came under the newly designated ‘special category criminal lunatic’” (Reference Mahone2006b:252). However, if this was Masinde’s status by the end of his stay, it certainly was not at the outset.Footnote ⁵ In 1946, the Medical Officer-in-charge Dr. G.R.N. Cooke wrote to Nyanza commissioners for clarification on Masinde’s status: “In the event of the recovery and discharge of the above, I should like to know if any criminal proceedings will be taken against him. He was sent here as a civil lunatic; not as a criminal lunatic” (KNA 1946a). Provincial Commissioner Hunter responded with shock and confusion, finding it “difficult to understand the purpose of your enquiry, as it suggests that if he is likely to be prosecuted, his release would be delayed” (KNA 1946b). Hunter continued giving his own psychological evaluation and foreboding warning: “This man is a very dangerous political character as he was obsessed with a religious mania which dictated him to undertake propaganda… I feel strongly that his return home will be accompanied by fresh outbreaks by his disciples.” Institutionalization, for Hunter, was a matter of local security rather than psychological treatment or bureaucratic technicalities. Official colonial policy similarly viewed detention for the criminal lunatic as “a necessary precautionary measure which is taken in the interests both of the patient himself and of the general public” (TNA:PRO 1941). However, Cooke’s question regarding the distinction between civil and criminal lunacy remained unanswered. Cooke believed that it was better for the patient to know “if he is regarded as a criminal or not” and that he was obligated not by bureaucracy but by legal, medical, and ethical standards to clarify Masinde’s diagnosis: “I have to do this because it is illegal to keep a sane man here” (KNA 1946c). Cooke continued: “If he is a dangerous political character, would it not be possible to detain him on some such charge, if he is ever discharged from here?” Within this debate, the discursive limits of colonial psychiatry to explain and contain rebellion were evident.

When Dr. J.C. Carothers took over Masinde’s care in late 1946, the focus shifted from his legal categorization to the way his community would react to his possible discharge. Carothers, later made famous by his psychological analysis of the Mau Mau rebellion, viewed the “African mind” as deficient intellectually, morally, and physically (Carothers Reference Carothers1953; McCulloch Reference McCulloch1995). Carothers found that Masinde had “been of excellent behaviour” and argued that “this is the sort of case that might be looked after at home satisfactorily by his relations” (KNA 1946d). Home care was a common solution that both respected local traditional healing practices and addressed the problem of overcrowding in psychiatric facilities. Despite repeated warnings from officials in western Kenya, on April 25, 1947, North Nyanza District Commissioner Williams received a brief message from Carothers stating that the hospital’s Visiting Committee, an intermediary body with oversight powers composed of colonial officials and medical professionals, “consider that Elijah Masinde is now fit for discharge under the terms of section X of the Indian Lunatic Asylums Act of 1858” (KNA 1947a). Masinde’s discharge to free public life could not have been achieved if Masinde had been categorized as a criminal lunatic, or if he had continued to exhibit symptoms attributed to mental instability; this demonstrates the limits imposed on the use of psychiatric facilities for social control by the professionals at Mathari.

After the public demonstrations at Kibabii and the Malakisi Riot in early 1948, many in the colonial administration blamed Mathari for releasing Masinde. In his annual report, Hunter complained that the Hospital Administration released Masinde in flagrant disregard of their numerous warnings, a charge repeated by Bishop L.C. Usher-Wilson in the first published account of the Msambwa movement (KNA 1947c; Usher-Wilson Reference Usher-Wilson1951). In a letter to the East Africa and Rhodesia journal, Douglas Michael McKean (Reference McKean1951), chair of the Visiting Committee that had released Masinde and later District Commissioner of Nairobi during the tumultuous early years of the 1950s, fired back, taking issue with the implication that “the advice of the Nyanza Province authorities should have been accepted by the Mathari Committee.” McKean affirmed that his committee “took the view … that mental homes were provided for the treatment of disease, and not for ‘the incarceration of political undesirables’.” Masinde’s release revealed the ambivalent relationship, competing priorities, and pragmatic considerations of psychiatry and discipline in the colonial world.

