Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
brill.nl/jra
Classifying African Christianities, Part Two:
The Anthropology of Christianity and
Generations of African Christians
Paul Kollman
130 Malloy Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA
pkollman@nd.edu
Abstract
Current approaches to classifying African Christianities include generalizing approaches like
Ogbu Kalu’s assertion of ongoing revival and particular studies associated with the anthropology
of Christianity. Here I argue for a generational approach to African Christian communities, noting what has been achieved and what remains to be done.
Two recent ethnographies show the promise in the anthropology of Christianity for fruitful
comparative approaches to African Christianity. Dorothy Hodgson’s study of Catholic evangelization of the Maasai and Matthew Engelke’s examination of a Zimbabwean independent church
both develop concepts—inculturation and semiotic ideology, respectively—that prioritize African theological work in making Christianity suitable for African believers. Such conceptual
approaches can include African Christians overlooked in past classifications and promote insightful comparisons. However, concepts that offer a comparative framework to address sociological
belonging to mission-founded churches are still needed for a generational approach to African
Christian communities.
Keywords
African Christianity, Pentecostalism, African Independent Churches, anthropology of Christianity,
generations, Ogbu Kalu, inculturation
This is the second part of an article analyzing past and current approaches to
classification of Christianity in Africa. The first described past approaches,
identifying four indices by which African Christianities have been commonly
classified: 1) religious orthodoxy (as orthodox or heretical), 2) ecclesial loyalty
(as loyal or independent), 3) cultural profile (as African or foreign), and
4) political orientation (as engaged or withdrawn). In evaluating these indices,
I noted that despite their widespread application they have clear limitations.
They reflect Africa’s colonialist history, and can be imprecise and subjective.
In addition, their overt dichotomizing oversimplifies the varieties in African
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010
DOI: 10.1163/157006610X498724
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
119
Christianities. Finally, since they mostly emerged from categorizations of African independent or initiated churches (or AICs), their legacy has induced
scholarly inattentiveness to non-AIC Protestants and Catholics.
Part one thus showed how recent growth in Pentecostal and charismatic
Christianity in Africa (or P/c, an abbreviation followed here) has exposed
those limitations even more. P/c has led certain scholars, notably the late
Ogbu Kalu, to assert a longstanding pattern of revivalism within African
Christianity, from the earliest days of sub-Saharan African Christianity to the
present, rooted in African primal religiosity.1 Kalu’s location of revivalist manifestations of African Christianity in a single ‘trail of ferment’ reflects the vitality of P/c in Africa, and joins a chorus emphasizing the salience of African
Christianity and P/c in the world Christian movement.2
Kalu’s approach has questionable aspects: a belief in a single African worldview underlying these manifestations of Christianity, theological assumptions
in his promotion of African church history, and the ongoing tendency to overlook African Christian vitality in mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church. But Kalu valuably appreciates discernible continuities across time
and space, and emphasizes Christianity’s diverse appeals to Africans. He thus
moves beyond reflexive antiessentialism frustrating any classificatory project.
In addition, he commendably foregrounds African agency in the continent’s
history of Christianity.
Kalu’s has not been the only response to the growth of Christianity in Africa.
Several anthropologists are generating important research into African Christianity, some in pursuit of foundations for an ‘anthropology of Christianity’.
Proponents envision this emergent subfield as not establishing set positions
about Christianity; instead, they want a richer scholarly conversation among
analysts to further ‘a more self-conscious engagement with Christianity as a
cultural logic’.3 Pursuing a more comparative approach, they promote better
familiarity with theology and foreground what some call ‘the break with the
past’ (Engelke 2004: 85) that many newer Christians describe themselves as
having made.
Kalu’s claim for transhistorical connections in African Christian movements
from the seventeenth century to present-day P/c looks fundamentally opposed
to typical anthropological inclinations to pay close attention to individual
cases. Yet his unifying claim shares important emphases with appeals for an
anthropology of Christianity. First, both draw on the growth of P/c. Second,
both stress the importance of theology in understanding African Christianity.
