Daive Njuguna’s first Chinese class at the University of Nairobi was the most fun he’d ever had in college. The teacher was a jovial young woman from China who cheerfully corrected her students as they struggled to pronounce ni hao (hello) and qing (please) and xie xie (thank you). Njuguna laughed throughout the class.
He was only vaguely aware that the Chinese government was funding the course via the Confucius Institute, part of Beijing’s “cultural soft power” offensive to broaden its global influence.
The videos that Njuguna’s teacher played in class were designed to impress students with the superiority of the Chinese way. But what Njuguna thought as he watched those videos was These people really need the gospel.
That was in 2018, a few months after Njuguna had heard on the radio that the Chinese government persecutes Christians and had begun praying for them. He knew there was a growing, if largely out-of-sight, Chinese population in Kenya.
So he also prayed, “Lord, I want to get more involved with the Chinese. But where are they?”
Within the past decade, thousands of Chinese workers have migrated to Kenya. They have built expressways and railways and condos and malls; opened supermarkets and eateries, selling tongue-numbing Sichuan pork and grilled lamb skewers; and established themselves as hawkers of toys and electronics at one of Nairobi’s largest open-air markets.
Kenya keeps no official count of its Chinese population, though estimates range from 20,000 to 40,000 to 50,000. According to the Joshua Project, about 4 percent of them identify as Christian, which makes them one of the most unreached communities in a country where roughly 85 percent of people claim the Christian faith.
Another student, Wanjiku Maina, also had trouble meeting Chinese people, even when she went looking for them on college campuses. In 2016, Maina had written in a notebook, I would like to reach out to Asians, and use language teaching as a platform. At the time, she was doing a year-long internship with the Mission Campaign Network, a local organization that mobilizes Africans, and she had had her heart set on becoming a missionary in Vietnam. But during one of her classes, a presenter suggested there were unreached people in Kenya, maybe even among her neighbors.
That switched Maina’s perspective. She started praying, “God, is Vietnam something you placed in my heart? Or maybe I just want to go abroad?”
Meanwhile, she was reading the news about China’s mega construction projects in Africa and was amazed to see Chinese companies operating, of all places, in her grandmother’s rural village, building a dam. She saw memes about Chinese people too. Dogs are disappearing, one joke went, implying that they eat canines. Maina didn’t pay those stereotypes any mind. Her prayers turned toward her country’s Chinese community.
It didn’t make sense to Maina and Njuguna that they should feel a special affection for Chinese people. They didn’t know the language or the culture. They didn’t have a single Chinese confidant. Many Kenyans do business with Chinese companies and labor in their factories, but the two communities rarely mingle. At work and in public, they eat separate meals at separate tables. It’s a widely accepted fact, I was told when I visited Kenya in 2023, that Kenyans and Chinese are not friends.
Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity TodayBy many estimates, China has exported more than a million of its citizens to the African continent—traders, managers, farmers, doctors, and restaurateurs who are spread from Mozambique to Senegal to Liberia. If you want to make big money fast, the thinking in China goes, set sail to Africa.
China has touted itself and its people as better partners for Africa than paternalistic Westerners and their one-way charity. Whereas Americans and Europeans sought to conquer and ravage Africa, the Chinese government claims, it seeks “partnership” and “cooperation” based on “equality and mutual benefit.”
Still, many Africans, remembering the colonial days, have watched the influx of fortune-seekers with unease. The Asian superpower clearly wields the upper hand, as many African nations have become deeply indebted to China. (Kenya now spends more than half of its national revenue on debt, much of it owed to China.) Since President Xi Jinping launched his ambitious Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, financing and building massive infrastructure projects across the globe, China has expanded its presence in almost every country in Africa.
Though Kenya’s Chinese community is small, China’s influence in Kenya is everywhere. Kenya was an early participant in the Belt and Road Initiative. A Chinese company built the controversial Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, which cost $4.7 billion and is losing money, and the $764 million Nairobi Expressway, which opened in May 2022 and stands almost empty because most locals cannot afford the tolls.
The Chinese embassy in Kenya boasts that the more than 400 Chinese businesses operating in the country have provided 130,000 jobs for locals. But that hasn’t quelled local fears of unfair competition from Chinese migrants who arrive with more capital and better import networks. Kenyans complain that Chinese employers only hire them for menial jobs and pay them a fraction of what they pay Chinese workers for the same roles.