While both colonial officials and later historians wrongly assumed the ease of criminal prosecution against Masinde, the greater concern with Masinde’s release from Mathari was clearly the effect it might have on his constituents. His brief imprisonments in 1945 had only strengthened his reputation; commitment to Mathari had offered the possibility of delegitimizing his teachings, recasting them as the ravings of a madman. However, Masinde’s release from Mathari fulfilled his prophetic declaration of his return, and to this day Msambwa followers proudly remark that the doctors at Mathari proclaimed him sane (interview, Kimilili, Masinde family, and Msambwa members, October 10 and 11, 2007). Masinde’s recapture also reinforced his reputation as a prophetic and persecuted figure. Assistant Superintendent of Police D.C. Connor reported that “ELIJAH is still being spoken of as the MESSIAH and fantastic stories put out as to his divine powers” (KNA 1948a). In March 1948, rumors of Masinde’s escape from prison spread, echoing earlier tales of his escape from Kisumu Prison in 1944 when, as the story goes, he walked right through the prison walls (KNA 1948c; interview, Masinde family). Neither brief incarcerations nor certifications of insanity proved successful in undermining Masinde’s reputation. There was a political and moral necessity on the part of the state to more permanently remove Masinde from public life, politically as well as corporeally.

Colonial officials scrambled to find alternative means to contain Masinde. The changing tide in official opinion was clear from intelligence reports; just prior to Masinde’s capture, reports suggested that Masinde “is not necessarily the mad man that he tries to make out he is” (KNA 1948e). J. Basil Hobson, Member for Law and Order in the Kenya Legislative Council, opined, “I fear that we must just wait until he misbehaves himself again and then take steps to: (a) have him recommitted to Mathari, or (b) have him deported to some place where he can do no mischief” (KNA 1947b). McKean (Reference McKean1951) also later recalled informing the Nyanza Provincial authorities that if Masinde’s return was “inopportune, then representations should be made to Government with a view to his being deported to some other part of the Colony.” Deportation became the ideal legal option, without the bureaucratic complications of psychiatric confinement or the evidential bar required of criminal prosecutions. Throughout the trial, “Nairobi” provided the thinly veiled euphemism for Masinde’s time at Mathari. No longer was Masinde to be discredited by colonial science as a madman but rather by “due process” as a criminal.

The pathologization of dissent, however, was not absent from the trial; instead, the psychological dangers posed by Masinde shifted to a susceptible public. The prosecution was careful to make a distinction between acceptable traditional religions and African “Dini,” which it presented as pathological and a hindrance to progress and modernity. Colonial officials later admitted their difficulty in distinguishing between Msambwa activities and Bukusu customs: “The nature of D.Y.M. meeting is not dis-similar from certain Msambwa [ancestral] customs which are of course, still permitted” (KNA 1955). Acts of arson, for example, the form of political activism most commonly associated with Msambwa adherents, were a common form of retribution in Bukusu custom, a way to declare a previous land right or punish deviations from social norms or obligations. Colonial officials, however, associated arson with mental instability, thus affirming anxieties over the psychological instability of Msambwa adherents (Christie Reference Christie1930; Shelley Reference Shelley1936). Officials were faced by what Lynette Jackson (Reference Jackson2005:9) has called “the paradox of colonial madness and resistance.”

