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Historians have held that colonialism and Western missionary enterprise were two distinct and unrelated entries to pre-colonial Kenya. How then did Christianity for decades live side by side with colonialism? The impact of that unholy relationship is felt and sustained in contemporary forms of violence. Whiteness realizes that is hard to enter into something that is in harmony. Therefore, separation needs to happen for Whiteness to succeed. Unfortunately, much of our theological understanding today is tempered with a neocolonial mindset that separates the soul from the body for Christian triumphalism. This paper will analyze the impact of Whiteness in Kenya during and after colonialism to demonstrate how the British explorer-settler-missionary alliance oiled the religious and economic disenfranchising of African people. Secondly, it proposes a political theology that will restore ‘Shalom’ in a socially, economically, and spiritually broken country.

Transitional justice (TJ) is an approach that has been used by states to bring hope and renaissance in addressing past injustices. Unfortunately, transitional justice mechanisms have been ambiguous and often yield underwhelming results. While various components that constitute human societies have been incorporated in Africa�s journey towards resolving historical injustices, religion has been casually utilised, if not altogether ignored. An interfaith approach to addressing a violent past has not been exploited, yet religion played a significant role in South Africa�s (SA) post-apartheid era and Kenya�s second liberation from KANU�s single-party rule. This article will highlight the insufficiencies and gains made by past TJ mechanisms in Kenya and SA. The article will also discuss the place of interfaith engagement in confronting structural violence. Lastly, improving on SA�s TJ model, it will suggest an interfaith agenda for TJ that mitigates the horrors of historical injustices for reconciliation, peace, and stability in Kenya.

In the last decade, since the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (2010) in Cape Town, South Africa, the world has significantly changed. The majority of the world’s Christians are located in the Global South. Globalization, conflict, and migration have catalyzed the emergence of multifaith communities. All these developments have in one way or another impacted missions in twenty-first-century sub-Saharan Africa. As both Christianity and Islam are spreading and expanding, new approaches to a peaceful and harmonious coexistence have been developed that seem to be hampering the mission of the Church as delineated in the Cape Town Commitment (2010). Hence a missiological assessment of the Cape Town Commitment is imperative for the new decade’s crosscutting developments and challenges. In this article, the author contends that the mission theology of the 2010 Lausanne Congress no longer addresses the contemporary complex reality of a multifaith context occasioned by refugee crises in Kenya. The article will also describe the Somali refugee situation in Nairobi, Kenya, occasioned by political instability and violence in Somalia. Finally, the article will propose a methodology for performing missions for interfaith engagement in Nairobi’s Eastleigh refugee centers in the post Cape Town Commitment era. The overall goal is to provide mainstream evangelical mission models that are biblically sound, culturally appropriate, and tolerant to the multifaith diversity in conflict areas.

The decolonial discourse around Christianity must not avoid dealing with Whiteness if there is going to be any fruitful decolonization. Colonialism and the Western missionary enterprise were not necessarily two distinct and unrelated entries to precolonial Kenya. How then did Christianity, for decades, live side by side with colonialism? In this article, we contend that Colonialism in Kenya could not have been possible without the missionary enterprise activity. The impact of that unholy relationship is felt and sustained in contemporary forms of violence. Unfortunately, critics of such a discourse dismiss the decolonial efforts in African Christianity citing intellectual activism. Such voices of dissent may not be far from the truth as Jesus’ ministry involved elements of activism. Whenever he confronted oppressive institutional structures, he used activism tempered with a degree of pacifism. Looking at the history of historical injustices in Kenya, we see instances whereby missionary Christianity conveniently abetted injustices for colonial structures to sustain the oppression of the indigenous Africans. Such injustices have been unresolved to date because the oppressive structures are still in place in the shape of neocolonialism. Land, for example, is a present source of conflict in Kenya. In the precolonial African ontology, the land was in harmony with the people. For land to be taken away from its owners, a separation of the people from the land had to happen. This was facilitated by a Christian theology that created existential dualism, violently separating the African bodies from their souls and the person from the community. Hence, Christian doctrine that emphasized ‘saving souls’ and ‘personal salvation’ was entrenched. This separation and fragmentation are fundamental to Whiteness. Whiteness universalizes truth, even theology, it puts a face of neutrality that obscures specificity. Such has made the church uncritical of oppressive and unjust political structures. Whiteness realizes that it is hard to enter into something that is in harmony. Therefore, separation needs to happen for Whiteness to succeed. Unfortunately, much of our theological understanding today is tempered with a neocolonial mindset that separates the soul from the body for Christian triumphalism. It anesthetizes the pain of oppression with the eschatological promise of future deliverance. This paper will analyze the impact of Whiteness in Kenya during and after colonialism to demonstrate how the British explorer–settler–missionary alliance ‘oiled’ the religious and economic disenfranchising of African people. Secondly, it proposes a political theology that will restore ‘Shalom’ in a socially, economically, and spiritually broken country. It is such a theology undertaken in Africa that will confront oppressive structures and identify with the marginalized communities in Kenya.