Karen church with long history and rich legacy

The farm was managed by Europeans but the labour was provided by “squatters” who guaranteed the “owners” 180 days of labour, per annum, in exchange for wages and the right to live and farm on the uncultivated lands which, in many cases, had simply had been theirs in the first instance before the British arrived and laid claim to them.

Bror was more interested in hunting animals and other, not so noble, social pursuits and eventually the marriage fell apart leaving Karen to manage the farm on her own in 1925.

Despite her industrious nature, her love for the land and her native workers, the soil on her farm was not suited for coffee growing.

The farm experienced several unexpected dry years with low yields which, coupled with declining world coffee prices, drove the business further into debt until the family corporation forced her to sell it in 1931.

Remi Martin bought the farm and named it Karen Estate and planned to carve it into parcels of 20 acres for sale. This must have been the very first big subdivision scheme in Kenya. During the same year, Archdeacon Low started the first St Francis Church on Windy Ridge to the west of Karen Estate.

The building was built on private land and consisted of mud and wattle walls under a grass thatched roof. It was named after St Francis of Assisi for his love of birds and animals.

It is claimed that before each service commenced, volunteers would enter the church to chase away squirrels and birds which would be inhabiting the structure, hence the connection.

In 1940, the church moved to an army hut which was part of the Army Signals Corps, west of Karen Shopping Centre, on today’s Dagoretti Road.

This was a swampy area which was prone to frequent flooding and the raised timber floor suffered wet rot with time. Female worshippers often found their high-heeled shoes impaled, inextricably, in the sticky clay soil.

In the meantime, Remi Martin was busy selling his 20 acre parcels and Karen’s population was slowly but surely growing; and so was the need for a fully fledged church.

A new seven-acre site was carved out of Ngong Forest, near the junction of Ngong Road and Karen Road, in 1948 for the church.

That junction is also where seven years earlier, one morning, a certain Lord Errol had been found, in his Buick, having been dispatched to the next world by a bullet to the head, under circumstances which remain unclear.

Population dynamics

The church was built to a Neo-Gothic design with dressed stone walls under a clay tiled roof supported by timber trusses.

Doors are made of heavy timber panels hung in pointed arch frames while windows are glazed in steel casements supported in rectangular frames.

There is a high ceiling finished in painted timber panels while the floor is finished in dressed masonry. The church has a seating capacity of 300 provided by carved dark wood pews.

St Francis Church was consencrated in 1952 by Reginald P Crabbe, Bishop of Mombasa.

St Francis Church started St Barnabas Otiende in 1965 to pastor Africans. There was an unwritten understanding that the church in Karen was reserved for the benefit of a “white only” congregation.

As Africans started buying property and settling in Karen in the late 60s and early 70s, a few attended church at St Francis but they were made to feel uncomfortable and unwanted.

The Africans must have been very frustrated by this “last bastion’’ of colonial rule persisting after independence.

It was not until 1975 when John Ball was appointed vicar at St Francis that things began to change. John Ball put in place a deliberate policy to embrace African membership, but it would take another four years before an African vicar, Bernard Amimo, was appointed in 1979.

Some white elements of the congregation strongly resisted the appointment and it took the intervention of Archbishop Manasses Kuria for them to yield.

Matters were helped somewhat by the fact that some of the white worshippers had become familiar with Bernard at All Saints Cathedral where he served.

In 1980, St Francis started two more churches, St Matthews Langata, Hardy, and Christ Church, Ngando.

A new church, alongside the old one, is about to be completed offering a seating capacity of 2,500 to meet the rapidly changing population dynamics of Karen. The current vicar at St Francis Church is Rev Joyce Kariuki.