While the prosecution cleared Masinde of any charges of insanity, they reconfigured his earlier “religious mania” as a deliberate strategy to mislead and politicize his followers: “Dini ya Msambwa is to simple people an attractive faith incorporating violent nationalism together with a certain amount of superstitious ‘mumbo jumbo’” (KNA 1949a). The “crowds” of Msambwa followers were thus on trial. The prosecution attempted to show that Masinde had manipulated religious fervor to “whip people into a frenzy.” Father Superior Joseph Ortner of the Catholic Mission at Kibabii described the crowd that had gathered at his mission as “fierce and crazy or hysterical.” The “frenzied crowds,” however, at Kibabii and Malakisi represented a complex mix of local actors with different motivations: avowed Msambwa members, onlookers, family members, and political activists, distinctions missed both by colonial officials and later historians. Further inflammatory allegations around practices of witchcraft and female circumcision incited a whole range of colonial anxieties surrounding “atavistic” movements among “troublesome tribes” (MacArthur 2017:144–50). The prosecution painted Bukusu custom as inherently dangerous and degenerative, and Masinde’s religious teachings as calculated manipulations of traditional beliefs.

Colonial attempts to pathologize tradition and anti-colonial resistance through the trials of leaders such as Masinde, as well as later of Mau Mau leaders and others across the continent, portrayed wider African publics as hapless dupes, justifying the need for intervention and remedy (see MacArthur 2017). Masinde’s case suggests that the colonial tendency toward “the application of psychological and psychiatric ideas to prophetic movements” (Mahone Reference Mahone2006b:242) was not a knee-jerk reaction or a failure to recognize the social and political roots of discontent but rather an ambiguous mix of anxieties, prejudices, and, perhaps more than anything, practical governance concerns in the face of anti-colonial dissent.

Masinde as Litigant

The deportation trial provided Masinde with a unique opportunity to speak into the colonial record. (For uses of “reported speech” as historical source, see Vaughan Reference Vaughan and White2001). Masinde had had extensive experience with the colonial justice system. Although scant record remains of Masinde’s work at the Kavujai Native Tribunal in the late 1930s, his time there provided an education in the quotidian practices of colonial justice. As clerk and process server, Masinde’s primary task was to deliver summons. Stories circulate of Masinde’s frequent disagreements with the president of the Tribunal over his duties, the legitimacy of the court, and the nature of his official dress, which he felt made him look like a child. As litigant, Masinde drew on this experience to contest colonial knowledge production and its privileging of written over oral texts, to challenge the pathologization of dissent, and to provide a counter-history of his patriotic project.

Acting as his own defense, Masinde’s voice appears frequently over the 500-page court transcript. While a common reading of lunacy emphasizes the uncontrollable need to “blurt out unspeakable truths and display forbidden impulses; …[to] refuse the respectability and stability of the home” (Swartz Reference Swartz2015:205), Masinde’s performance demonstrated the opposite, carefully controlling his speech, emphasizing respect for procedure and propriety, and continually referencing the home as space of autonomy and accountability. In his testimony and cross-examination of witnesses, Masinde maintained an even and playfully tongue-in-cheek tone:

One can almost see the slight smirk on Masinde’s face. After many such almost absurdist exchanges, a frustrated Todd mockingly commented on Masinde’s “intelligence.” Masinde kept his responses concise and repeatedly corrected or refuted the characterizations of his accusers: “People know me”; “I did not take any interest in the people who did not like to join me because it was only for people who were willing”; “That was not my teaching”; “All Africans are not trustworthy.” Through parables and word play, Masinde stressed personal accountability and culpability:

Referencing his alleged interference with colonial agricultural projects, Masinde invoked a common idiom of personal responsibility: “Every man has his own garden.” He further painted a picture of himself as a man continuously mocked, surveilled, hounded, and threatened by colonial officials; he recounted his wife’s arrest, the ransacking of his house, personal threats, and fear of poisoning. This testimony is not offered as a case of recovering the “voices of the mad” (Sadowsky Reference Sadowsky1999); to the contrary, Masinde appeared determinedly rational and conscious of the occasion to impress his vision of personal accountability and reputable conduct by speaking into the historical record.

