East African Christian Networks

These two studies of Christianity in East Africa are welcome additions to the expanding corpus of scholarship that seeks to uncover the frequently ambiguous ways in which European missionary traditions were appropriated and re-fashioned by African peoples. Both Andreana Prichard and Jason Bruner consider African initiative to have had greater room for maneuver in this process than some other influential treatments, notably by Jean and John Comaroff, allow. Prichard, indeed, is bold enough to assert (152) that “scholars of African Christianity have shown [my italics] that ‘conversion’ to Christianity was not an act of surrender on the part of Africans or a ‘colonization of consciousness’ by European evangelists.” Both authors focus on the ways in which African converts constructed new communal networks of affect and allegiance. These networks transcended locality and ethnicity as African Christians formed extended families of spiritual kinship, marked out by boundaries of shared behavior, distinctive religious practice, and even dress.

Both books are concerned with the indigenization of Anglicanism in East Africa, but the two studies represent opposing ends of the Anglican ecclesiastical spectrum. In Sisters in Spirit: Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860–1970, Prichard examines the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), and in particular the resilient community of affect and shared memory that linked together the former pupils of Mbweni Girls’ School (founded in 1887) in Zanzibar, most of them freed slaves. Scattered throughout the Tanzanian mainland in the pursuit of their mission, these “sisters in spirit” were nurtured by the UMCA as the future wives of those who would become the ordained leadership of the African Anglican church. The reserved Tractarian theological tradition of the UMCA eschewed evangelical ideas of unwrapping the full package of Christian truth by unrestrained preaching to the “heathen,” relying instead on slow cumulative revelation of the meaning of the gospel through ritual practice, teaching of the young, and the moral example of Christian companionate marriage. In this gradualist strategy of influence, the role of Christian wives and mothers was of critical importance.

Bruner’s book, Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda, analyzes the East African or balokole (Luganda for “saved ones”) Revival that began in Rwanda in the 1930s. This movement spread throughout most of East Africa, leaving an enduring imprint on evangelical Protestantism in the region, especially on the missions of the Church Missionary Society and its emphatically evangelical affiliate, the Ruanda General and Medical Mission. Bruner’s principal focus is on southwestern Uganda, where the Revival had its greatest impact. Adherents of the Revival formed their own trans-local and cosmopolitan community of the Spirit. They described themselves as “walking in the light,” a state of radical mutual openness and spiritual egalitarianism. Converts entered the fellowship of the light by publicly confessing their sins, putting right their wrongs done to others, and then calling on fellow Africans, and even missionaries, to walk the same path of shocking spiritual and moral transparency.

This radically discontinuous understanding of conversion as a moment in time defined by the public revelation of one’s sins stands in stark contrast to the Catholic gradualism of the UMCA. Although clearly indebted to the victorious life teaching of missionaries schooled in the Keswick Convention, most notably the Revival’s father figure Joe E. Church, the revivalists’ insistence on the textual biblical justification for public disclosure of sin was disputed by some Ruanda Mission missionaries. Yet, after due consideration, Bruner finally rejects the suggestion made by various other interpreters that this emphasis was drawn from the initiatory practice of emandwa possession cults. He is thus content neither with exogenous nor endogenous theories concerning the source...