Here I argue that both Kalu’s assertion of continuity and studies associated
with the anthropology of Christianity point ways forward in grasping African
Christian vitality. Kalu discerns continuities in African Christianity, attends to
120
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Christianity’s appeal to Africans, and emphasizes African initiatives in Christian creativity. The anthropology of Christianity produces heuristic concepts
that encourage comparative and contrastive work, generating new insights into
African Christian theological creativity. The anthropology of Christianity also
creates openings for meeting a distinct need, namely a generational approach
to collective African Christian identity. Such an approach historically connects
so-called ‘missionary’ Christianity with today’s vital African Christianity. Together,
Kalu’s work and the anthropology of Christianity move beyond previous classificatory tendencies to include non-AIC, non-P/c Christians.
After a discussion of the place of theology in the developing anthropology
of Christianity, this article turns to two recent studies of Christianity in Africa
that show the benefits of attention to theology: Dorothy Hodgson’s analysis of
Catholic evangelization among the Maasai in Tanzania (2005), and Matthew
Engelke’s study of an African independent Christian church in Zimbabwe
(2007). After discussing how these ethnographies use theology to draw on and
develop the concepts of inculturation and semiotic ideology, I show how they
address a second concern of those pursuing the anthropology of Christianity,
namely the problem of continuity in the identities of Africans before and after
they become Christian. I then outline a theory of generations suitable for
African Christianity and suggest needs for future development.
As I will argue, we have substantial research on why Christianity appeals to
Africans, epitomized by Kalu’s extensive work. We also have interesting studies
about how Africans have inculturated Christianity. Less developed are historical cases that describe African Christian generations between the initial appeal
of Christianity and the forging of Christian identities. Studies foregrounding
African Christian belonging are needed, especially the belonging to missionfounded churches that characterizes most African Christians (Maxwell 2006:
388). Concepts that grasp stages and regularities in such belonging will emerge
from such studies, encouraging comparative analysis of evolving communities
of African Christians.
Theology’s Place in the Anthropology of Christianity
In recent years several anthropologists studying religion have urged their peers
to improve their theological understanding. Such appeals often accompany
calls to develop the anthropology of Christianity as a substantial disciplinary
subfield. Fenella Cannell thus contrasts the rich knowledge of theology possessed by the founders of modern social science—Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—with a lack of such awareness among anthropologists today. This lack,
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
121
she writes, ‘has tended to promote the inflexible attachment of the study of
Christianity to a theory of modernity, and a downgrading of any serious
engagement with what Christianity, in all its historical particularity, might
mean’ (Cannell 2006: 45).
Prominent among anthropologists heeding Cannell’s call and also promoting the anthropology of Christianity is Joel Robbins, who wrote an influential
ethnographic study of Urapmin Christians in New Guinea (2004). Acknowledging the difficulty of interpreting his own ethnographic results due to his
theological ignorance, Robbins admits, ‘One of my hopes for the emerging
anthropology of Christianity is that it will save people such trouble in the future
and allow them to do more informed research from the outset’ (2007: 33).
Robbins argues that the anthropology of Christianity so far has been hampered by several factors linked with a lack of theological awareness. He mostly
blames default anthropological assumptions about continuities in human
identity that dispute Christian convictions about the possibilities of rupture in
personal and collective identities through God’s activity (2003a, 2007), something discussed more fully below. Another limiting factor comes from most
social scientists’ distrust of organized religion, a distrust partially born from an
early ambivalence. Social science, Robbins observes, emerged in reaction
against Christian assumptions about human nature. Its founders sought to
explain human behavior without recourse to supernatural explanations. Christianity is thus both too similar to anthropology—each promises comprehensive explanations of the same data—and too different due to its perceived
epistemological certainties, which contradict the cultural relativism assumed
by most anthropologists (Robbins 2003a, 2007). Another barrier that Robbins believes hinders the anthropology of Christianity lies in anthropology’s
instinctive suspicion of comparison. He writes, ‘Fearful of resting their efforts
on groundless essentialisms, anthropologists are not these days inclined to
accept that there is a single thing called Christianity that they might make the
object of comparative investigation’ (Robbins 2003b: 193).
To overcome these obstacles Robbins calls for engagement of anthropology
with theology and describes three productive forms of such engagement
(2006b). First, anthropologists study theology to understand the theological
(or antitheological) bases of their own discipline, part of the field’s self-criticism. Second, they study theology to understand the Christians producing it,
theological awareness thus informing ethnography. Third, theological awareness could actually challenge fundamental assumptions within anthropology.