During the trial, Masinde used the theatre of judicial practice to turn colonial evidence against itself. The prosecution alleged that the accused should be judged not on his actions but rather on his words and the “acts of violence… committed by the Sect as a whole.” Although the prosecution failed to directly link Masinde to any of the confrontations in question, they maintained that the court “must also consider what effect the words and actions of these three people would have upon” their followers. And it was these “words” that Masinde capitalized on in his defense. In his cross-examinations of Crown witnesses—ranging from colonial administrators and members of Locational Councils to Bukusu elders and church members—Masinde deftly undermined the prosecution’s case as built on hearsay. To each witness Masinde asked: “Have you ever seen me before?”; “Did you hear me say that?”; “Did you see me on that day?” Each witness in turn answered, “No.” To others, Masinde asked if they had ever met him, to which most gave a negative response. To District Commissioner Williams, Masinde asked “How did you know that I wanted to remove Europeans from this country?” Williams responded, “Because it had been reported to me by people who had attended your meetings.” The prosecution failed to provide any direct evidence of Masinde’s words, or even to prove his physical presence at key events. Instead of refuting specific charges, Masinde called into question the authority, motives, and firsthand knowledge of witnesses, revealing the role that rumors, suspicion, and hearsay played not only in this case but also in prophetic traditions and other popular movements (see White Reference White2000).

Masinde further challenged the prosecution’s evidence by pointing to the tension between orality and literacy. Several witnesses claimed to have heard Masinde make anti-colonial statements at Locational Council meetings. Masinde asked the witnesses to produce the minutes of such meetings, but none could produce any written records. Masinde repeatedly emphasized the power of speech in the political ethos of the Msambwa movement. When asked to produce the aims and objectives of the movement, Masinde refused to produce a written record but offered to tell them to the court, “to go personally to talk to them.” The spoken word was both creed and instrument of dissent for Masinde. Cross-examining prosecution witness Kamitu Waitu of the Kenyan Police, Masinde established that the crowd at Malakisi had carried neither guns nor spears, but merely ceremonial sticks. If the Bukusu crowd had come for “war,” Masinde argued, then they would have carried spears. Masinde repeatedly asserted that he preached against the use of violence: “I told them that it was not good for you to carry sticks or anything which could harm somebody when you go to meetings like this. I told them it would be better to follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.” Members of Masinde’s family and original Msambwa followers recalled Masinde’s position on violence even more succinctly; when asked how Msambwa could combat the colonial government with no weapons, Masinde responded with a call to “use your tongues” (Interview, Masinde family 2007). Masinde’s tongue, here recorded, refused colonial insistence on the written and corporeal.

For Masinde, the trial offered the opportunity to record a counter-history of the movement. Masinde began his official statement with a historical preface: “I want to say how the trouble came.” He then used the prosecution’s chronology of events to create his own biography. Beginning in 1943, Masinde recounted his arrival in Kakamega to play football, listing his football accolades in Nairobi and Uganda. Football in North Nyanza represented an important outlet for displays of honor, masculinity, and local patriotisms (MacArthur 2016:139–42). To this day, despite Masinde’s many exploits as leader of Dini ya Msambwa, his most celebrated story tells of the football he kicked up to the sky that never returned to earth, foretelling his prophetic future. Masinde thus began his testimony by calling the court’s attention to his reputation and achievements in the local political economy.

Masinde then recounted a very different version of the events highlighted by the prosecution. First, he recast his alleged anti-government campaigns as an extension of his role as a watchdog, a “gadfly” to his society, evaluating various elements of the local administration and giving his approval or disapproval to their projects. He reframed his legendary encounters with government officials over agricultural work as support for developmental planning, individual autonomy (tending to one’s “own garden”), and communal responsibility. As in the tradition of eastern African prophets, Masinde often challenged local structures of power and authority, a point made clear in the testimony of the much-reviled Chief Amutalla. Recounting an incident from 1944, Amutalla accused Masinde of shouting at him: “You are just like a dog who follows at the heels of the European and shakes his tail.” Yet, Masinde denied any anti-European sentiment, instead claiming to tell his followers to look to Europeans as moral examples, saying, “I told them that the aims were to unite together and live in harmony, as the Europeans do. You do not see them beating their wives or children.” Denying any desire to expel all Europeans, he lauded Europeans for bringing advances to the district, as “we are still very backward.” The prosecutor asked Masinde to explain Msambwa’s most famous song: “Oh Baba jua, Oh Baba jua, Wasungu watasumbua (Oh father know, oh father know, the Europeans are troubling us).” In response, Masinde claimed he sang the version from his hymnal book that referred to “enemies” not “Europeans.” Rather than deny that his followers sang this version, Masinde explained that “people took it wrongly.” Masinde reframed his critiques of local authority and countered popular and academic images of himself as a boisterous crusader against white colonizers.