In March of 2023, hundreds of Kenyan traders marched in Nairobi, carrying signs calling for the government to “Stop China Invasion!” and chanting “Chinese must go!” Such fears and resentment have mixed with reports of racist behavior by Chinese employees that have gone viral online.
And yet, amid such fraught international and social dynamics, there’s Njuguna, whose eyes light up when he hears Chinese being spoken. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oooh! I can’t wait to go talk to them.’”
And although both communities tend to self-segregate, there’s Maina, who now spends more time with Chinese than with Kenyans. Five years ago, she didn’t eat seafood. Now she can pick apart a whole gingery steamed fish with chopsticks and suck the pink flesh from a whiskery, wok-fried shrimp.
Wayne and Irene, an ethnic-Chinese missionary couple from Malaysia, call Njuguna and Maina “black pearls.”
“Pearls are precious, but black pearls are even rarer,” Irene said, a reference not to the Kenyans’ skin color but to the valuable gemstone. Njuguna and Maina “are the kind of black pearls that you can’t just find in any churches.”
They should know. Wayne and Irene, who asked that only their first names be used to protect their ministry from interference by the Chinese government, had been trying to get Kenyan Christians to engage with Chinese immigrants since the couple moved to Nairobi in 2014.
In February 2016, they founded International Fellowship, a multicultural community that offers Chinese ministry training and bilingual Sunday services and that they hoped would be a model for other Kenyan churches. To promote it, they visited a dozen churches and helped organize 80 hours of training on Chinese language and culture. People showed up, curious. But when it came time to commit, “they disappeared,” Irene said.
Once, after Wayne led a seminar at a church, a young man approached him and said, “Wow, I never once thought that the Chinese might need the gospel too!”
Wayne asked him why not. The man replied, “Because the Chinese are rich! They make our watches, computers, and headphones.”
“The idea of missions is still trapped in the paradigm of from the rich to the poor, from urban to village, the haves to the have-nots,” Wayne said. Many locals see the Chinese community in Africa as better educated and more powerful, perhaps even more “blessed.”
Adding to the cultural gulf is the fact that many Chinese expats don’t plan to stay in Kenya permanently. They work long hours, often including weekends. One middle-aged hot pot restaurant owner from Fujian Province told me that he and his wife work seven days a week, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. When I asked if they interact with any locals, he shrugged. “We have no time outside of work,” he said, adding they hoped eventually to go back to China. Why make friends?
Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity TodayIn August 2018, Maina visited International Fellowship’s Sunday service. The 25-year-old was late, so she slipped into a seat at the back.
Maina, who is quiet and has a kind face, had been looking for ways to meet Chinese people when someone told her about the fellowship. About 30 Kenyans and Chinese filled the tiny, warm room; Maina observed them in awe.
At the end of the service, a Chinese woman stood to give her testimony in Mandarin, while Wayne interpreted in English. The woman said she was returning to China soon, and she thanked the congregation for all their care and love—life in Kenya would have been so lonely without them, she said.
At the time, Maina had been meditating on Psalm 146:9: “The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.” As she looked around at the Chinese worshipers, she saw not the privilege that other Kenyans saw, but vulnerability and isolation. Maina sensed God whispering to her, “Yes, I’ve been watching over them. I’ve been taking care of them.”
After that first Sunday service, Maina joined International Fellowship’s prayer meetings, where a small team gathered every Thursday morning at a Chinese family’s house. This is it, Maina thought, her excitement growing. This is home.
The following year, when Wayne and Irene visited a large church to promote International Fellowship, Njuguna was in the audience. The lanky 23-year-old with aviator glasses felt his heart flutter as he listened to the presentation. Afterward, he beelined to the missionaries. “I also want to reach out to the Chinese!” he said. “I did not know there were people who did this.”
And just like that, Wayne and Irene had found their two black pearls. “God called them,” Irene said. “It had nothing to do with us.”
At 4 foot 7, Maina is so petite that she rolls up the bottom of her jeans. She can fade into the background—until she opens her mouth and speaks fluent Mandarin, perfectly hitting every intonation.
When Maina first told her parents she wanted to be a full-time missionary to Chinese people, they were displeased. Her father is a pastor, her mother an elder and Sunday school teacher. They had approved of their daughter’s involvement in ministry during university. But when Maina began talking about becoming a missionary to Vietnam, they grew alarmed. All they knew about Vietnam was the bloody American war movies. And what about getting a real job? Their daughter was smart, with a degree in linguistics. Why throw all that away? “Don’t go,” they begged her.
