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legacy together with the conditions ofmodern society, are factors that havebeen responsible for the proliferation ofindigenous churches. This movementbegan during the colonial period and didnot end with independence. Of seventhousand-plus indigenous churches inAfrica there are over one hundred andeighty in Kenya, mostly located in westernKenya. These indigenous churches grewin areas where missions had been wellreceived, and response to mission teachingwas positive.However, the volatile admixture ofChristian teaching, mission education andrapidly growing cultural nationalism couldnot run in the mission channels. MissionderivedChristian churches came to beregarded as imperialistic and aggressivelyhostile to African culture, and includedissues now found in the secular media suchas the matter of female circumcision, whichearly on was an extremely fierce area ofconflict between mission Christianity andAfrican culture.Mission churches and the white racewere indiscriminately and collectivelydenounced by some leaders. There weresome who were opposed to ‘missionary’Christianity but wished to retain aChristian identity: they took recourse inthe founding of independent churchesand schools. It was not only the rejectionof Western (‘Christian’) education, culture,even medicine, that generated such adisconnection. Some indigenous churchesarose from plain dissatisfaction with theleadership style and paternalism of themission churches. There were also, and stillare, declarations of resentment towardsthe decadence that (they feel) traditionalChristianity tolerates. No surprise then thatthey strive to make a culturally relevant‘indigenised’ Christianity by incorporatingAfrican traditional religious world-views. 13After independence, many such groupsIssue Number: 599 – April to June 201225registered as bona fide churches. They lookfor a buoyant church that reflects Africanspirituality, attaching great importanceto community life and human relationsand giving women a prominent placein the hierarchy of the church. Thesechurches have experienced growthbecause, they claim, they are so relevantto their adherents. We believe rather thata Christian church needs first of all to behonestly relevant to the Word of God, theBible. I quote from the translators’ prefaceto the Authorised Version: ‘But now whatpiety without truth? what truth (whatsaving truth) without the word of God?what word of God (whereof we may besure) without the Scripture?’ 14 With this, wenow turn to consider TBS and the Bible inKenya.Bible MattersSwahiliSwahili or KiSwahili is a Bantu language,and five million people speak it as theirnative language; the total number ofspeakers is said to exceed one hundredmillion. Originally written in Arabic script,Swahili orthography is now based on theLatin alphabet introduced by missionariesand colonial administrators. In the AfricanUnion 15 there is today growing pressure forthe overall use of Swahili as the unifyinglanguage of Africa south of the Sahara.What great need, then, for a sound Bibleversion in this language!By 1844, a foundation had been laid forthe translation of the Bible into KimvitaKiSwahili (the Mombasa dialect) by Krapf.Very soon standardisation of the languagebecame an issue, and in the 1920sKiunguja KiSwahili (the Zanzibar dialect)was favoured. The need for a commonKiSwahili Bible, blending as far as possiblethe most used dialects, led in 1950 to aNew Testament—the KiSwahili Union