Elijah Masinde, son of Nameme the future prophet, founded Dini ya Msambwa when he left the Friends’ Church in 1935 after the church objected to his plans to take a second wife, a Ugandan. He had married his first wife Sarah Nanyama in a wedding conducted by the Friends Church in 1932.
Eventually he married a second wife and the Quakers expelled him from church. He then left home to work as a guard at the Bungoma Law Courts. He later married four other wives; the youngest is 60-year-old Gladys Masinde.