And then, all of a sudden, Maina stopped talking about Vietnam and began talking instead about becoming a missionary to Kenya’s Chinese community.
It filled her parents with new anxieties. How was she going to raise funds to support herself as a missionary in Kenya? They worried she would fall into “a life of begging.”
But she was hooked from her first encounter with International Fellowship. “I want to be part of this,” Maina resolved that day.
To learn Mandarin, she attended a training center called Discovery Chinese Cultural Center, run by a Christian Kenyan woman who partners with International Fellowship. Maina began there in 2019 and studied for two years, then turned to self-study. As her parents feared, she struggled with finances. The center’s director offered her extensions on her tuition payments.
Maina also began teaching English to a group of Chinese women every Tuesday. It was more social club than English class. Maina would instruct them on basic vocabulary words—“This is a bus. This is a car.”—and the women followed along, repeating “bus” and “car” for a few minutes before dissolving into giggles and reverting to Mandarin chatter.
That didn’t bother Maina. It was to her gain, listening to their melodious Chinese, studying their facial expressions and the ways their personalities bloomed when they could freely express themselves. She doesn’t know if these women learned any English, but her own Mandarin improved. Wayne says Maina is the best non-native speaker he’s met in Kenya.
Friends of friends began hiring Maina for private tutoring. Then Chinese businessmen hired her to teach them English and Swahili. Without any advertising, she amassed enough students to rent a tiny tutoring space in Nairobi and support herself.
Sometimes, Maina flips back to her old notebook in which, seven years ago, she had journaled about her desire to reach Asians and teach. “God is good,” she said.
Her parents no longer ask when she’s going to find a job. They see her working. And they see God working.
Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity TodayIn June 2023, Maina was hired by three Chinese visitors working for a company that sells stonecutting machines. She interpreted for them at a trade show. She accompanied them on a safari ride where they fed the giraffes. And toward the end of the trip, they stopped by a factory that uses the company’s machinery.
The factory boss, an agitated Indian man, complained that the machines weren’t working properly and demanded that the Chinese team fix the problem. But neither party could understand each other, so Maina stood in the middle, trying to translate difficult technical words between English and Mandarin while everyone’s patience wore thin.
Meanwhile, the Kenyans who worked directly with the machines told Maina in Swahili that their boss was confusing the machine with another model. “We’ve been telling him this,” they told her. “But he refuses to listen to us.”
Maina felt the misunderstanding could have been resolved in ten minutes, but it took her hours to explain the mistake to the boss and the Chinese team. It was like “two bulls fighting,” she recalled, “and the Kenyans are the grass. The Chinese and the Indian are up here”—she raised a hand up to her head, then lowered it to her belly—“and the Kenyans are down there.”
What Maina and Njuguna do as missionaries seems simple: They meet Chinese people, they befriend them, they look for ways to share the gospel. It is 101-level relational evangelism, sometimes called incarnation evangelism or friendship evangelism. But how do you befriend someone who might not see you as an equal?
Njuguna remembers the dirty expressions he received when he visited Chinese homes. Not realizing he could understand them, his hosts would mutter, “Zhe ge ren shi shenme?” What’s up with this person? Some told him to stay outside. Once, Njuguna accompanied some Chinese friends to a Chinese home for a meal, and someone barked in Mandarin, “Don’t give him our utensils!” Njuguna’s friends had to borrow a plate and spoon for him from neighbors.
But Kenyans also discriminate against Chinese. Kenyan officials are known to target Chinese immigrants and harass them for bribes. Wayne says he regularly gets stopped and fined by police for offenses such as having a dirty license plate.
When Maina and Njuguna intentionally break those kinds of barriers to befriend people, that’s the gospel coming alive, Wayne said. “We believe that the gospel brings reconciliation. The Chinese and the Kenyans are not friends. But we believe the possibility of friendship develops in Jesus Christ.”
In 2021, a Chinese family that attended International Fellowship invited Njuguna to move and live with them in Eldoret, a town in western Kenya. They hired Njuguna to help manage their sheet metal factory.
At times, relations were strained. The family talked to him in a commanding tone and expected him to work on holidays. “They treated me as if I were a tool,” Njuguna said. He didn’t tell them they paid him too little to treat him that way. Instead, he told them, “Guys, I’m your friend. I’m here to help you and work with you. But you can’t use me like I’m a fork.”
