Will Uhuru succeed where Jomo failed?

When President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the Ministry of Education to reinstate the ownership of all the schools built by the church, he did not know that he was opening a Pandora's box. Now, there is no turning back.

From a historical point of view, the government played in the hands of the Independent African Pentecostal Church of Africa (IAPCA), perhaps the most aggrieved of all the churches.

AIPCA is the only church in Kenya inspired by Marcus Garvey's teachings on liberation – the small, stocky black American from Jamaica who launched a giant liberation movement. His supporters regarded him as the "Black Moses" and he influenced most pioneering African leaders, including Harry Thuku, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere. They all called Garvey who also influenced Martin Luther King.

It was thanks to the support of Garvey's Archbishop William Alexander that AIPCA managed to get its own ordained priests – and become what it became: a religious and educational force in central Kenya. It was before that he lost everything in 1953.

Even before the order of President Kenyatta, IAPCA had insisted – between two struggles for power – for the restoration of its 327 schools seized by the colonial government and entrusted to dominant churches – Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians and Anglicans. They are now public schools under the ministry and in the registers these churches appear as sponsors.

The way in which the directive to restore the ownership of these public schools to the churches will be achieved without encouraging IAPCA to renew its long battle for the restitution of its properties, remains to be seen. Some Harambee schools were built by communities in the 1970s and 1980s on some of their land.

AIPCA also lost the Githunguri Teachers College, where the late Jomo Kenyatta – and his brother-in-law Peter Mbiyu Koinange – were teachers in the 1940s, before plunging into the political life of the African Union. of Kenya (KAU).

President Kenyatta may want to repair a colonial mistake that his father did not take into account despite the harbadment of AIPCA leaders such as Waira Kamau and Peter Mundati Gatabaki – the man to whom Partly attributed to the creation of AIPCA in Kenya.

In Kenya, the church and schools are Siamese twins and AIPCA was closely linked to KISA (Association of Kikuyu Independent Schools) after its members separated from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Church of Scotland Mission (CSM), which formed pioneering politicians.

CMS had arrived in Kenya in 1898 and had begun a mission and school in Bura in 1895 and another in Thogoto, Kiambu.

It is in this school that the young Jomo Kenyatta escaped to seek education as one of the pioneering African students.

Other missions that have arrived during the same period to open churches and schools include the Catholic fathers of the Holy Spirit who established a camp in St Austins, Nairobi, the Consolata Fathers who had stations in Limuru, Mugoiri near Murang'a and Karima, Othaya.

For starters, it was these Karima missionaries who painted the villages in search of students. And when they went to Mzee Githinji's farm, he allowed them to take the boy who was "useless at the farm and raising goats." This boy would become President Mwai Kibaki!

But the failure of some of these religious schools to train locals for useful programs that could turn them into doctors and scientists has led to failure – not only in the church, but also in schools. # 39; education. These spin-offs saw the creation of independent schools from 1930 – and the invitation of Archbishop Alexander in 1935 as a guest of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association. .

Since the days of John Krapf and Johan Rebman in Rabai in 1844 and 1846 respectively, the education system advocated by the missionaries was designed to enable Africans to work only as artisans, farm laborers and, if possible, Raised higher, like "young employees".

In all the places they visited, whether it was Ukambani, the Africa Inland Mission (AIM) or the Gospel Mission Society (GMS) of Kiambu, the missionaries, in their pioneering era, turned their schools into semi-churches for Christian-minded victorious converts rather than endowing them with world-wide secular knowledge.

The majority of schools in the mission did not offer education beyond the third year (third year!) To the chagrin of local leaders.

This was in part the genesis of the struggle for independence – when mission students turned against the missionaries. And like the colonial government, the missionaries did not put emphasis on literary education and in most places they taught only simple industrial skills.

This pushed Africans to demand independent schools and better Western education. The departure of Mbiyu Koinange in 1927 for an American university excited many. Mr. Koinange will later become the first Kenyan to obtain a master's degree. Upon his return, he will harbad his father, Koinange wa Mbiyu, so that he rallies locals to build an independent college to train their own teachers for independent schools.

