The Quiet Wise Spirit: Edwin W Smith 1876-1957 and Africa (review)

W. John Young has produced a carefully researched account of the life of Edwin W. Smith by dividing his career into various phases, from his earliest days as a young missionary in Lesotho and South Africa, to his late seventies, when he continued to travel to Africa from Britain and return to deliver lectures about his observations. By the end, the reader will have learnt about Smith’s life and thought, but more importantly will have gained an intimate insight into his personality and an understanding of the widespread influence he held over at least two generations of scholars working on Africa. If the reader wants a critical analysis of Smith’s contribution to African studies, however, this is not the place to find it. The book’s rather short closing chapter, which considers Smith’s legacy, focuses on why Smith has not received the recognition he deserves, rather than offering a serious analysis of Smith’s theory and methods.

Despite this shortcoming, this book is still worth reading, since it invites the reader to engage with the author’s claim that Smith should be acknowledged as far more influential in African studies than has been realized previously. We gain meticulous details about Smith’s work in what is now the southern part of Zambia, where, in 1902, he was assigned by the Primitive Methodists as a missionary. We are told about his move back to Britain in 1915 to assume a post with the British and Foreign Bible Society, and how eventually he took charge of the Society’s translation work. During his long career with the Society, Young recounts how Smith made numerous contributions to the field of African studies. He was a founding member of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, whose other founding members included such notable figures as F. D. Lugard, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, J. H. Oldham, Wilhelm Schmidt and C. S. Seligman. In addition, Smith served as President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1933 to 1935. After leaving the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1939, he held visiting professorships in the United States, first at Hartford Theological Seminary and then at Fisk University. He was editor of Africa from 1945 to 1948 and concluded his career in 1950 with what might be regarded as his most lasting achievement, the edited volume African Ideas of God.

Even from this abbreviated list of Smith’s contributions to the study of the languages, cultures and religions of Africa, it is understandable why Young asserts that Smith’s ‘influence was clearly both wide and deep’. He asks: ‘Was there, indeed, any other person so expert in so many parts of African studies as well as the field as a whole?’ In answer to this question, he posits: ‘Anthropology in British Central Africa – he was the founder. Research interest in Africa – he set it going in earnest. African traditional religion – he outlined its chief characteristics. African Christian theology – he was its “fons et origo”.’ Young points out that Smith’s sympathetic approach to the study of African cultures enabled him to identify the main characteristics of African religions. Despite earlier descriptions of Africans by anthropologists and ethnologists as primitive and void of any idea of a divine being, Smith discovered that Africans everywhere have expressed their religious ideas under three categories: belief in a Supreme Being, a sense of dynamic power and a localized, kinship focus on ancestor spirits. These three main typological classifications, which could be used as a basis for comparing African religions with other world religions, prompted Young’s claim that Smith ‘founded the study of religion in Africa as a serious academic discipline’.

Young notes that African Ideas of God, which exercised a wide influence over subsequent scholars of African religions, has come under criticism for its stress on the High God as opposed to the many other aspects which appear...