Ngendo, Rahabu

? East African Revival Fellowship (Tukutendereza)
Kenya

COLLECTED MEMORY: The following text belongs to our collection of eyewitness and fragmentary accounts that includes eulogies, obituaries, and primary materials. It may lack sources and proper academic verification for accuracy.

Rahabu Ng’endo was a Christian who lived with her parents in Limuru. Her husband was drawn to the patriotic Mau Mau movement and was among the first to take the oath. However, Ng’endo, a member of the East Africa Revival Movement and a woman of staunch faith, decided to oppose the oath. She believed she was not alone but with Christ. One night, Ng’endo refused to attend the oath-taking ceremony that had been arranged, instead locking herself in with her children. Nonetheless, the neighbors came to fetch her, and after battering on the door, they took her and her children along to the ceremony. There, she found a banana tree trunk, some Sodom apples, and various other items lying on the ground, with a hole in the trunk filled with goat’s blood.

Each initiate was to jump over these things seven times, saying certain words and curses, and drink and be smeared with blood. A crowd was already there, having paid the subscription and ready to take the oath, but Ng’endo refused. The crowd shouted, “We will make her take it, we are stronger than you,” showing her the strap hanging from the cave of the nearby house, to strangle those who refused. Ng’endo responded, “I am not afraid to die and go to God, even with the spade and things for digging the secret grave near, I have drunk the blood of Christ, how can I return to drink your goat ‘s blood?” With these words, they hoisted her up by the neck, slowly strangling her to death.

Stephen Kariuki Apollo Warui

Source:

Onyango, Emily. “Gender Equality in the East African Revival Movement.” African Multidisciplinary Journal of Research 4, no. 1 (2022): 21–42.

This collected memory was submitted in May 2025 by Stephen Kariuki Apollo Warui, a PhD student at the Boston University School of Theology and a member of both the Presbyterian Church of East Africa and the Presbyterian Church (USA).