Introduction: A Great Football Match^{Footnote 1}

On Monday 5 October 1909 Dr. Arthur of the Church of Scotland Mission to Kenya (CSM) took a team of boys from his mission station at Thogoto to Kabete for game of football against the Church Missionary Society. It was, Arthur later reported in the CSM’s bulletin for home parishes Kikuyu News, “A Great Football Match.”^{Footnote 2} The respective mission schools proclaimed a “general holiday (…) in honour of the momentous occasion.” Accompanying Arthur and “his boys” were “a goodly following of supporters” including two female CSM missionaries, Mrs. Scott and Miss Stevenson, who “added much to the beauty if not the playing strength of the team.” The Director of Public Works for East Africa Protectorate, William MacGregor Ross, travelled up from Nairobi, to referee the game. Before the match, tea was served to the “ladies,” the team captains (Arthur and Leakey), and the referee.

The match itself receives scant attention in Arthur’s report; the result (Kabete 3 – Kikuyu 2) is mentioned only once. The match was “great” not for anything that happened on the pitch within ninety minutes of play, but because it contributed to no less than the advance of Christian civilization in this part of East Africa. “It was the first time they had ever seen a game of football,” Arthur wrote of the spectators; among them were “quite a number highly painted warriors, relics of a day fast giving place (…) to the playing fields of sport, in which manliness, courage, and unselfishness shall add their quota to the formation of true Christian character.” Arthur concludes his report thus:

Sport was an integral component of the CSM’s evangelistic enterprise. This was particularly so between 1907–1937, when John Arthur (Figure 1) was part of the mission. As a medical student Arthur broke the University of Glasgow record for 440 yards and captained the rugby team; while studying Tropical Medicine in London he had trials for the Scotland rugby team.^{Footnote 3} During his three decades in East Africa he attempted to climb Mount Kenya eight times. John Arthur, who led the CSM from 1911, was undoubtedly the mission’s most renowned (and quotable) proponent of sport, but he was far from unique in his belief that sport could radically remake individuals and societies. Frequently and explicitly – in personal correspondence and in public reports, in home-made fundraising motion picture films and in private reminiscences – CSM missionaries expressed an unshakable confidence in the “uplifting” qualities of activities as seemingly frivolous as hitting balls with bats and running in circles. Nearly every edition of Kikuyu News contains updates on mission sports, often whole articles dedicated to particular initiatives or specific events. Sport was a regular feature of CSM life, pursued with intensity and invested with importance.

Figure 1.

“J[ohn].W. Arthur [centre] and the Kikuyu First XI,” (n.d. c.1910).

Source: University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Arthur Papers, Phot. Ill. 96.

Kenyan Running – A Critical Review

In this article I explore the ways in which missionaries of the CSM used sport in their mission to the people of Central Kenya. In some ways, there is little that is remarkable about the CSM’s sporting evangelism: as J.A. Mangan has shown, many missionaries, educationalists, and administrators, elsewhere in Africa and the rest of the world at this time shared Arthur’s and the CSM’s commitment to sport.^{Footnote 4} However, this research has had a surprisingly limited impact on historians of Africa. There are only a handful of studies which have explored how colonial sports programs operated on the ground, in specific settings at particular times, and how they were received and adapted according to the needs, actions, and beliefs of local actors.^{Footnote 5} With the notable exceptions of Stephan Miescher’s Making Men in Ghana and Markku Hokkanen’s study of the “games ethic” in Malawi, missionary sport initiatives in colonial Africa, in particular, have received scant scholarly attention.^{Footnote 6} With a few notable exceptions, moreover, historical studies of sport in Africa have remained confined to “sports studies” or “sports history” where their capacity to have a broader influence on African and/or colonial history is restricted.^{Footnote 7} My aim in this article, then, is not simply to explore the rich sporting history of the CSM but to make a case for the important contributions the topic of sport can make to understandings of the history of colonialism in Africa.^{Footnote 8}

Throughout this article, I draw upon and critique John Bale and Joe Sang’s Kenyan Running. ^{Footnote 9} Published twenty years ago it remains the only book-length scholarly work in which the history of sport in Kenya is explored in any detail. Winner of the British Society of Sports History’s annual prize for “the best book in sports history on a British topic or by a British author,” Kenyan Running is a landmark text in sports history and continues to be widely read and widely cited. Upon publication it was hailed by leading luminary in the field John Nauright as “an excellent example of the virtues of a multidisciplinary approach to the social and cultural study of sport (…) one of the few detailed and sophisticated studies of sport and society in Africa.”^{Footnote 10} Chris Jenkins, in African Affairs, called it “an excellent monograph” which “will be of interest to a wide readership including (…) specialists in African Studies.”^{Footnote 11} However, the impact Kenyan Running has had on historians of Kenya can only be said to be slight and the work has failed to ignite a body of scholarship on the history of sport in Kenya. This article represents the first attempt to systematically and explicitly scrutinize Bale and Sang’s arguments.

