Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga

Maxwell (African Gifts of the Spirit), an ecclesiastical history professor at the University of Cambridge, delivers an enlightening study of Pentecostal missionary activities in Central Africa from the late 19th to mid-20th century. The author focuses on cultural exchanges between the Luba-speaking people of Katanga and William Burton, the charismatic engineer–turned–Pentecostal preacher who founded the Congo Evangelistic Mission in 1915 and “provided some of the most intimate and detailed early ethnographic accounts, thereby helping to shape the development of the secular discipline of anthropology.” Examining firsthand accounts, photographs, illustrations, and artifacts, Maxwell suggests that Luba people “adapted missionary ideas to their own context,” detailing how the Luba “viewed Burton as a prophet standing in the indigenous tradition” and credited his “ability to fix a gun or heal” to traditional magical substances, rather than God. The author also describes how African Christian evangelists traveled with Burton as porters and provided crucial assistance to the missionary cause by conversing with audiences about what Burton “had really meant” during his public speeches. Brimming with nuance and acute historical detail, this makes clear that the Luba reception of such missionaries as Burton was an active process of fusion and exchange. Social scientists and Christian historians will be well rewarded by this thorough chronicle. (June)