Perhaps most importantly, Masinde recast himself not only as a religious leader but moreover as a progressive, cultural nationalist. He presented his movement as a peaceful religious regeneration, aspiring to reclaim the ancestral dignity of the Bukusu: “I went on praying and instructing my people to unite together and not separate& to live in harmony.” Masinde framed his public role not only as preacher and public historian but also as a legitimate local authority. While readily admitting to providing spiritual leadership to Msambwa followers, Masinde adamantly denied founding the movement: “Msambwa is an old religion so it was not started by me.” Masinde presented Msambwa not so much as a “counter-society” (Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs, Binsbergen and Schoffeleers1985:341–42) but rather as a space for cultural regeneration, moral accountability, and to claim for himself political authority.

In the final judgment, Judge de Lestang concluded that the nature of the trial called for “greater latitude than normally allowed in criminal proceedings … and this will serve to explain the presence of some hearsay in the recorded evidence.” De Lestang found that although the evidence showed that Masinde and the other defendants had not been present at any of the events in question, they “must be held responsible for them as those incidents were in furtherance of the declared aims and objects of the Dini Msambwa creed.” De Lestang recommended the deportation of all three based “not only… on their individual acts and utterance but by virtue of their position as leaders of the sect.” In the end, Masinde and his fellow Msambwa leaders were deported based not on their actions but rather on their words, whether spoken or imagined.

In his classic nationalist text Not Yet Uhuru, Luo leader Oginga Odinga (Reference Odinga1967:70) captured the complex relationship between politics and religion in Kenya’s nationalist histories: “In fact, Masinde started as a political organizer not a religionist& his ‘amens’ alone are a national anthem.” But Masinde’s “nationalism” was not confined by the colonial borders of tribe and nation; the political ethos Masinde promoted integrated Bukusu traditional practices with pan-Africanist, liberatory politics that struggled to find a place in the pragmatic politics of decolonization to come in Kenya. While the colonial state sought to remake Masinde as a calculating criminal, Masinde in turn used the courtroom to remake his own patriotic vision. This discursive shift, however, had dramatic consequences and set the stage for remedial intervention in the counter-insurgency against Masinde’s followers.

The Limits and Legacies of Dissent

Masinde’s deportation trial prefigured a particularly disturbing trend in the justice system of the second colonial occupation. This case served as a dangerous precedent for the later detainment and “rehabilitation” of hundreds of suspected Msambwa followers and, in more dramatic form, the subsequent Mau Mau trials and detentions. Masinde’s deportation and the pathologization of his followers spoke to larger debates over social order and dissent in both the late colonial moral economy and the first years of independence in eastern Africa.