Two recent ethnographic studies answer these calls to attend to theology. Both
also develop concepts for productive classifications of African Christianity.
Dorothy Hodgson’s study of Catholic evangelization in Tanzania typifies
122
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Robbins’s second type of engagement with theology, using theological ideas
to understand those described. Matthew Engelke’s book on a Zimbabwean
AIC typifies the third, using theology to question anthropology’s assumptions.
Both focus not on theology as a written product of elites (which is Robbins’s
rather limiting view, at least in Robbins 2006b) and more on how theological
assumptions, often implicit, shape African Christian thought and behavior.
Two Recent Ethnographies of African Christianities
Building on previous work on the Maasai (e.g., 2001), Dorothy Hodgson has
written The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries, a study of recent Catholic evangelization in Tanzania (2005). She
shows how Maasai historical and cultural particularities have shaped their
reception of evangelization by American Catholic missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost, or Spiritans, so that women predominate among
converts despite missionary attempts to convert men. Hodgson’s work epitomizes Robbins’s second approach. Theological presuppositions in missionary
strategy and those presuppositions’ resonances with the spiritual aspirations of
potential Maasai converts—aspirations also defined in theological terms—
help Hodgson understand the results of evangelization.
In her analysis Hodgson uses the concept of inculturation in two ways. First,
inculturation describes recent missionary strategy, representing the present
endpoint as Hodgson connects individual missionaries—their aims, personalities, and activities—with evolving missionary strategies (2005: 68-105).
Having begun less open to Maasai culture, the Spiritans embraced inculturation. Yet their efforts have not produced the results desired since Maasai
men have generally refused to become Catholic. Instead, female Maasai join
the Church, and Hodgson’s emphasis is that they do so for spiritual, not
material, benefits.
Hodgson credits Catholicism’s appeal for Maasai women not to the missionary strategy of inculturation but to the implicit inculturation carried out
by Maasai believers, especially women. Using her awareness of Maasai history,
Hodgson shows the felt congruity women discern between Eng’ai, the supreme
Maasai deity imaged as female and long an object of women’s devotion,
and the deity preached by Catholic missionaries. Catholicism draws Maasai
women, Hodgson contends, because it allows them to reconnect with Eng’ai.
The missionary-carried faith redresses an imbalance in the social order that
women perceive, an imbalance created by precolonial and later social changes
that progressively disempowered women by eroding their prior assumed
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
123
spiritual authority (2005: ix-x, 21ff, 210-229). Maasai women become Catholic, she argues, attracted by the God preached by the Catholic missionaries.
In turn they inculturate Catholicism by their embrace of the new religion.
Inculturation as self-conscious missionary strategy is therefore less important
than what happens when the Maasai—especially Maasai women—inculturate
Christianity, producing Hodgson’s ‘church of women’.
Hodgson’s use of inculturation moves away from its common reference—to
missionary efforts—to focus on how the Maasai make the faith their own.
Others recognize that inculturation, understood descriptively, operated long
before the term and its self-conscious missionary espousal (Gittins 2000; Bevans and Schroeder 2004; Sanneh 2009). Inculturation thus produces Christian vitality in Africa even when unrecognized or unconscious, analogous to
what some call ‘localization’ (Howell 2008; Lado 2009), others ‘indigenization’ (Essamuah 2003) or the creation of ‘folk Christianity’ (Höschele 2007;
Blanco 2009). When Africans consider themselves Christian they implicitly
inculturate Christianity, carrying out what Stefan Höschele calls ‘spontaneous
contextualization’ (2007: 553).
The second study is Matthew Engelke’s A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church (2007), which investigates the Masowe weChisanu
Church, or ‘Friday apostolics’ (or vapostori) of Zimbabwe, one of several
groups tracing their faith to the prophet Johane Masowe (1915-1973). Engelke
examines life stories of Masowe and later Friday apostolic prophets and current vapostori religious practices, which are distinguished by aversion to Scripture. This unusual feature—they call themselves ‘the Christians who don’t read
the Bible’4—leads Engelke to ask how they ensure God’s presence in their
midst. He uses the apostolics’ unusual tendencies to explore what he calls a
core paradox in Christianity: ‘the simultaneous presence and absence of God’
(2007: 9). All Christians, he contends, face ‘the problem of presence’ in his
book’s title.
