2. The Gikuyu refer to themselves as Agîkûyû in the plural and Mûgîkûyû in the singular. I follow Ngugi wa Thiong'o in referring to the group as “Gikuyu,” as opposed to the more common spelling “Kikuyu.”

3. MacGregor, A.W., English-Kikuyu Dictionary, Compiled for the Use of the CMS Mission in Eastern Africa (London, 1904)Google Scholar, Barlow, A. Ruffell, Tentative Studies in Kikuyu Grammar and Idiom (Edinburgh, 1931/first published in 1914).Google Scholar

4. John, and Comaroff, Jean, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991).Google Scholar Interestingly, the Comaroffs, ibid., 141, do not read dictionaries themselves as texts, preferring instead to use them to determine the real meaning of Tswana vocabulary. Paul Landau criticizes the Comaroffs' underattention to word usage in his Realm of the Word (Portsmouth, 1995) xxvi n32.Google Scholar

5. Benson, T.G., Kikuyu-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1964).Google Scholar Benson was the long-time principal of the government-run Jeanes School and a education department official from the late 1930s until the 1950s.

6. Atkins, Keletso, The Moon is Dead! Give us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an Africa Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843-1900 (Portsmouth, 1993).Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 5.

8. Kanogo, Tabitha, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (Nairobi, 1987), 9.Google Scholar

9. Clough, Marshall, Fighting Two Sides: Kenyan Chiefs and Politicians, 1918-1940 (Niwot, 1990), 32.Google Scholar

10. Kanogo, Tabitha, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau, 1905-63 (London, 1987), 10.Google Scholar

11. Kitching's, Gavin massive Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1905-1970 (New Haven. 1980)Google Scholar, contains the most cogent analysis of the anthropology of early colonial laborers. Presley's, Cora Ann “Labor Unrest Among Kikuyu Women in Colonial Kenya” in Robertson, Claire and Berger, Iris, eds., Women and Class in Africa (New York, 1986)Google Scholar, offers a gendered reading which explains colonial labor shortages in terms of women's resistance.

12. Barlow, , Studies, vii.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., 71, my translation.

14. Ibid., 61.

15. Ibid., 203.

16. Ibid., 200-01.

17. This conclusion bears much resemblance to Nancy Rose Hunt's observations in “Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork Doctrine in the Heart of Africa” in Hansen, Karen Tranberg, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, 1992).Google Scholar

18. Barlow, , Studies, 235.Google Scholar Older atumia (initiated Gikuyu women) would, with Barlow, describe circumcision as painful—but many locate the pain of irua within a redemptive, maturative framework. Wanjiku, one of Jean Davison's informants, said that “[a]nybody who has not felt the pain of irua cannot abuse me….The ones who went through irua together, we have felt pain together—that shows body maturity…From irua I learned what it meant to be grown up, with more brains…also from irua, I learned what it means to be a pure Mûgîkûyû.” Wanjiku wa Gacoki in Davison, Jean, Voices from Mutira: Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women (Boulder, 1989), 42.Google Scholar My thanks to John Lonsdale for pointing this out to me.

19. For the “female circumcision” controversy see Murray, Jocelyn, “The Kikuyu Female Circumcision Controversy, with Special Reference to the Church Missionary Society's ‘Sphere of Influence’” (PhD, UCLA, 1974)Google Scholar; Sandgren, David, Christianity and the Kikuyu: Religious Divisions and Social Conflict (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Ward, Kevin, “The Development of Protestant Christianity in Kenya, 1910–40” (PhD., Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar

20. For an explication of the denominational tension driving the unseemly missionary scramble for Gikuyuland see Murray, Nancy Uhlar, “The Need to Get There First: Staking a Missionary Claim in Colonial Kenya,” Journal of African Studies, 12 (1985/1986), 181–93.Google Scholar

21. Strayer, Robert, The Making of Mission Communities in East Africa: Africans and Anglicans in Colonial Kenya, 1875-1935 (London, 1978), 44.Google Scholar

22. Feldman, David, “Christians and Politics: The Origins of the Kikuyu Central Association in Northern Murang'a 1890-1930” (PhD, Queen's College, Cambridge, 1978), 43.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., 36.

