Bwana Majwek and the Hospital by the Lake: The Story of Kendu

Gospel in Action

By Belden Orina, MSc · Bachelor of Theology (in progress)

Kenya’s first Adventist hospital began with a doctor operating on a kitchen table in a mud hut. A century later it still stands by Lake Victoria, and its story shows how healing prepared the way for the gospel in Kenya.

The sick were brought to Him

When Jesus began His ministry, healing and preaching went together, and the news spread. “And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people” (Matt. 4:24). The same thing happened to Paul on the island of Malta. After he healed the father of Publius, “others also, which had diseases in the island, came, and were healed” (Acts 28:9).

On the shores of Lake Victoria, in what is now Homa Bay County, Kenya, the same pattern was repeated in the twentieth century. This is the story of Kendu.

Gendia, 1906

Late in 1906 two missionaries landed at Mombasa: Arthur Carscallen, a Canadian, and Peter Nyambo, from Nyasaland, now Malawi. They travelled inland by train to Kisumu and on to Kendu Bay. A few kilometres inland, among the Luo people, they chose a site on Gendia Hill and built the first Seventh-day Adventist mission in Kenya.¹

The beginnings were slow. Carscallen learned the Luo language and became the first to put it into writing. The first ten Luo believers were baptized on May 21, 1911. In 1913 he brought a small printing press to Gendia, and that same year the British and Foreign Bible Society published his Luo translation of the Gospel of Matthew.² A chain of stations followed along the lake: Wire Hill, Rusinga Island, Kanyadoto, Karungu, Kisii (Nyanchwa) and Kamagambo.³ Then the First World War disrupted the work, and for nearly two years most of the workers could not reach their stations.⁴

Medicine at Kanyadoto

Healing was part of the work from early on. At Kanyadoto, south of Gendia, a German missionary named Alfred Matter began treating the sick who came to him. In 1917 Carscallen reported that Matter was doing more medical work than the rest of the missionaries, and that year Kanyadoto had its first baptisms.⁵

In 1921 the church sent a trained physician. Dr. George A. S. Madgwick had been born in Antigua in the West Indies, qualified in medicine in London in 1916, and served as medical director of the Stanborough Park Sanitarium in England. With his wife, Vera, and £75 for supplies, he went to Kanyadoto.⁶ It took time to win the people’s confidence.⁷

He worked with almost nothing. He operated on a kitchen table in a mud hut with a grass roof and sterilized his instruments in kerosene tins boiling over an open fire. Yet his surgery succeeded, and he operated on Europeans under the same conditions. The Luo called him Bwana Majwek. Mothers in the area had lost many infants, but babies born at the mission grew up healthy. People began to call the place a “fountain of blessing.”⁸ By 1924 Kanyadoto had 154 members, and a church leader called it “our strongest mission in Africa.”⁹

Valerius Tygart, Homa Bay, on Winam Gulf, Lake Victoria (2007). CC BY-SA 3.0.

A hospital by the lake

In 1924 the church decided to move the medical work to a healthier site near Gendia. Building began at Kendu in July 1924 on land given by Chief Okoth at Nyaburi. Madgwick himself made bricks and helped lay the foundation, and between patients he worked on the buildings.¹⁰ The hospital opened in 1925 with six beds. It was first called the Kenya Hospital, later Kendu Mission Hospital, and since 1980 Kendu Adventist Hospital.¹¹

Two Danish nurses came from the Skodsborg Sanitarium in Denmark: Karen Nielsen and Carentze Olsen. When they arrived, the hospital was barely finished. There were hardly any instruments and no ward beds, so seriously ill patients slept on grass mattresses on the floor. The nurses took turns going out to the villages to see patients and give medicine.¹² Karen Nielsen learned to speak Luo well, and alongside her nursing she shared the gospel. She served at Kendu for nearly thirty years.¹³

“They know that he fears the Lord”

Within ten years the hospital was well known. In 1934 a church leader visiting East Africa wrote, “Dr. Madgwick and the Kendu hospital are known far and wide.”¹⁴

In 1936 S. G. Maxwell, superintendent of the East African missions, explained why. A government hospital that gave free medicine and treatment was only thirty miles away, yet people passed it by to reach Kendu. They did so, he said, “because they know that he fears the Lord and that he is there for their good.”¹⁵

The church grew with the hospital. In the same report Maxwell said the Luo field had nearly 3,000 members. More than 600 people had been baptized in Kenya the year before, and for five years baptisms had averaged more than 500 a year. Church members themselves carried much of the work, visiting their neighbours and the markets in organized bands.¹⁶

Training Kenyans to heal

Madgwick left Kendu at the end of the 1930s to open a hospital at Ile-Ife in Nigeria, and later served in Ethiopia and South Africa.¹⁷ The work at Kendu continued. In 1948, under Dr. Donald Abbott, the hospital opened a school of nursing.¹⁸ It began by training nurse aides. Today the Kendu Adventist School of Medical Sciences trains nurses and clinical officers, and more than 10,000 nurses have graduated.¹⁹

The hospital also reached outward. In the 1960s, when Enock Keino saw how far the sick near Kebeneti had to travel for care, his community put up a building that became a clinic of Kendu. The doctor in charge, Dr. E. C. Kraft, saw patients there once a week.²⁰

Today Kendu Adventist Hospital has about 170 beds and is a referral hospital for Homa Bay and the surrounding counties. For many years it was the only major referral hospital in South Nyanza, and it received patients from Tanzania and Uganda.²¹

Two church leaders know this from their own beginnings. In a 2020 interview on Baraton TV, Pastor Geoffrey Mbwana, then a vice president of the General Conference, told the university chaplain, Dr. Rei Kesis, how he came to be born in Kenya. His father was a teacher at Tarime in northern Tanzania, and when his mother’s time came, his father took her to the nearest Adventist hospital, which was Kendu. Kesis answered that his story was the same. His father was working at Kaigat in Nandi, and when his mother was about to deliver, he too took her to Kendu.²²

On June 22, 2025, the hospital celebrated one hundred years of service.²³

SuSanA Secretariat, Lake Victoria near Kendu Bay (2012). CC BY 2.0.

