Critical Thought Paper: The River Between
... first of the villagers to convert to Christianity, and was a firm believer in its practices and ideas. This created a gap between the two sides that kept growing with time. Another reason for the growing separation of the two sides, was the colonization of the Westerners around and in to the village. Government posts were being built in the villages of the area by the Westerners and there was already a central government post in Nairobi. There was also talk of building a government post in Makuyu, which was blamed heavily on Joshua and his followers. The idea of a government was completely new to the villagers, as was the taxing that came along with it. They had lived among themselves without a government for a long time. All of these differences escaladed and reached a peak when Joshua’s daughter was killed because of circumcision, a ritual of the village that meant adulthood and that was seen as a huge sin by the Christians. Waiyaki, a mission-educated villager from Kameno, tried to synthesize the Christian worldview with the Gikuyu. He wanted to “infuse the tribe with wisdom and strength, giving it new life.” In order to do this, he took the path of education. He accomplished a lot in this path. He built and organized schools anywhere he could and recruited mission-educated teachers to teach the students that came from all around. His schools were very well-known in the villages all around. People send their kids to his schools and looked up to him as their leader and educator. They called him “the Teacher.” Waiyaki did not want to take sides and his goal was to get both sides to live in unity through education. He resigned from the Kiama, the village council, to keep up with his education plans, which was a mistake. He had now lost contact with the elders and was not an integral pa...