Part II Africa for Africans: Ethiopian Independent Churches
Imagine a company that hires a number of individuals as future managers.Supervisors who hire them explain that they will be given more responsibility as they learn the job. Yet year after year, though the employees perform duties diligently, demonstrating their readiness to move up to the next level, they are consistently denied the education or other tools that would allow them to become managers. Eventually, frustrated to the point of quitting, they form their own business that operates by different rules than the first business.
This analogy explains the African Independent Church (AIC) movement. Year after year, missionaries denied loyal African Christians the opportunities to advance in leadership and become pastors, priests, deacons and elders. In the one area they allowed Africans a degree of leadership, evangelism, Africans soon surpassed missionaries in spreading the Gospel(Spear, 7). When missionaries tried to regain control, African evangelists responded by establishing their own churches.
It would be easy to argue that Africans were tired of being treated like children, and this was why they broke away from the mission churches to start their own. Africa Inland Mission (AIM) provides a perfect example of how missionary attitudes and behavior toward the Kamba (an ethnic group in Kenya) caused a split that led to an independent church.
In order to maintain control over their converts, AIM missionaries had set up several systems to punish Kamba Christians who had "sinned." (Sinning could be defined as a travesty of morals, but more often than not, sinning was defined as participating in cultural customs or rituals, like circumcision or polygyny.)
Punishments varied. For example, those Kamba who sinned were forbidden to pray publicly. If a Kamba Christian was known to have "sinned," and he or she attempted to pray in church, the congregation would shout him/her down. The most prominent system of punishment was the black chair. The black chair, also called the seat of shame, was higher than the rest of the chairs, painted black, and seated at the front of the church. If a person confessed their sin, or was accused of sin by other church members, they had to sit in the black chair during church services and other church functions for as long as the missionaries dictated.
It is easy to imagine what this system of punishment did to an individual Kamba's morale and desire to attend church. In fact, the system of punishment led many Kamba Christians to leave the AIM church altogether. They attended other churches (such as the Roman Catholic church), stopped going, or began attending the new African Brotherhood Church, an African independent church that sprang to life among the Kamba around the same time that disillusionment with AIM began. Like most African independent churches, it was popular for a variety of reasons: it offered African leadership; it was for Africans by Africans; Africans did not have to give up their culture to belong to it; and it was politically oriented against the colonial powers. In addition, the African Brotherhood Church, like many African Independent Churches, tried to meet people's needs for community and worship in an African context. (For more on Kamba Christianity and the Africa Inland Mission, see David Sandgren in Expressions of East African Christianity.)
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