This college would attract pioneering professors such as James Gichuru, Achieng Oneko and Jomo Kenyatta.

AIPCA had spread like a whirlpool but did not have trained clerics. Thus, Mr. Gatabaki, in collaboration with a Kikuyu Central Association official, James Beuttah, asked Archbishop William Alexander to train the first ministers of the AIPCA church.

But Archbishop Alexander, as the primate of the African Orthodox Church founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914 with the Mission of Universal Improvement of Negroes, had other ideas. He wanted to use AIPCA as a local branch of the church and Marcus Garvey movement.

In a way, despite suspicions, the AIPCA keeps the spirit of the church of Marcus Garvey and even today, the clothes and dresses of the archbishops resemble those of the AOC Garvey. It is in this group that the first three candidates were ordained, including Benjamin Kahihia – who for many years was the archbishop of AIPCA.

They then faced tithing and other contributions.

Far from Alexander, AIPCA set up its own schools in central Kenya, but in 1952, following the declaration of the state of emergency in Kenya, the colonial government closed all those churches and schools and entrusted them to District Councils (DEB).

The authorities considered them a recruiting place for the Mau Mau movement and said that in these schools, "subversive hymns" were taught – to glorify the Mau Mau movement.

What is said is that the AIPCA church had openly urged its members to participate in the armed struggle against the British and allowed the partisans to take an oath. The first pioneers in the church were actually KCA-related politicians, including Peter Gatabaki Mundati, Johanna Kunyiha and Willy Jimmy Wambugu. Waira Kamau (former MP for Juja), Taddeo Mwaura (former MK Kandara) and Wanyoike Thungu (former Kenyatta bodyguard).

While the other churches supported the colonial government, AIPCA was the alternative voice and when its churches were closed, schools and grounds were given to traditional churches.

For more than five decades, IAPCA has been asking for its schools to be reinstated, but the beneficiaries, with the support of politicians, have always thwarted this attempt. It was only during the last years of Moi's regime that the Minister, Mr. Marsden Madoka, announced that the government would return schools to AIPCA.

But this was partly seen as a campaign of the beleaguered Moi regime by the church and activists demanding political reforms.

Mwai Kibaki, chairman of the Democratic Party, described the movement as "criminal" while Kenyan National Council of Churches (NCCK) Secretary General Mutava Musyimi described it as a "big blunder". with a "hidden agenda".

But IAPCA persisted in its requests for restitution of schools they had built on their own land.

On the eve of Jamhuri Day in 1964, a delegation from AIPCA went to Kenyatta's home in Gatundu with a petition. They wanted the church to be officially registered and they asked Kenyatta to make their independent schools sponsored which were taken over by the traditional churches.

While Kenyatta was accepting church registration, factional feuds that struck the church and the state's takeover of schools saw the latter demand remain unanswered.

The church was restored in 1963 and registered as AIPCA on February 13, 1964, while its sister church, the Independent National Church of Africa, strong in Embu and Meru, was registered on 7 February 1964.

The African Orthodox Church of Kenya, which was more or less a wing of Marcus Garvey, was registered in 1965.

Although AIPCA continued to appeal to its political friends, such as Kenyatta's bodyguard Wanyoike Thungu and Cabinet Minister Mbiyu Koinange, to stay abad of the news, she never managed to recover his schools. In an attempt to convince Jomo, they would organize school holiday visits to Gatundu's home – the most notable being that of 1968, which had seen thousands of students from Nyeri, Kirinyaga and Laikipia travel to Kenyatta – as part of from the request of the churches to be returned to them.

Mbiyu Koinange opened Kenyatta Mahiga High School in Nyeri in 1969, with only one triumph.

It was closed in 1953 on the grounds that its founders favored the Mau Mau. It is one of the few schools sponsored by the African Independent Pentecostal African Church – IAPCA.

That the AIPCA finally recovers its schools is a game of wait-and-see. But the order of President Uhuru Kenyatta will undoubtedly raise this issue.