Faith & Community
Distinguished
Elijah Masinde
c. 1910 – 1987
Founded Dini ya Msambwa and defied four governments
Distinguished is level 3 of 4 in the Kenya Hall of Fame: sustained excellence over a career, widely honoured at home. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A footballer who became a prophet, founded a religion that told the Bukusu to throw out the missionaries and the colonial administration together, and was locked up by the British, by Kenyatta and by Moi in turn.
Elijah Masinde wa Nameme played football for Kenya before he began preaching. In 1948 he founded Dini ya Msambwa, a movement that fused Bukusu ancestral religion with elements of Christianity and taught that European rule and European religion had arrived together and should leave together.
It was a religious movement and a political one at the same time: followers refused colonial taxes, destroyed mission property, and resisted the agricultural rules the administration imposed. The British banned the church, tried Masinde repeatedly, declared him insane, and held him at Mathari and then in remote detention for most of the 1950s.
Independence did not help him. Jomo Kenyatta's government also banned Dini ya Msambwa and detained him, and so did Daniel arap Moi's. He spent a large part of his adult life in custody under three separate administrations for the same beliefs, and died in 1987 still preaching them. He is a significant figure in the study of African independent religion and in western Kenya's own account of resistance.
It was a religious movement and a political one at the same time: followers refused colonial taxes, destroyed mission property, and resisted the agricultural rules the administration imposed. The British banned the church, tried Masinde repeatedly, declared him insane, and held him at Mathari and then in remote detention for most of the 1950s.
Independence did not help him. Jomo Kenyatta's government also banned Dini ya Msambwa and detained him, and so did Daniel arap Moi's. He spent a large part of his adult life in custody under three separate administrations for the same beliefs, and died in 1987 still preaching them. He is a significant figure in the study of African independent religion and in western Kenya's own account of resistance.
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