Kenyan Running carries a bold claim: “When athletes from countries like Kenya reject their indigenous body cultures in favour of those of Europe or America they have, in a sense, been collaborating with imperialism.”^{Footnote 12} Bale and Sang’s chief aim is to problematize the global success of Kenya’s distance runners, a phenomenon typically received uncritically by the mainstream media and sports fans. The authors do this by historicizing sport in Kenya. For Bale and Sang, sport, by which they mean “modern sport” or “achievement sport,” is “an essentially Western phenomenon:” it developed in a late-nineteenth century industrializing, imperializing, “European core” before “radiating outwards (…) to the rest of the world.”^{Footnote 13} Modern sport is based on a “centimetre-gram-second model” and characterized by competition, standardization, and regulation. Its development in Kenya has seen “the relatively unrestricted and free movement of the pre-colonial period (…) replaced by the corset of running as racing with its starting and finishing lines and its geometrically arranged lane markings.”^{Footnote 14}

Bale and Sang argue that “traditional Kenyan movement culture (…) has been exterminated; it has been the victim of cultural genocide.”^{Footnote 15} In their analysis of “traditional Kenyan movement culture,” the authors acknowledge that in the wrestling, spear-throwing, and high-jump contests which were a part of initiation ceremonies “pre-modern Kenya did possess many forms of movement culture which were physical and competitive (italics added).”^{Footnote 16} They also point out that “for some physical games measurements were made and victory given considerable significance” and that in some cases “prizes were awarded, high performances were demanded, and, to an extent, planned, physical training was required.”^{Footnote 17} However, prior to colonization it was a “sensuous African body culture” which prevailed: physical contests took place in “open spaces,” used natural features such as trees or rivers to mark boundaries or finish lines, and occurred spontaneously or were part of the rhythms of life-cycles or seasons.^{Footnote 18} This Arcadian freedom was crushed when Europeans arrived in Kenya and began to use sport “as a form of social control.”^{Footnote 19}

In the longest chapter of the book, indicatively titled, “Between Folk Games and Modern Sport,” Bale and Sang consider the period between 1900 and 1950. For them, this is the key phase in the transition “from the traditions of tribal folk activities to those of globalised modern sport.”^{Footnote 20} It was “a liminal period (…) neither here nor there, betwixt and between” as initially folk games and modern sport co-exist; but ultimately the latter “replaced” the former.^{Footnote 21} Bale and Sang’s emphasis is on the colonization of Kenya, in particular, the authoritarian and disciplinarian sports programs of the colonial administration, the military, and the police. They show that the colonial administration used sport “as an alternative to tribal dancing which was deemed sexually explicit, lascivious and hence undesirable” and as a means of creating “a fit workforce.”^{Footnote 22} Bale and Sang draw particular attention to the use of “drill” in the training of the police and infantrymen; drill, they claim emphasized “the straight body in straight lines with no room for individual expression” and exemplified a “hygienist mode of body culture which contrasted with the more sensuous and fluid movement culture of the indigenous people.”^{Footnote 23}

For Bale and Sang the history of sport in Kenya is about European dominance over Africa. It is a domination that continues today: “Political independence for Kenya did not involve a decolonisation of the body and little has been done to revive the nation’s traditional folk-games.”^{Footnote 24} The “success” of Kenya’s distance-runners, for Bale and Sang, is little more than “a classic example of cultural imperialism.”^{Footnote 25} Herein lie both the strengths and weaknesses of Kenyan Running. The chief value of Kenyan Running is its claim sport is a historically particular phenomenon: a “body culture” that is neither natural nor necessary but has been produced out of concrete circumstances. The authors invite us to see sport – too often conceptualized as politically-neutral and value-free – as a highly problematic cultural activity, intimately connected to the circulation of power. The story of global sport, they rightly claim, cannot be separated from the history of colonialism. However, Bale and Sang conceptualize historical change in colonial Africa in a way which most historians would contest: all power and agency is located in a monolithic “Europe” and an undifferentiated mass of Europeans effortlessly spread their fully-formed and universally agreed-upon culture to a docile “Rest-of-the-world.” There are no contests, struggles, or disagreements. Indeed, at one point Bale and Sang explicitly state: “The passive reaction of the recipient culture” meant “early twentieth century proselytisers quite straightforwardly imposed athletics.”^{Footnote 26} Not without irony, Bale and Sang are in full agreement with imperialists like John Arthur that games like football and athletics are “our games;” by playing them, Kenyans automatically become “Britishers.”