The fluid and indeterminate nature of the Msambwa movement stoked colonial anxieties over its spread. Mobility characterized the communities around Mount Elgon, whether for forest-clearing, migrant labor, or spiritual practices. Msambwa followers spread among other groups in Kenya and across the border into Uganda, particularly among the Bagisu, who were “cousins” of the Bukusu (see Figure 2). Msambwa followers traveled widely and strategically targeted colonial symbols of spatial demarcation; as “frontier rebels” they invoked the msambwa ancestral spirits, or “ghosts,” that could move and inhabit new territories (Schoenbrun Reference Schoenbrun2006:19–20; MacArthur 2016:165–69). Msambwa followers undertook aggressive settlement campaigns, destroyed boundary markers, and made pilgrimages to their Zion, Mount Elgon. The colonial administration struggled to contain their movements, instituting pass laws, screenings, and repatriations; creating a blacklist of suspected Msambwa followers; and hardening policies on inter-ethnic mobility. The largest Msambwa confrontation occurred in the desolate areas of West Pokot in the Rift Valley, led by the charismatic Lucas Pkech. The “Kolloa Affray” of 1951 left dozens dead, including Pkech, and provoked severe collective punishments on the Pokot and evictions of Bukusu laborers blamed for “infecting” the region. As the Mau Mau rebellion took shape in the 1950s, colonial officials expressed an almost paranoiac fear of a possible alliance between Msambwa and Mau Mau followers, particularly in the Trans Nzoia farms where Bukusu and Kikuyu labored side by side. Colonial officials worried over the potentially wider reach of Msambwa, as it combined “the almost universal pagan African spirit worship and many of the not dissimilar Old Testament beliefs and ceremonies learnt in Christian Missions… before long the cult became a militant form of African nationalism” (TNA: PRO 1954).

The political ethos of Msambwa and Mau Mau, however, diverged in important ways. Msambwa adherents baffled colonial officials with their openness. Unlike Mau Mau adherents, who took oaths of secrecy, Msambwa followers made voluntary declarations of their religiosity. Many in administrative and psychiatric circles saw this willingness to “confess” their faith as proof of their mental instability (KNA 1949b). While secrecy played an important socializing role in traditional Bukusu society, Dini ya Msambwa was noisy. As earlier mentioned, Masinde made Msambwa worship public, hosting spectacular mass prayer meetings and ancestral ceremonies that offended the sensibilities of many Bukusu as well as many missionaries.Footnote ⁶ Masinde and his followers were loud, preaching on the streets against colonial officials, missionaries, and Asian traders. As a moral reform movement, Dini ya Msambwa sat somewhere between the noisy East African Revivalists, who promoted an openly accountable religious culture without calls to the past, and Mau Mau adherents, who enforced a strict code of secrecy and moral conduct adapted from past traditions (MacArthur 2016:176). Colonial officials interpreted Msambwa’s unnerving openness as a psychological deformity in need of remedy and rehabilitation.

While the elaborate pipeline of detention camps established during the Mau Mau rebellion has prompted intense scholarly debate (see Elkins Reference Elkins2005; Ogot Reference Ogot2005; Peterson Reference Peterson2012a), there is little acknowledgement that the system of detention camps was already in place by the late 1940s, established to contain and “rehabilitate” Msambwa adherents. Msambwa detainees were first imprisoned in segregated sections of existing prisons in the Trans Nzoia, and then later housed in semi-permanent work camps further afield. Msambwa adherents made “exceptional confessions” as officials often noted (KNA 1956). Confession and associated torture, which formed such crucial components of the “rehabilitation” of Mau Mau detainees, were thus not central features of the “rehabilitation” of Msambwa followers (Leakey Reference Leakey1954:85–86). Rehabilitation focused instead on education, acculturation, and conversion. Detainees labored on work projects during the day, and at night they participated in “rehabilitation” exercises, including trade training, religious instruction, and classes in arithmetic, writing, hygiene, and geography (KNA 1956). As Msambwa adherents stressed their commitment to traditional beliefs, a change of religion was necessary; as Bishop L. C. Usher-Wilson (Reference Usher-Wilson1951) prescribed, “The cure must lie in religion.” Detainees were required to prove not only their abandonment of Msambwa but moreover their conversion to a more acceptable faith to gain their release. While for most this meant conversion to Christianity, for some, especially those deported to the Coast, conversion to Islam aided their return (TNA:PRO 1961). Rehabilitation for Msambwa adherents required remedial intervention into their minds and spirits, through proscribed work, education, leisure, and religious conversion.