He held his ground, but he also empathized with the Chinese family. They had struggled since arriving in Kenya. The husband had been jailed for 10 hours over some purported issues with his immigration paperwork. (The issue was resolved after he paid them.) A landlord had cheated them out of almost $5,000.
“So by the time I met this family, there was a lot of hurt,” Njuguna recalled. “They didn’t trust anyone. Within Chinese circles, they all say the same thing: Don’t trust the Kenyans.” Though the family was friendly to Njuguna, he sensed an underlying tension. He felt that Chinese people tend to treat relationships as transactional. But what if a Kenyan were to display the unmerited grace that Christ modeled on the cross and love without expecting anything in return?
Njuguna offered to help the family recover the $5,000 from the landlord. They were wary—they didn’t want more trouble—but Njuguna insisted. “Who says you can’t get justice just because this isn’t your country?” He called a lawyer, and eventually the family got their money back.
That was one barrier broken down.
The second crumbled inside their home. The family’s then eight-year-old son, Jason, had been diagnosed with ADHD. When his behavior turned unruly, his parents beat him. They were so busy with work that they barely noticed Jason hanging out with kids who spewed profanity and watched violent television shows. But Njuguna had bonded with Jason—who called the Kenyan man shushu, or uncle. “Let me take over the disciplining,” Njuguna told the exhausted parents. They consented.
Njuguna disciplined Jason the way his mother disciplined him: with love and prayer. He set firm boundaries and explained the reasons for any consequences. He prayed with him after each discipline session. “I saw him like he’s my son,” Njuguna said.
After more than a year in Eldoret, Njuguna felt convicted to return to Nairobi to serve as a full-time missionary among the Chinese community. His father, a pastor himself, tried to dissuade him. So many young Kenyans are hungry for secure jobs like his in Eldoret, he told Njuguna. Maybe God had provided it for a reason.
“I feel like God is calling me to do this,” Njuguna said.
His mother told him, “Whatever God is calling you to do, do it.”
Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity TodayNjuguna plays the guitar. In March 2023, two months after he returned to Nairobi, a Chinese restaurant hired him to perform live music on Saturday nights. Njuguna saw it as an exciting outreach opportunity. He made some phone calls to talented friends, including a vocalist who could sing Chinese pop songs.
Every weekend, at a courtyard next to an outdoor grill piled with caramelizing meat skewers, they played traditional Chinese folk songs and Christian hymns. The restaurant patrons were thrilled. They recorded with cell phones, tipped generously, and made offers to hire the band for other gigs.
Once, after the group played a Swahili hymn about prayer, a man approached with his hand on his heart. “That song!” he exclaimed in Mandarin. “It touches me. Can you play it again?”
But Njuguna clashed with his band members. Some of them wanted to draw bigger crowds by playing popular songs with sexual content that Njuguna felt was inappropriate.
“It would be like preaching water and drinking wine,” Njuguna said, quoting a common Kenyan saying. Within six months, Njuguna shut the band down. It was clear his friends saw the music ministry as a moneymaking gig, and if they were going to be in constant conflict, it was better to end it.
“It’s not easy,” Njuguna told me. “Finding that one person with the same desire so we can work together is so hard.”
After being the recipient of foreign aid and missions for so long, many Africans think “mission work is for foreigners,” he said. A local missionary who feels called to reach the Chinese must compete for interest in Kenyan churches already pulled in many directions by many needs.
For two years, Njuguna had been pestering his pastors about how they could reach the Chinese community. He interned at Mamlaka Hill Chapel, a nondenominational church with more than 1,000 members and a main campus near the University of Nairobi, home to the Chinese government’s first Confucius Institute in Africa. Most of the institute teachers lived in a gated apartment complex a mere five-minute walk from the church.
Njuguna told pastors: People from one of the least religious countries in the world flew 5,000 miles to live a stone’s throw from a church whose mission statement is “to build godly communities that will impact the nations for Christ.” Could the church not see what a providential opportunity this was?
On a Sunday afternoon, I sat in a pastor’s office with Njuguna and several other Mamlaka leaders, lunching on pilaf and chicken drumsticks.
It’s not that there’s no interest in cross-cultural missions, senior pastor Samuel Ithiga told me. Mamlaka had recently sent a team of 27 Kenyans to Germany and another couple to New Zealand. “Never thought of the Chinese, though.”