Bale and Sang present history schematically. Events unfold with an inevitable teleology, becoming more rational, more secular, and more “European” over time. In their narrative there is no room for contradiction or ambiguity. It is perhaps for this reason that missionaries receive very little attention in Kenyan Running – there is no evidence in the footnotes or bibliography to suggest that the authors consulted any of the extensive missionary archives in Nairobi, Edinburgh, Birmingham, or London. The three pages dedicated to missionary sport is justified on the basis that “missionaries were not always interested in teaching athletics.”^{Footnote 27} Bale and Sang find the school drill at mission stations interesting because it “aided and abetted (…) the maintenance of imperial rule.”^{Footnote 28} Less useful to their argument are missionaries’ carnivalesque sports days and the “culture of laughter” which pervaded them, and the missionary emphasis on sport for “welfare” rather than for competition. These are mentioned but not explored; the implication is that they are mere “anomalies” in the overall movement from folk-games to modern sport.

The problems with Kenyan Running are in no small part attributable to the authors’ method. The bulk of their evidence is published material authored by European colonizers. There is a smattering of archival material, but most of their argument has been made from books that can be accessed from most major British libraries.

Moreover, with the exception of Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mount Kenya and some works by Ngugi wa Thiongo, they do not use texts authored by Kenyan people. Nor do they use oral testimonies as evidence in their historically-oriented chapters. Bale and Sang are convinced the history of modern sport in Kenya can only be told from what they call a “global” perspective. This is a valid premise but in attempting to locate their story in a global narrative, they elevate their analysis above the level of the local and everyday. This prevents them from penetrating the contests, struggles, emotions, and actions of real people.

The result is an abstract and overly theoretical account in which all Europeans, by virtue of being European, have undiluted power; and all Africans, by virtue of being African, can only ever be victims, collaborators, or at best “resisters.”

These weaknesses are especially problematic given the subject matter is sport: an intensely subjective and experiential activity. One problem facing any scholar who approaches the topic of sport is the challenge of producing an account which both meets the theoretical and empirical sophistication required by an academic audience and goes some way, at the very least, to take into account the highly subjective experiences of athletes and fans. A question which Bale and Sang cannot answer is “why do people play sport?” Indeed, it is a question with which they do not even engage: Bale and Sang make little attempt to understand sport from the perspective of its primary actors, expressing little empathy with them, even on occasion outright hostility. Thus they ask, as they draw their argument to a close: “Can racing around a standardised 400m synthetic track 25 times, routinely metronomised in a concrete stadium, be regarded as progress? (…) what sense is there in striving oneself to run in circles faster than any other?”^{Footnote 29}

Sport at the Station

The example that follows is based on the notion that global history need not necessarily entail such a sweeping, macro, approach.^{Footnote 30} I address broader issues of sport and colonialism by scaling down the analysis to specific sites of activity, to particular times, and to specific actors. I explore, in detail, the history of the CSM’s attempt to use sport to “civilize” and “discipline” the bodies and minds of the people of Central Kenya. In addition to some of the published texts cited by Bale and Sang, I draw upon recent fieldwork and archival research in and around Edinburgh, London, Nairobi, and the three former centers of CSM mission work in Central Kenya: Thogoto, Tumutumu, and Chogoria.^{Footnote 31} Broadly speaking I make three arguments. First, Bale and Sang are mistaken to marginalize the importance of missionaries in the history of sport; of all of the colonizers it was missionaries who sought the most far reaching changes for indigenous body cultures and made the most thoroughgoing attempts to spread new forms of recreation. Second, sport is an important topic for historians of colonial Africa not simply because it was a means by which colonizers sought control, but because it was a site of contest, struggle, and exchange. With particular attention on the chaotic and irrational aspects of missionary sport, I question the rigidity of Bale and Sang’s chronology of the diffusion of sport. Third, and most importantly, I argue that the topic of sport in general, and missionary sport in particular, can deepen our understanding of modalities of colonial power. At mission stations sport was undoubtedly used as a form of social control but at the same time, it was frequently experienced as individually empowering and enjoyable.