24. Lonsdale, John, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau” in Berman, Bruce and Lonsdale, , eds., Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London, 1992), 335–37Google Scholar, for the Gikuyu labor theory of value.

25. Ibid., 363.

26. For Lonsdale's analysis of dynastic theory see ibid., 365.

27. Leo, Christopher, Land and Class in Kenya, (Toronto, 1984), chapter 2.Google Scholar For a fuller discussion of ahoi, see, e.g., Muriuki, Godfrey, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500-1900 (Oxford, 1974).Google Scholar

28. For senior lineages as ahoi see Kershaw, Greet, “The Changing Roles of Men and Women in the Kikuyu Family by Socioeconomic Strata,” Rural Africana, 29 (1975/1976), 177.Google Scholar

29. Interview with Johanna Muturi, in St. Paul's Theological College archive, Limuru.

30. Interview with Paul Mbatia Gakobo, who attended classes at Weithaga from 1904, in St. Paul's Theological College archive, Limuru.

31. Feldman, , “Christians and Politics,” 76.Google Scholar Karuri did not limit his connections to the CMS but also assisted the Consolata Fathers, the rivals of the Anglicans, in settling close to his home near Murang'a town: Strayer, , Mission Communities, 45.Google Scholar

32. John Lonsdale has suggested in private correspondence that the range of meanings displayed in MacGregor's definition of muthamaki—from sovereign to magistrate—may additionally be connected to Gikuyu and missionary attempts to render the Old Testament languages of authority—especially Kings I and II—into the Gikuyu lexicon. For the moment I am unable to evaluate adequately the impact of Bible translation on this translation of muthamaki. I would, however, note that organized efforts at translation did not get underway until the 1910s, with the formation of the Kikuyu Language Committee. This remains a topic of ongoing research.

33. Lonsdale, , “Moral Economy,” 339–40.Google Scholar

34. For a similar description emphasizing the fluidity of Gikuyu land practices, see Muriuki, History.

35. See Clough, Fighting Two Sides, for an analysis of Kiambu landholders' efforts to secure land titles from the Carter Land Commission in the late 1920s. European settlers, too, would have applauded such a legalist definition of tenure, at least in the “White Highlands:” see Kanogo, Squatters, for an exegesis of settlers' various attempts to solidify their tenure to disputed landholdings by limiting squatters' competing claims to ownership.

36. The definitive history of the Blantyre mission is McCracken, John, Politics and Christianity in Malawi (Cambridge, 1977).Google Scholar See also Shepperson, George and Price's, ThomasIndependent African: John Chilembwe and the Origins, Setting, and Significance of the Nyasaland Native Rising of 1915 (Ediburgh, 1987).Google Scholar Blantyre and Thogoto were linked by more than mission philosophy: the first superintendent at Thogoto, H.E. Scott, was formerly head of Blantyre.

37. See Murray, , “Need,” 182–83.Google Scholar The mission did not divest itself of most of this land until the 1920s, when the Carter Land Commission prompted the CSM to return progressively some 2000 acres to local Gikuyu lineages. See R.G.M. Calderwood to Leonard Beecher, 15 May 1945, in the CPK Nairobi archives, CCK correspondence 1940-44 file, where Calderwood outlined the history of CSM land holdings at Thogoto.

38. Johnstone Kamau, later Jomo Kenyatta, schooled at Thogoto and worked as an assistant carpenter. See Murray-Brown, Jeremy, Kenyatta (London, 1972), chapter 4.Google Scholar

39. Murray, , “Need,” 183.Google Scholar

40. Barlow, , Tentative Studies, 234.Google Scholar

41. For an explication of the Kenya state's reliance on the ideology of indirect rule, see Berman, Bruce, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London, 1990).Google Scholar See also Young, Crawford, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, 1994).Google Scholar

42. Mundu wa therekali uheetwo hinya wa gutua macira. The 1975 dictionary was published by Benson, who was then teaching linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Benson based the dictionary on notes made by Barlow, who by then had died.