To address the issue of divine accessibility, Engelke borrows the notion of
semiotic ideology from Webb Keane (Keane 2007: 16-21). Defined as ‘basic
assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world’ (Engelke
2007: 29), semiotic ideology leads Engelke to identify the distinctiveness of
vapostori religious practices, which begins with Masowe’s defining call in 1932
and continues in contemporary rituals. Engelke’s theological attention to the
apostolics’ semiotic ideology typifies Robbins’s third way of engagement
between anthropologists and theology in which theological insights challenge
anthropological assumptions. In approaching Christianity, Engelke believes,
anthropologists take for granted how Christians make God present. The
strangeness of the vapostori approach, however, unsettles assumptions about
124
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Christian (and possibly other) constructions of religious meaning, especially
those linked to divine presence. It invites attention to how Christians consider
divine access, in official theological reflection or in religious practices. Semiotic ideology, like the notion of inculturation that Hodgson invokes, has broad
potential application to studies of Christianity.
In explaining their rejection of Scripture Friday apostolics say they prefer
‘live and direct’ encounters with God rather than those mediated through
sacred texts (Engelke 2007: 3-11). Their aversions extend to viewing other
typical Christian material mediators of God—including prophets like their
founder—as unreliable vehicles for meeting the divine. Masowe’s ‘call into
the wilderness’ and subsequent discernment of his response underscore ‘the
doubts, misgivings, hesitations, and confusions that color [his] life as a religious subject’ (Engelke 2007: 82, italics in original; see also Engelke 2005). In
reports about later vapostori prophets, including a contemporary prophetess
whom he interviews (Engelke 2005: 792; 2007: 90-96), Engelke detects a
similar semiotic ideology, both in how they act and are remembered. Although
some sources identify one prophet or another as exceptional, all, even Masowe
himself, stand accused by most apostolics of falling away from what, in the
most common version of the official ideology, is the necessary immateriality of
faith. All succumbed to a less exalted, more material adherence to Scripture
(ibid., 109ff ). Similar tentativeness shapes their use of much spoken language
in worship and their approach to healing. Engelke observes, ‘Today this sense
of uncertainty—as a quality of tension between distance and proximity—is a
key characteristic of the Friday apostolics’ notion of a live and direct faith’, so
that ‘uncertainty becomes a constitutive element of both religious knowledge
and authority’ (2007: 82; also 2006). Engelke thus sees in vapostori practices
and beliefs a set of assumptions about the dangerous and seductive qualities of
typical religious objects, images, and leaders.
Masowe’s role for the Friday apostolics differs from most African Christian
prophets described by Ogbu Kalu when he depicts the ‘trail of ferment’ over
the past four centuries in African Christianity (Kalu 2005b: 26ff; Duncan and
Kalu 2007). Many African Christian groups draw on religious virtuosi, tracing to such figures formal theological assertions, sacred texts, inspiring narratives, or distinctive practices (Gunner 2002; Burlington 2004). Engelke shows
that his subjects rely not on the content of Masowe’s visions or his religious
practices; Masowe, too, ‘fell’ from properly immaterial faith into reliance on
the Bible. What is pivotal about Masowe is his witness to the centrality of
uncertainty in his vocational discernment. This theologically grounded spirituality, a mode of approaching discernment as mediated through a variety of
symbolic interactions—each to be treated provisionally, not definitively—is
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
125
what Friday apostolics see as Masowe’s bequest. They remain faithful to him
by holding at arm’s length typical objects of religious devotion—famously, the
Bible itself.
These two ethnographic studies differ in important ways. Engelke’s discussion of theology is more philosophical and explicit than Hodgson’s as he
describes vapostori semiotic ideology. To describe their unusual approach to
Scripture, Engelke distinguishes it from conservative Christian theologies of
the Word of God that emphasize its immediate revelatory quality. He likens
their view to that of liberal Protestants like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst
Troeltsch who emphasized the always-already distance between present believers and the Scriptures, and the need to interpret sacred texts in order to appropriate them (2007: 20-27). Hodgson locates Maasai women’s predilections in
abiding cultural and gender preferences, showing little interest in locating
their faith in relation to larger Christian currents.