The foundation of the mission enterprise was the mission station. The CSM had three stations – Thogoto (founded in 1898), Tumutumu (founded in 1909), and Chogoria (founded in 1918) – each with satellite churches, out-schools, and dispensaries.^{Footnote 32} The stations were large both in terms of acreage and population. Thogoto, by far the largest, was 3,000 acres and included vast coffee and potato plantations.^{Footnote 33} In 1925 Thogoto station had 150 boys in permanent residence, 716 attending the “central school” located on the site and 1,281 church members; there were 3,456 athomi (mission scholars [literally “readers’]) attending out-schools of Tumutumu; Chogoria had 200 people attending the central mission school.^{Footnote 34} On each site there were hospitals, schools, dormitories, industrial workshops, farms, and – of course – playing fields.

The stations were deliberately set apart from white settlements, located in the African reserves. Situated on hilltops with large stone buildings, mission stations were deliberately intended to radically interrupt the indigenous landscape. “On entering the mission estate one is struck at once with the contrast to what one sees outside its boundaries” said Horace Philp in 1910.^{Footnote 35} The CSM characterized the space beyond the station as dark, unknown, chaotic, even dangerous; inside meanwhile was bright, spacious, knowable, and rational.^{Footnote 36}

According to the missionaries, village life was “heathen” but not diabolic; the people lived not so much in sin but without sin; in a dimly perceived spirit world with little sense of moral responsibility and little ability to recognize the self, a necessary precursor to having a personal relationship with God.^{Footnote 37} The task of Christian mission, as the CSM saw it, was to awaken (or, we might say, manufacture) the individual subject which, it was believed, lay dormant within each Gikuyu villager: “The power of the Gospel, together with training of mind and body (…) [will] uplift them in thought and conduct, and (…) call forth God-given abilities which have lain buried in ignorance during unknown centuries,” reasoned Arthur Barlow.^{Footnote 38} The mission station (see Figure 2) facilitated the CSM’s attempt at subject formation: with meticulously planned daily timetables and tightly managed, highly visible spaces the CSM hoped “to fill up their day and develop them on every side.”^{Footnote 39} Sport was a key component in this enterprise.

Figure 2.

“Rough Plan of Tumutumu Station,” (c.1909). Note the proposed site for the football field at the eastern end of the station.

Source: University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Barlow Papers, GEN 1786/3.

It is possible to discern three different forms of sport at the station: drill, games, and sports days. Here, Peterson Muchangi, who attended Tumutumu school in the 1920s describes the drill:

The drill was an important feature of the school timetable, often the first activity of the day. It remains an abiding memory of most who attended CSM mission schools: many of my respondents began speaking about it before they knew of my interest in sport. Most described it in a similar way to Muchangi, relating it to a specific time, comparing it with military training, and either demonstrating to me the sequence of maneuvers or adopting a different tone of voice to declare “right, left, up, down, turn.” Two films which detail everyday life at Chogoria station made in 1931 and 1933 by CSM missionary A.C. Irvine wonderfully illustrate the importance of drill for the CSM. These silent black-and-white films, which together run over ninety minutes, contain extended footage of mission-children attempting to follow their instructor’s sequence of exercises.^{Footnote 41} Of all the sports initiatives at the mission, drill was the most utilitarian. Nevertheless its purpose was not simply to improve physical fitness; as one missionary explained, the point of the drill was “to teach neatness, punctuality, and prompt obedience.”^{Footnote 42}

“The simple education given will enable them to read the scriptures and equip them for a better, healthier, happier life, for it embraces, besides the three R’s, hygiene, drill, and football.”^{Footnote 43} While drill often opened the school day, games often closed it. Games – as we saw in Arthur’s match report – were thought of in loftier terms than drill, as a form of moral instruction that worked “wonders in teaching unselfishness and team work.”^{Footnote 44} They could be competitive and some of the football tournaments and athletics meetings John Arthur organized must be considered among some of the earliest organized sports competitions in Kenya. (For an early CSM photograph of a game of football in play see Figure 3, below). While drill was a routine and anonymized form of physical exercise, games brought the characteristics of individuals to the fore. In serious competitions, missionaries could be ebullient in their praise of certain individuals: after the Empire Day sports of 1911 Barlow said: “The competitors made a very good display. The heroes of the day were Kahuho, our oldest boarder, as a runner, and Muriuki at the high jump.”^{Footnote 45}

Figure 3.

“Football at Tumutumu,” (c.1910).

Source: University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Barlow Papers, GEN 1786/3.