43. Lonsdale, , “Moral Economy,” xiii.Google Scholar This translation, in the introductory grammar of the book, was largely an oversight. Lonsdale's argument concerning the progressive “coarsening” of Gikuyu class relations is actually centered around the historical, debated emergence of Gikuyu dynasts.

44. It is suggestive, in this light, that the term wiathi, which Lonsdale translates as a historically embedded word connoting self-mastery, does not appear in MacGregor's or Barlow's grammars (see ibid., 334-37, for a discussion of remembered ideology of sweated labor by which men earned private virtue and proved public power). This suggests that wiathi, like muthamaki and the ideas it connotes, must be located within the historical dialogue out of which its more modern meanings emerged.

45. Peel, J.D.Y., “The Pastor and the Babalawo: the interaction of religions in nineteenth century Yorubaland,” Africa, 60 (1990), 338–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarSanneh, Lamin, Encountering the West: Christianity and the Global Cultural Process: the African Dimension (Maryknoll, 1993)Google Scholar; Landau, Paul, The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Portsmouth, 1996)Google Scholar; Lonsdale, “Moral Economy.”

46. Allman, Jean, “Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers, and Women's Work in Colonial Asante, 1924-1945,” History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47. Peel, , “Pastor,” 339.Google Scholar

48. See Landau, Realm, chapter 6, for a brief review.

49. Lonsdale, , “Moral Economy,” 442Google Scholar, argues that missionaries' inability to enter into the Gikuyu world of sorcery and personal evil limited the scope of mission-run churches.

50. Sanneh, , Encountering the West, 160.Google Scholar Terence Ranger offers a more nuanced reading of the same sort of dialectic in his “Missionary Adaptation of African Religious Institutions: the Masasi Case” in Ranger, Terence and Kimambo, Isaac, eds., The Historical Study of African Religion (Berkeley, 1972).Google Scholar

51. McIntosh, Brian G., “The Scottish Mission in Kenya, 1891-1923” (PhD, Edinburgh, 1969), 255.Google Scholar

52. For Kenya whites' attempts to prove their racial identity see Kennedy, Duane, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1960 (Durham, 1987).Google Scholar

53. In 1928, though, Barlow again sought to separate himself from the big CSM mission centers, building a house at Mahiga and staying there for six months out of the year. See KNA Educ/1/1392, Weller to Director of Education, 23 August 1928.

54. Ward, , “Development,” 78.Google Scholar

55. Barlow disliked another Gikuyu word for God, Mwene Nyaga, because he thought it connoted a non-specific, naturalist model of the divine (ibid., 187). Mwene Nyaga, which can best be rendered as “he who has bright ostrich feathers,” refers to the God who in Gikuyu thought dwells on the top of Mount Kenya-Kirinyaga in Gikuyu. The feathers refer to the brightness of the sun shining off the snow at the top of the mountain.

56. See Lonsdale, , “Moral Economy,” 344Google Scholar, for a discussion of thahu.

57. Barlow, in Kikuyu News 37 (1912)Google Scholar, cited in Ward, , “Development,” 83.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., 85.

59. Lonsdale, , “Moral Economy,” 344.Google Scholar

60. See my “Dancing and Schooling: Missionaries: Athomi and the Outschool in Late Colonial Kenya” (M.A., Minnesota, 1996)Google Scholar, chapter 5, for an evaluation of Gikuyu independent churches and schools. See also Anderson, John, The Struggle for the School: The Interaction of Missionary, Colonial Government, and Nationalist Enterprise in the Development of Formal Education in Kenya (London, 1970).Google Scholar