A CMS Conference, held in September 1942, stated the following on the agenda of “Women in the Work of the African Church”:
It is hoped that African women will be encouraged to take their full share in the life and work of the Church, particularly by serving on the African Church Councils, by assisting in pre-baptism classes, by helping girls in village life, by assisting in the examination of girls and women for baptism, and by generally undertaking the responsibility for the investigation of cases of discipline involving women and girls (KNA Mss/61/567).
According to this statement, it is evident that the missionaries desired women to be actively involved in the affairs of the church. However, such a desire could only become fulfilled with an initiative by the missionaries themselves to empower women. There were at least three major
barriers to women’s full participation in the church. Firstly, the male dominated church hierarchy matched African hierarchy of leadership.175 Secondly, the gender-biased curriculum did not prepare women for major responsibilities in the church, but prepared them rather to be homemakers.176
As indicated in chapter five, this silencing of women in the church in the history of the Christian tradition goes back a very long time to Paul’s 1 Cor 11:34, 35 where women are silenced in the church, and also 1 Cor 11:1-16 where male headship is sanctioned. The Church Fathers and the Christian tradition in subsequent centuries used these Scripture texts as a divine sanction of the silencing of women in church and to confine the leadership of the church to male headship. This Thirdly, women could not be ordained to priesthood. This meant that women could only perform as laity in the structure of the church.
Furthermore, apart from recommending that women serve in the church councils, the conference confined women’s ministry to the service of other women and girls. It did not even propose that women could either lead services or preach in the church. This was a mimicry of not only the roles that women played in the Church of England in the eighteenth century, but also in the history of the Christian tradition and the biblical texts as a whole. According to Mwaura (2005b:410) however, in the missionary era women were deeply involved in evangelistic work and opened various outstations, but unfortunately this effort has been ignored in the records where more attention has been given to the role that men played in the growth of the church.
In sum, most of the contributions of women to the advancement of the missionary church were not highlighted as much as the role that men played in church growth. Furthermore, the failure to ordain women was a major handicap to their full participation in the church. All in all, the missionaries subordinated women, in that they established hierarchical structures and male domination in the church, whereby women were not accorded equal status with men. In accordance to Scripture, such as 1 Cor 11, women were not allowed to hold positions that would allow them to lead men or to speak in church.
175 See above where in 1916 Mrs Hooper’s campaign for women to be represented in church councils met with strong opposition from the male dominant leadership in the church hierarchy.
176 The same conference for instance recommended that, in addition to the Bible Study and Prayer Meetings courses that were being offered to women, other subjects such as “hygiene, child-welfare, agriculture, and other general matters which must find their place in the new Christian home” should be taught (KNA Mss/61/567).
notion of male headship subordinated female missionaries to male missionaries, so that the former had difficulties in their efforts to liberate African women (see Bowie 1993:8-9).177
In conclusion, as with Paul, one cannot use a generalized and monolithic description of either pre-colonial Kenya or the CMS. Rather, both, like Paul, have played an ambivalent role in regard to the role and status of women. On the one hand, for instance, CMS has served as an agent of women’s liberation, but on the other it has been a catalyst of their subordination, especially through the male dominated leadership of the missionary church and its colonial tendencies.
Although the missionaries, for instance, made an effort to liberate women from some of the dehumanizing aspects of African culture, such as female circumcision, dowry, levirate marriages and wife inheritance among others, the church did not and has not done much to abolish gender disparity. This is particularly so, because Africans received the gospel as a divine sanction where Paul’s texts in particular were used to bolster subordination of women in the already existing pre-colonial Kenyan patriarchal structures.
6.3 Conclusion
178
In my opinion, it is still debatable whether or not the influence of Christianity has been beneficial to the socio-cultural transformation of Africa- and I am most concerned with
I therefore concur with Oduyoye (1995:183) that:
177 During the 1888 London Missionary Conference, J.N. Murdock argued for the authority of male missionaries over female missionaries when he stated: “Women’s work in the foreign field must be careful to recognize the headship of man in ordering the affairs of the kingdom of God (Johnston in Bowie 1993:8). Earlier on, Bishop Allan Beecher of Bloemfontein had expressed a similar opinion in 1883 with regard to the sisterhood he had founded in southern Africa, when he said: “All Sisterhood work, to be perfect, ought …to be carried on with the real central power vested in the Bishop…” (Swaisland in Bowie 1993:8). Women missionaries were therefore frustrated by lack of independence. This subordination of women within the missionary community itself brought an obvious contradiction, as the women missionaries tried to raise the standards of the native women. This is clear from Miss Gollock’s statement of 1912 that: “It seems only good that the natives should see the Christian women missionaries not segregated, not treated as if they must by reason of sex be kept out of authority and responsibility, always subordinate, even the wisest and ablest, to the most callow and tactless young man; but treated by fellow missionaries as honoured and trusted fellow-workers…” (Bowie 1993:9).
178According to Mwaura (2005:412) for instance “the missions whether Catholic or Protestant originating in the nineteenth century, were largely expressions of a patriarchal society and these attitudes seemed to fit with an African society in its patriarchal and matriarchal form.”
its effects on women. It seems that sexist elements of Western culture have simply fuelled the cultural sexism of traditional African society…
The missionary theology of gender was also representative of the theological perceptions of gender in the Church of England, characterized by the Victorian ideology of womanhood as indicated in chapter five. It was observed in this chapter, that this missionary/Victorian theology was in many ways similar to the pre-colonial theology of gender in Kenya and hence both theologies reinforced each other, while being propped up by biblical texts such as 1 Cor 11:1-16 to support the subordination of women.
The question which remains is, has the Anglican Church that was born out of the missionary church re-imaged this distorted perception of Imago Dei in a woman? How has the ACK interacted with both the pre-colonial and the missionary forms of gender construction? In the following chapter, I will address these questions.