As well as being part of the curriculum and taking the form of organized competitions, games were also encouraged simply as a form of recreation. Gikuyu “had to be reached and turned from (…) the lazy, somewhat sensuous lives in which they passed their days (…) new methods of recreation had to be inculcated,” said Arthur.^{Footnote 46}

It pleased the missionaries to see their scholars break out into an impromptu game of football as they considered it a proper way to release energy which might otherwise be expended in activities deemed nefarious. Marion Stevenson’s biographer writes of an occasion when, upon witnessing a ball game, Stevenson rejoiced “that they had this healthy outlet for their energies (…) [an] outlet in great contrast to the evils of village life which all too soon sullied their young minds.”^{Footnote 47} Likewise Horace Philp celebrated his boys’ decision to play football and other “games of skill” instead of “their native forms of amusement” which are “associated with the vilest songs and viler deeds of which we cannot even speak.”^{Footnote 48}

Sometimes missionaries played sport with their Gikuyu charges. Instances of this are rare, and appear to be a feature of earlier, rather than later, mission work; not one of my respondents, most of whom were born in the 1920s and 1930s, recalled a missionary ever playing games with them. A few examples can be found in John Arthur’s letters to his mother during his first year of missionary work in 1907. In one letter about his houseboys Wamgata and Gobe, for example, Arthur claimed to, “always play games with them from about 4 to 5.30. We have been having drill, shots at goal and through-the-mill. The latter takes on tremendously and is an excellent introduction for rugby.”^{Footnote 49} In another he writes of having played “a game of soccer with the native workers, about 8 a side. We had a pretty hot game and as I had already done my twelve miles, I was quite glad when it was over.”^{Footnote 50} Arthur Barlow, also played sport with athomi. At the 1910 Christmas celebrations at Kikuyu, for example, Barlow “played but having marched the 26 miles from Tumutumu the same day did not feel very vigorous.”^{Footnote 51} Barlow gives us a glimpse of the fact that mixed games may have provided a chance to invert the existing racial power structures: commenting on “the old African method of showing no mercy whatsoever to the defeated,” Barlow, who was on the losing team, wrote: “I was pained (…) by the treatment the Kikuyu spectators gave us, ‘slanging’ us rather badly: special derision was directed at myself, particularly by the senior teachers.”

CSM sport rarely conformed to the “centimetre-gram-second” model integral to Bale and Sang’s argument; and it rarely (if ever) took place on “carefully prepared running track[s].”^{Footnote 52} “Modern sports” like football and athletics were accompanied by a host of other less orthodox activities such as tennikoits, tug-of-war (see Figure 4), obstacle racing, and a high jump contest in which the contestants, with a running jump, had to clear a rope held up at each end by two people.^{Footnote 53} The clearest expression of the fact that missionary sport rarely conformed to Bale and Sang’s disciplinarian model were sports days (see Figures 4 and 5). These, moreover, were by far the most spectacular display of missionary sport, took up the most time, and drew the largest crowds. Contrary to the implication of Bale and Sang’s teleology, which sees sport becoming increasingly serious and secular over time, the size and significance of these occasions did not diminish between 1907 and 1937. If anything they got bigger and more spectacular with each year.^{Footnote 54}

Figure 4.

“Tug-of-War at the Third Annual Sports, New Years’ Day,” (1909).

Source: University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Arthur Papers, Phot. Ill. 92.

Figure 5.

“Pole-Climbing at the Third Annual Sports, New Years’ Day,” (1909).

Source: University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections, Arthur Papers, Phot. Ill. 92.

“The usual sports took place on Boxing Day and were a great success,” reported A.C. Irvine, superintendent of Chogoria station, in his annual report of 1933:

Sports days took place on the major days in the colonial missionary’s calendar: Christmas, New Year, Easter, Empire Day, and St. Andrews’ Day. Their tone was celebratory; their aim was to showcase, or “invent,” the traditions of both Europe and Africa.^{Footnote 56} Native dress was encouraged and “native sports” occupied an important place on the schedule. “The native events in the sports were the most popular,” it was said after the 1927 Christmas games at Tumutumu, “the men were pleased to show their skill in shooting with bow and arrow or throwing the knob-kerry and casting the spear.”^{Footnote 57} Sports days verged on the bizarre. A 1910 event included a race which required competitors to go “through a box, then over a trestle covered in brushwood, under the tennis net lengthways, through two suspended barrels, and lastly under one of the school floor mats, pegged down, and with a liberal coating of flour.”^{Footnote 58} Typical sports included pillow fighting, pole climbing, and banana eating competitions.^{Footnote 59} Eclectic events were matched by eclectic prizes: sheep, pieces of soap, handkerchiefs, spoonfuls of salt.^{Footnote 60}