“Why not?” I asked. The Chinese community was at least a decade old, wasn’t it?
The pastors nodded. Many of their members do business with the Chinese. One pastor lives on Ngong Road, home to several Chinatowns. In fact, he said, he’s often awakened in the night by drunk Chinese men singing loud karaoke next door. They don’t even have the decency to sing well, he joked. Ithiga said he is on a soccer team with a friendly Chinese man who isn’t a Christian and is hungry for friends.
“The Chinese are a very unique ministry,” said assistant bishop Richard Munala. “We want the church to [reach Chinese people]. But we need someone who can teach us how.”
“The only thing I know about the Chinese is kung fu movies,” interjected one pastor. Everyone laughed.
“It’s still very new to us,” Ithiga said. “It needs a champion, somebody who sort of helps the rest of us see, Oh look! There’s an opportunity here.”
When Njuguna first started talking about his heart for Chinese people, the pastors thought, “Wow, good for you,” Ithiga recalled. “But then he kept coming to us and telling us, ‘I’m not taking any jobs. God is telling me to be more serious about this.’ Then it was like, whoa. It’s getting scary,” Ithiga joked. “What are you doing? Go get yourself a job!”
Then Njuguna brought his friends from International Fellowship. The pastors took Njuguna’s vision more seriously when they saw that he had partners behind him, people like Wayne and Irene and Maina. It was a “no-brainer” after that, Ithiga said. Mamlaka Hill Chapel commissioned Njuguna as their full-time missionary to the Chinese community.
Photograph by KC Cheng for Christianity TodayOn July 9, 2023, the morning of his commissioning service, Njuguna knew exactly what he was going to wear.
About five years ago, when he was praying for his Chinese neighbors, he spotted a shirt at a secondhand market. It was a black pullover tunic, with a western collar, long fitted sleeves, and a hem that reached down to his knees. It wasn’t quite a Kenyan kanzu, nor was it an Indian kurta, but it vaguely reminded him of a changshan, a long robe worn by men in China in the early 1900s. So he bought it.
Since then, Njuguna has learned that people don’t wear black changshans, as they’re typically burial attire. But on commission day, Njuguna resurrected the shirt from his closet. It seemed fitting that he should wear it that morning as a symbol of his love for the Chinese community.
During the service, Ithiga announced that Mamlaka Hill Chapel would be pursuing a new mission field. “What God is doing in our times is he’s sending the Chinese people our way, so that we may create friendship, create understanding with them, and hopefully get to share our faith,” he told the church. “And God has raised a Moses from our midst.”
Njuguna walked up to the stage with a nervous grin.
“It’s not like you’ve ever gone to China,” Ithiga said to Njuguna, launching an onstage exchange. So how did he develop a heart for Chinese people?
But he had been to China, Njuguna replied. “I’ve gone to Chinatown, China City in Kilimani . . .” He listed all the bustling Chinese hubs in Nairobi, and the congregation chortled. Everyone knew these places, even if few had set foot in them.
“A mark of a great church is a church that’s fulfilling the Great Commission,” Munala said as he got ready to anoint Njuguna. God has raised Njuguna as their “champion” to reach out to Chinese communities in Kenya, “not only so we can feel good that we have someone out there doing mission work to the Chinese, but he will be the door for us—all of you, you and I”—he pointed with his Bible at the congregation and to himself—“to do ministry to the Chinese.”
Then the pastor dipped his finger in oil, drew a cross over Njuguna’s forehead, and prayed over him.
As Njuguna knelt, face solemn, his parents stood beside him, also somber. His father, a man of few words, didn’t say much. His mother spoke for him when she told her son, “We are so proud of you.”
Standing onstage too was the entire core team from International Fellowship, representing six different countries: Malaysia, China, Germany, Switzerland, the United States, and Kenya. Wayne and Irene beamed. Njuguna had waited two years for his church to embrace his mission, persevering when people told him he should give up.
“What a beautiful picture,” Ithiga marveled, looking at the people onstage. “People from different nations, standing right here saying, ‘We want to reach the Chinese for the kingdom of God.’ And I love how this will be like at the end of the age when we are standing there, people from every tongue and nation, praising the nation of the Lord.”
Then he added, “And we, Kenya, will not be left behind.”
Sophia Lee is global staff writer at CT.
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "Called to Kenya's Chinatowns".
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