ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to highlight the early Kikuyu Christians' contributions to the creation of a distinctively African-Anglican church in central Kenya between 1900 and 1932. It identifies two possible levels of analysis — the formal and the informal — and concludes that there was, in the appropriation of Christianity in its Anglican form, a considerable degree of continuity with Kikuyu culture, even where there was conflict. The Kikuyu, who are the subject of this chapter, constitute a large group of Bantu-speaking people in the Central Province of Kenya. At the end of the nineteenth century, they numbered about half a million. Their ancestral land is a highland area measuring about one hundred miles north to south and fifty miles east to west. The establishment of the British Protectorate and, more importantly, the building of the Uganda Railway, paved the way for extensive missionary upcountry penetration.