The Struggle for Sport

The “Third Annual Sports [Day]” which took place on New Years’ Day 1909 were, apparently, “the best of all three.”^{Footnote 61} The original plan was to start at 12.30, but “as usual the people were rather slow at gathering.” Among the guests was Chief Kinanjui who brought with him 150 followers, who “watched the sports to the end.” The main event was the obstacle race. They were “under the control of a European and an older boy” but their attention lapsed, giving rise to an “infinitely funny” episode. It is recalled here by Belle Scott:

Because the women’s bodies were coated in the customary red ochre, Dr. Scott “emerged from the mob as if they had been dipped in a paint pot.”^{Footnote 63} Kenanjui, we are told, laughed at “us and our strange ways.”^{Footnote 64}

It is not true that “early twentieth century proselytisers quite straightforwardly imposed athletics.”^{Footnote 65} Even in situations in which they seemingly occupied positions of control, the missionaries’ power to enforce sport was not absolute: the guests were late; the “maidens” initiated the race; the missionaries were laughed at. Bale and Sang argue that owing to its rule-bound nature, sport is a counter example to Robert Young’s dictum that “a culture never repeats itself perfectly away from home:” “the cultural landscape of sport does, of necessity.”^{Footnote 66} But missionaries frequently found, to their dismay, that this was not the case. When, for example, George Grieve’s Kikuyu School team were eliminated from the Arthur Cup, he wrote a scathing match report complaining “Reuben Kinanjui played a good game but for fighting was suspended (…) James Waithaka is young and a good player, but he must learn to play “clean” he was responsible for his team’s defeat.”^{Footnote 67} The CSM were acutely aware of the fact that the meanings they wanted to instill through sport were not automatic, but had to be worked out, asserted, and enforced: “they must learn to play ‘cleaner’ football than they do,” Grieve ended his match report, “‘dirty’ football never pays and gives the team a bad name.” The problem of explaining the rules was of course compounded when the missionary instructor concerned could not speak the local language. “The boys have not been awfully keen on the drill lately,” reflected Arthur in one letter, “there have been a number of reasons for this, among which may be mentioned the difficulty of learning the drill under English terms.”^{Footnote 68}

Linus RuKenya Kubai who was born near the CSM’s Chogoria station in 1925 but did not become a Christian told me that though the station was seen as “separate” from the village, there was little the missionaries could do to enforce this and there was much movement between the two. Even “followers of Irvine” (as he called them) continued to participate in village dances:

Mission-educated African teachers were more responsible for the spread of sport and games in Kenya than white European missionaries. Between 1907 and 1937 the number of Scottish missionaries at each of the three CSM stations rarely exceeded ten. As John Lonsdale has pointed out, “many black Christians scarcely met a white missionary, and were decreasingly less likely to do so [during the twentieth century].”^{Footnote 70} It was Africans who taught Waruhiu Itote (Mau Mau “General China”) at his CSM out-school at Kiangurue; and it was a Gikuyu man called “Kamau” who had been educated by the CSM who “introduced soccer to Stoton,” the Rift Valley Primary School to which Mugo Gatheru went.^{Footnote 71}

The methods of out-school teachers did not always please the CSM missionaries. In 1928 an inspector of a Tumutumu out-school reported: “There is still an uncomfortable lack of discipline in the place. Instead of real football they punt a ball about; dormitory discipline seems lax: I saw male teachers joining in the girls’ games.”^{Footnote 72} On a visit to an outstation at Muthambe in 1934, Irvine was alarmed to discover “the games side had been neglected (…) Jonathan had not realised that to leave football outside of the day’s program would be very unwise.”^{Footnote 73} As the number of out-schools increased, supervision became increasingly difficult for the CSM: at a teachers’ meeting in 1936 W. Scott Dickson, superintendent at Tumutumu, was shocked when it was reported back to him that many of his out-schools “had no facilities for football.”^{Footnote 74}

Sport and Colonialism

Few Europeans in colonial Kenya shared the missionaries’ enthusiasm for spreading sport among the African population. For most whites Kenya represented not “an ideal place for the propagation of the Gospel of Christ among the African people,” but a “White Man’s Country:” “a tabula rasa, an almost untouched and sparsely inhabited country, where we can do as we will.”^{Footnote 75} Most expatriate settlers lived geographically and socially apart from the indigenous population, in white townships and white reserves. There they created for themselves a most lively sport and leisure scene: there were “more farmers’ associations, cricket clubs, golf clubs, women’s institutes, gardening societies, masonic lodges, dining clubs per head of the white population in Kenya than in any other community in the world.”^{Footnote 76} The impulse behind these clubs and societies was of course not to alter indigenous life, but to create and affirm social bonds between whites.^{Footnote 77} Membership and participation was racially exclusive, they worked to assert rather than disrupt divisions between Europeans and Africans. For most whites, sport was important but only among their own community. Nairobi’s marquee sporting events, the bi-annual “Race Weeks,” were for settlers and officials only.^{Footnote 78} Planters and farmers who had relocated to Kenya in search of profit, felt little need to promote sport for Africans. On some farms in the Rift Valley sport was even banned for African workers on the grounds that it wasted energy needed for labor. ^{Footnote 79}