What Kendu teaches

Kendu shows why medical missionary work is the best way to carry the gospel forward. A doctor with a kitchen table and a few tins won the trust of people who had good reason to be wary of strangers. Healthy babies, successful operations and nurses who came to the villages spoke before any sermon was preached. People walked past free care to reach a hospital where they knew they were loved.

Ellen White described this work: “In new fields no work is so successful as medical missionary work. It is the pioneer work. It is the gospel practised, the compassion of Christ revealed.”²⁴ She also wrote, “Ignorance can appreciate the work of relieving suffering, and minds darkened by prejudice will give way before the God-fearing medical missionary.”²⁵ Maxwell’s words about Madgwick say the same: the people came because he feared the Lord and was there for their good.

The work that began at Gendia and Kanyadoto now belongs to the church in Kenya and across Africa. Every congregation can carry it on in its own way: by teaching health, caring for the sick, training young people to heal, and joining all of it to the preaching of the Word. Then, as in Galilee and Malta and Kendu, the sick will come, and many will find the Saviour.

Cover picture: Africraigs, A Dhow Sailing on Lake Victoria (2010). CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notes

1. “Arthur Asa Grandville Carscallen,” Dictionary of African Christian Biography, dacb.org, reprinted from the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia; Eric Nyankanga Maangi, “Re-Imagining Mission: Early Educational and Evangelical Activities of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church to the Gusii of Western Kenya,” International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (2024).
2. “Carscallen,” DACB; “Arthur Carscallen,” Wikipedia, citing the DACB and contemporary reports.
3. “Carscallen,” DACB.
4. Ibid.
5. “Kanyadoto Mission,” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, encyclopedia.adventist.org, citing Review and Herald, January 31, 1918, 13.
6. “George Madgwick,” DACB, dacb.org, reprinted from the Seventh-day Adventist Encyclopedia.
7. Ibid.
8. “Kanyadoto Mission,” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, citing Virgil E. Robinson, Third Angel over Africa, and oral interviews at Rapedhi (2019).
9. Ibid., citing Review and Herald, June 26, 1924, 18.
10. “Kanyadoto Mission,” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists; “Madgwick, George Alexander Sheridon (1892–1954),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists; George Odiwuor, “Kendu Adventist Hospital Celebrates a Century of Existence,” Daily Nation, June 2025.
11. George O. Opundo, “Kendu Adventist Hospital,” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, encyclopedia.adventist.org.
12. Godfrey K. Sang, “Nielsen, Karen (1896–1990),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists.
13. Ibid.
14. C. V. Anderson, “Our Work in East Africa,” periodical of the Northern European Division, August 1934, 1, adventistarchives.org.
15. S. G. Maxwell, “The Gospel in East Africa,” British Advent Messenger, August 9, 1936, adventistarchives.org.
16. Ibid.
17. “Madgwick,” DACB.
18. Godfrey K. Sang, “Abbott, Donald Humphrey (1908–1973),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, encyclopedia.adventist.org; Opundo, “Kendu Adventist Hospital.”
19. Opundo, “Kendu Adventist Hospital.”
20. Godfrey K. Sang, “Keino, Enock Kipkerich araap (1901–1978),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists.
21. Opundo, “Kendu Adventist Hospital.”
22. Geoffrey Mbwana, interview by Rei Kesis, “One on One with Pr. Geoffrey Mbwana – GC General Vice President,” part 1, Baraton TV, February 24, 2020, YouTube, from about 2:45.
23. Maureen Were, “Kendu Adventist Hospital Celebrates 100 Years of Healing and Hope,” Adventist Review, July 2025, adventistreview.org.
24. Ellen G. White, “Medical Missionary Work,” Pacific Union Recorder, August 29, 1901, egwwritings.org.
25. Ellen G. White, Manuscript 58, 1901, egwwritings.org.

Bibliography

Anderson, C. V. “Our Work in East Africa.” Periodical of the Northern European Division, August 1934.

Dictionary of African Christian Biography. “Carscallen, Arthur Asa Grandville” and “Madgwick, George.”

Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists. “Kanyadoto Mission”; “Kendu Adventist Hospital”; “Madgwick, George Alexander Sheridon”; “Nielsen, Karen”; “Abbott, Donald Humphrey”; “Keino, Enock Kipkerich araap.”

Maxwell, S. G. “The Gospel in East Africa.” British Advent Messenger, August 9, 1936.

Mbwana, Geoffrey. Interview by Rei Kesis. “One on One with Pr. Geoffrey Mbwana – GC General Vice President,” part 1. Baraton TV, February 24, 2020. YouTube.

Odiwuor, George. “Kendu Adventist Hospital Celebrates a Century of Existence.” Daily Nation, June 2025.

Were, Maureen. “Kendu Adventist Hospital Celebrates 100 Years of Healing and Hope.” Adventist Review, July 2025.

White, Ellen G. “Medical Missionary Work.” Pacific Union Recorder, August 29, 1901.

White, Ellen G. Manuscript 58, 1901.