Fearing the sting of a ‘kiboko’

Besides the imposing Gothic Lutheran Church building in my home village of Ilembula, in Njombe Region, are four graves of Germans, who died between 1898 and 1904.

I have always known that the remains therein belong to early Berliner missionaries, who arrived in Benaland in the 1890s and set a base at Ilembula (1900), Kidugala (1898) and Lupembe (1899). Indeed, they must have been an adventurous lot.

But it was not until last week that I came across a narrative on what life must have been in those yonder years, thanks to a gift of book I received from a long lost former lecturer of mine, who tutored me, when I went for training in Berlin many years ago.

He is now in his late 80s and he had come across the book in one of his archive rooms and decided that I would indeed benefit from its contents. Actually, after going through the book ‘History of the Church in Africa by Bengt Sundker and Christopher Reed’ I could not, but concur with my lecturer. Much more interesting is the fact that, inside that book, I came across some very precise information on early Christian life in Ilembula.

Ilembula grew up as a Christian sanctuary during the Hehe-Sangu wars pitying Chief Mkwawa against Chief Merere respectively, in the late 19th century. However, the whole village life revolved around one Priebusch, a German missionary, born 1867, a former Prussian non-commissioned officer.

In efforts to safeguard the ‘Christian’ life of the few ‘saved’ natives, Priebusch, in paramilitary style, established what he called ‘Platzordnung’ – local mission by-laws.

These by-laws were to be strictly adhered to by all residents of the Ilembula Lutheran Church mission village. Ilembula, by then, was already a thriving mission station, which easily attracted about 400 regular attendants at Sunday service.

Among the many natives’ inducements to the mission village, and eventual baptismal to the faith, were the provision of bush school education and missionary medical skills. For, example, the book says, over 1,200 villagers were vaccinated against smallpox. Actually, school attendance for children was compulsory.

Naturally, this caused segregation, which solidified a village Christian group against surrounding traditional communities. This gave rise to some poignant human problems.

Under Priebusch, law, order and discipline were the rule in the village, and he saw to it that it was punctiliously observed. Sometimes he emphasised this with the help of a ‘kiboko’, a whip made of hippopotamus hide. For example, late comers to Sunday church worship felt the ‘kiboko’ sting.

Others, who were whipped were Christians, who at the death of one their own clan members would show their mourning, as custom had it, by shaving their hair. However, ‘sins’ such as polygamy led to excommunication from the community.

Polygamy was such a popular ‘sin’ that in no time melancholy little villages of ‘sinners’ families, fairly close to the Christian Ilembula, emerged, harbouring memories of past Christian fellowship and also feelings of injustice.

As I attended Sunday church service, the other day, in that Gothic structure built in 1907, I could not help, but imagine scenes of timid old Ilembula men and women rushing in to attend service more than a century ago. They had to. Otherwise, they would have to feel the sting of the ‘kiboko’.

The author is a journalist and media consultant based in Arusha