LAP Lambert Academic Publishing Childlessness as a challenge in African Christianity: Sampling the case for the Kikuyu of Kenya

The book endeavors to explore the traditional value of children in African families. From the outset, the author has traced the traditional concepts of marriage, meaning and purpose of the family. It has become a well established fact that, like in the Gikuyu and Mumbi myth of their origin, traditional African myths connect marriage and childbearing as the original purpose of the creation of male and female by whoever or whichever power or force that did it. Therefore, since religion has to do with the relationship between humanity and divinity, Africans hold the belief that their Creator, to whom everything belongs and from whom everything originated demands every male and female person to marry and procreate. Thus marriage and childbearing is held as a religious obligation. It demonstrates that the Western “imported” or imposed Christianity has affected the African traditional concept, purpose and value of marriage and childbearing. In the name of Christianity, marriage was divinely intended for life long companionship between man and woman with or without children. Paradoxically, the same Western Christianity may accept divorce, thus curtailing the marriage life.