After the Kolloa Affray and the declaration of the Emergency in 1952, the detention and deportation of Msambwa members increased rapidly. Records on the “rehabilitation” of detained Msambwa followers used the same classifications as Mau Mau detainees (KNA 1956). In fact, many Msambwa followers remained in detention much longer than Mau Mau detainees, though their total numbers were far fewer.

Although he was never technically subjected to “rehabilitation,” Masinde remained a vocal and unpredictable political figure in exile. Masinde’s reputation as a prophet was reaffirmed when he was transferred from Lamu to Marsabet soon after his deportation, as he had predicted (KNA 1949c). In 1959, he was moved again, this time to the evermore remote location of Mandera. At each stop, colonial officials worried about Masinde’s expanding influence; Masinde continued to preach, entertain political figures and visiting family members, and referee popular football matches (KNA 1960–61). The colonial administration felt it necessary to make “daily changes of his guards in order to avoid their being contaminated by Masinde’s vituperative tongue” (TNA:PRO 1960). In 1960, as the Emergency came to an end, the Kenya Intelligence Committee reported that “the release of Elijah Masinde might well cause a revival of militant Dini ya Msambwa& and would constitute an unacceptable security risk” (TNA:PRO 1960).

Masinde remained in exile until 1961, ultimately spending longer in detention than Jomo Kenyatta, a point raised repeatedly by politicians from western Kenya in hopes of securing his release while shoring up their own anti-colonial resumés. His return to the district was marked with great fanfare. In the years leading up to decolonization, Masinde became a kind of political gatekeeper; Musa Amalemba of the independent Buluhya Political Party and Masinde Muliro, leader of the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), both visited Masinde in exile, celebrated his return, and led fundraising campaigns to build him a house and send his children to school. But much to their disappointment, Masinde pledged his support to Kenyatta, prophesying his victory and actively campaigning for the Kenya African National Union (KANU). Masinde’s close relationship to KANU alienated much of his former support in the heavily KADU-supporting Bukusu areas of western Kenya.

For a time after independence, Masinde seemed to have found a place in the new political landscape, holding political meetings and preaching that constituents should “pay taxes and school fees due to his dreams” (KNA 1964). An altar was constructed on Mount Elgon as a gathering place for Msambwa followers. In 1964, the movement received official recognition as a registered society on the condition that they produce a written constitution; it is perhaps unsurprising that the constitution produced had a dry, procedural tone, listing generic religious and non-political functions (for the full constitution, see Wipper Reference Wipper1977). But this period of recognition and cooperation was short-lived. Masinde never received the official sanction he felt was owed to him. Though lacking some of the coherence and bite exhibited earlier, Msambwa activities quickly recommenced. Masinde began encouraging oath-taking, opening illegal schools, and targeting a number of social issues, from displaced laborers to “undisciplined women,” publicly shaming women accused of adultery, prostitution, or wearing clothing deemed too revealing. Reflecting similar moral anxieties of the 1940s around gender, land, labor, and discipline, into the early years of independence Masinde seemed to be on a “one-man crusade against… moral denigration” (Simiyu Reference Simiyu1997:33).

While its formal membership fell precipitously in the early years of independence, the Msambwa movement retained great emotive and potentially subversive power. Masinde and Msambwa members were continuously surveilled and harassed by the Kenyatta government; even historian Audrey Wipper was closely monitored by archivists during her research in the 1970s.Footnote ⁷ Kenyatta would re-ban the movement in 1968 and re-imprison Masinde multiple times. Masinde’s death in 1987 opened a space for a variety of appropriations and myth-making projects. In political contests right up to the 2017 elections, the opportunity to sit on Masinde’s stool, in the shrine that remains in use for ritual services, continues to attract politicians from across the country. While some focus on his policing of morality and his more controversial culturalist agenda, Masinde remains a touchstone for those seeking to challenge systems of power, mobilize constituents, and promote alternative social orders.