Bale and Sang grossly overestimate the extent to which Kenya’s colonizers were unified by a desire to transform indigenous “body cultures.” Many whites were, in fact, actively hostile to the idea. A strong strand of white opinion held “that African society should be kept separate from European society and should be encouraged to follow a separate plan.”^{Footnote 80} This attitude gained traction during the inter-war years when fears of social disintegration caused by so-called “detribalized natives” became acute; Eric Dutton, private secretary to the Governor between 1925 and 1930, spoke for many administrators and settlers at this time when he expressed his belief that “the native was a better man as a man before we touched him.”^{Footnote 81} In this politically fraught climate, criticism was frequently directed at missionaries who were accused of threatening the stability of the colony. On the one hand, the advance of Christianity, literacy, and other so-called “European” cultural forms was said to inflate the confidence of an indigenous population who should be subservient. As early as 1910, trader John Boyes had expressed his belief that “the primary mistake, from which most trouble springs (…) is the assumption, to which all missionaries seem to be officially compelled to subscribe, that the African is, or can be made by education, the moral and intellectual equal of the white man.”^{Footnote 82} Lord Cranworth likewise wrote: “[I]t has been my sad experience (…) to find (…) that as soon as a native is ‘converted’ (…) he frequently becomes an exceedingly idle and troublesome fellow.”^{Footnote 83} The missionaries’ forthright and uncompromising commitment to restructuring even the slightest details indigenous life, meanwhile, was considered unnecessarily confrontational and was criticized for inviting unneeded political turbulence.^{Footnote 84} For this reason, when missionaries called for the colonial government to legislate against the Gikuyu custom of female circumcision in 1927, they met the trenchant opposition of not only sections of Gikuyu society but Europeans as well.^{Footnote 85}

The colonial administration was far from the unified and coherent force portrayed by Bale and Sang. Caught between the conflicting desire to, on the one hand, transform the rural population into a modernized, productive, and industrious workforce and, on the other, maintain social order by preserving “traditional” “tribal” structures, and all the while lacking capital and personnel, the colonial administration did not pursue the spread of sport with anything like the same degree of intensity as the missionaries.^{Footnote 86} Indeed, outside of mission stations it was not until the third decade of the twentieth century that there were any significant attempts to promote sport among the masses. Many will agree with Matthew Carotenuto’s observation that “prior to the 1920s, organized African sporting opportunities of any kind were limited. It was not until the establishment of the Arab and African Sports Association (AASA) in the mid 1920s that organized sport took off.”^{Footnote 87}

Before the Second World War the colonial government had neither the resources nor the inclination to encourage sport among the civilian population to any significant degree. Sport was, however, a key feature of the training of the military and the police. It is these sports programs upon which Bale and Sang base most of their claims. They were of a remarkably different character to missionary sports programs: disciplinarian and authoritarian, their chief aim was to produce an obedient and healthy workforce. Contrary to what we have seen of sport at the mission station, Timothy Parsons writes “there was nothing particularly complex about the training of infantrymen.”^{Footnote 88} Games, sports days, and competitions – major elements of the missionary enterprise – were not common in police and military training until the late 1930s.^{Footnote 89} Until then, the primary emphasis was on drill. Police Officer C.I. Semphill explained in 1928 why this was the “best” form of physical exercise:

In government schools a similar attitude to physical education seems to have prevailed. For example, in a letter to the Director of Education in which he advocated a “standardised form” of drill for all government schools based upon the training of the Kings African Rifles, G.W.B. Huntingford, Principal of Nandi Industrial School, expressed his opinion that while “football and other games are of the greatest value as training and should not be neglected. The finest disciplinary training, however, is on the parade ground.”^{Footnote 91} The 1922 Education Commission Report, meanwhile, asserted that “the primary object of Education should be to develop physical and mental energy and efficiency.”^{Footnote 92}

