East African Expressions of Christianity (review)

This addition to the East African Studies series, which has made its mark among Africanists with the publication of Berman and Lonsdale's Unhappy Valley, Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo's Siaya, and Sheriff's Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar, will, I am afraid, do little to further enhance its reputation. The book contains one exciting essay: Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba's study of the Bundu dia Kongo movement in Congo/Zaïre as a prime example of how Africans formulate an alternative emancipatory politics in terms of religion. Brimming with profound general insights in the predicament of African Christianities, this essay enters into a dialogue with the movement's main theologian, taking him seriously as a partner in a discussion in which religion and politics intertwine, but also criticizing him for keeping his spiritual liberation too much aloof from political liberation. Richard Waller's essay on Maasai Christians is a wonderfully meticulous account that does away with the essentialized notion that "Maasai are conservative and don't convert," suggesting, instead, that the unstated sedentary assumptions of the mission made it impossible to convert a nomadic people. The chapters on popular Roman Catholicism in Uganda and Tanzania, one by Ronald Kassimir, and the other by Christopher Comoro and John Sivalon, are to be recommended for their combination of interesting questions and good research, with new insights into the development of African Christianities, although they share with the other essays about African Roman Catholicism in this volume an inexplicable omission of any reference to priestly celibacy. The rest of the essays, although sometimes based on solid scholarship, and although a number of them fill some gaps in the historiography of East African Christianity, seldom offer new insights into African Christianity, even according to the criteria stated by Tom Spear in his introduction to the volume.

The difference between broader Africanist scholarship and the narrow field of East African history seems to explain why the editors have nevertheless framed their collection as offering something novel. The editors' intention seems to have been to give more room to the study of African initiatives in Christianity within mission churches, to counter the overemphasis on the study of African Christianity on missionaries and independent churches (p. 9). In the context of the study of East African Christianity, which has been rather behind on these topics as compared to works by Africanists working on West or South Africa, this is a worthwhile goal; however, the inclusion of an essay on Congo/Zaïre and the title of Spear's introduction ("Toward the History of African Christianity") suggest more ambitious goals, ones that can be upheld only by ignoring or downplaying the role of a considerable part of the Africanist literature in general, and the work of historical anthropologists in particular. Anyone reading this book from a general Africanist point of view will be surprised to find only sporadic references to the volumes of Adrian Hastings's Journal of Religion in Africa, and the central insights into African Christianity of important scholars—including Jean and John Comaroff, Johannes Fabian, Robin Horton, John Peel, and Matthew Schoffeleers—reiterated for East African scholarship without much reference to their work, except Giblin's wild and totally inaccurate swipe at the Comaroffs in the last essay of the volume (p. 309).

The editors' and authors' main interests seem to lie in matters of religion per se, as is testified by the theology of one of Gregory Maddox's essays and the peppering of the book as a whole by references to Lamin Sanneh. That is, in a sense, the most problematical aspect of this collection. On the one hand, Sanneh's emphasis on the centrality of the creativity and uncontrollability of translation is important and timely, and of course it is shared by anthropologists who have put forward comparable notions, derived from paying attention to the historical process...