For the CSM, by contrast, physical transformation through sport was only a means to an end. The CSM spoke not only of muscle and concentration, but of spirit and character too; they sought to create neither athletes nor healthy workers but self-possessing, self-disciplining, self-knowing Christians. “We firmly believe,” said William Blakie, physical education instructor at the CSM Kikuyu Boys school, “that all this physical training with its emphasis on fitness and clean-living is of real importance from the point of view of character building, and our confident hope is that our boys may grow up to be stronger, keener and better disciplined Christians because of it.”^{Footnote 93}

Megan Vaughan notes that in colonial discourse “there was a strong strand of thinking which held that Africans were hardly capable of being individuals at all.”^{Footnote 94} An exception, Vaughan shows, were Christian missionaries who were “deeply concerned” with the creation of new, individualized, identities.^{Footnote 95} Her observations readily apply to sport in colonial Kenya. While the physical exercise programs in the military and the police force were specifically designed to inculcate the communal identity said to be “natural” to the African, the missionaries emphasized the cultivation of “character.”^{Footnote 96} There was a powerful individualizing ethos to the CSM’s sports programs. Talented and successful school athletes were singled out for praise, rewarded with prizes on school speech days, and had their photograph, short biography, and sporting triumph, featured in Kikuyu News. ^{Footnote 97} The mission encouraged sporting ability as a “source of the self:” something an individual possessed, should feel a degree of pride about, and should nurture through practice and hard work.^{Footnote 98}

It is notable that attempts by the CSM to coerce athomi into organized games of sport, while frequently thwarted by minor acts of insubordination, never met any serious resistance. In this respect sport is remarkably different from other components of the mission’s enterprise. Not only did the mission’s politically spectacular campaign against female circumcision incite rebellion and cost some of the CSM’s parishes their entire congregations, so too, as Kenneth King and Derek Peterson have shown, did their seemingly banal school gardens scheme face substantial opposition.^{Footnote 99} Here, the mission’s attempt to teach their athomi thrift, planning, and organization by providing them with each with a small plot of land faced the protests of students and their families who interpreted it as little more than a means of soliciting their labor for free. As I scoured the missionary archive and pressed my respondents, I was left with the impression that sport was the least controversial component of the CSM’s work. In fact, it was often cited as the most enjoyable. Certainly this was the case for Charles Muhoro Kareri, the first African Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA), who was a CSM student in the 1910s and 1920s:

A chief aim of the CSM’s sport was to give individuals a sense of personal achievement and empowerment. It was undoubtedly intended to serve as a form of social control but, with the cultivation of self-disciplined Christian individuals as its goal, and based on intimacy and affection, this mode of social control was not a simple form of “domination.” Missionary sport was at times overtly disciplinarian and authoritarian but more often it was, or at least missionaries intended it to be, enjoyable.

In their attempt to produce particular kinds of Christian subjects, missionaries sought to affect deeper, more enduring, changes in Kenya’s indigenous population than the country’s other colonizers. Paradoxically, this is a point on which both critics and defenders of colonial missionaries often agree. For Thomas Beidelman, for example, colonial missionaries were:

For most of my Presbyterian respondents in Thogoto, Tumutumu, and Chogoria, meanwhile, the CSM’s attempt to win hearts and minds as well as bodies distinguished the benevolent missionary from the self-interested colonizer. For the Very Reverend John Gatu, former Moderator of the PCEA, “the mzungu [white person] was only interested in the African being his laborer on the farm, the missionary on the other hand was interested in bringing up the African.”^{Footnote 102} Likewise for Bedilego M’ribu M’muthaera and Julius Ndubi Maligi, two members of Chogoria parish, “missionaries were near the people, they tried to become friends with us but (…) the government’s interest was to rule only.”^{Footnote 103}

More interesting and important than the rather stale question about whether colonial missionaries and their sports programs were “good” or “bad” is the way in which missionary sport indicates the multiplicity of ways in which colonial power functioned in Kenya. For it has been comprehensively shown that in colonial Africa in general, and in the “racially-charged, settler dominated landscape”^{Footnote 104} of colonial Kenya in particular, there were few colonial “contact zones”^{Footnote 105} which had any chance of providing enjoyment or a sense of personal empowerment. As Florence Bernault puts it: “In Africa, the endurance of white rule depended on asserting social and political divides between colonisers and Africans rather than crafting integrative ruling strategies.”^{Footnote 106} And as Lynn Thomas has demonstrated: “Colonial power in Kenya alternated between extreme brutality and minimalist control.”^{Footnote 107} What happened on missionary football pitches and on sports days constitutes a rare example of a colonial attempt to produce disciplined bodies and minds that was not simply authoritarian and oppressive.