Yet both studies model what the anthropology of Christianity pursues,
drawing on careful descriptions to consider larger comparative questions.
Such descriptions are, as Jonathan Z. Smith observes, a necessary basis for
fruitful classification and comparison. But descriptions by themselves are not
sufficient; classification depends on reduction, the selection of aspects of phenomena to set them in relationship to each other. Only then can a comparison
across difference generate productive redescription, ‘bringing disparate phenomena together in the space of a scholar’s intellect,’ thereby allowing ‘surprise, the condition that calls forth efforts of explanation’ ( J. Smith 2004:
174-175; see also 28-29 and 345). The concepts Hodgson and Engelke
employ—inculturation and semiotic ideology—lend themselves to fruitful
classification and comparison. They are generalizable notions applicable to
differing situations.
Unlike past bases for classification, however, such notions do not categorize
forms of Christianity in Africa along an axis—independence from missionary
control, or cultural African-ness, or level of political engagement, for example.
Instead, both semiotic ideology and inculturation pose heuristic questions to
forms of African Christianity. In addition, unlike previous approaches to classifying African Christianities, these notions do not implicitly presuppose any
restriction to AICs or P/c. Both describe unusual cases, but for comparison
and classification examples like these can be valuable in drawing attention to
overlooked aspects of religious practices. Both also prioritize the theological
work of African Christians.
Besides engaging theology, Hodgson and Engelke also address anthropology’s default ‘continuity thinking’, which Joel Robbins identifies as a major
stumbling block for anthropologists studying Christianity. Semiotic ideology
126
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
and inculturation thus advance the conversation around conversion, a topic
long engaging those studying African Christianity.
African Christian Conversion and ‘Continuity Thinking’
Regarding conversion, there are two emerging interrelated consensuses among
analysts of Christianity in Africa. First, instead of denigrating conversion as
‘remorseless subjection’ (Bayart 2008) or celebrating it with naive assumptions
about inevitable emancipation via the ‘myth of the sovereign self ’ (D. Anderson 2007: 167), most appreciate the situated or ‘choice-encompassed’ (Mailer
2007: 205) agency within which Africans have always adapted new religious
identities. Africans facing missionary evangelization have selectively appropriated the new message and found possibilities for creative agency in the midst
of constraint (de Bruijn, van Dijk and Gewald 2007: 1-3). Thus they often
frustrated missionaries; as Terence Ranger once ironically noted, ‘The fact that
conversion was incomplete is the truism which every study of the interaction
of mission and society begins’ (1993: 183-84).
A second emerging consensus recognizes that African converts to Christianity show both continuity and discontinuity with their previous religious identity. Scholars approach this dialectic between continuity and discontinuity in
various ways. Responding to a widespread trend, Joel Robbins identifies a
persistent obstacle to an anthropology of Christianity in the dichotomy
between Christian and typical anthropological approaches to time (2003a,
2007). The logic of Christianity, he contends, assumes the possibility of profound discontinuity within history by God’s action and within human personhood by God’s grace. The ‘deep structure of anthropological theorizing’
(Robbins 2007: 10), in contrast, rejects divine intervention, assuming personal and communal continuity despite conversion. Implicit anthropological
‘continuity thinking’ for Robbins thus bedevils anthropological attempts to
grasp Christian self-understanding by discounting Christian religious experience. Predisposed to disbelieve converts’ self-reports, anthropologists focus
instead on discerning continuity with preconversion status. P/c raises the issue
of such continuity acutely, since believers’ self-descriptions of a radical break
often loom large in their self-identity (Engelke 2004; Robbins 2003b, 2007).
Continuity Thinking and Pentecostal Conversions
Anthropologists addressing the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in
conversion usually acknowledge discrete levels of identity based in culture.
Thus apparent newness at one level—expressed by new believers—coexists
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
127
with abiding deeper structural continuity at another. Scholars distinguish
between the continuous and discontinuous in various ways.
Ogbu Kalu addresses this distinction by focusing on P/c. His trail of
ferment in African Christian history at first glance typifies anthropological
default continuity thinking and discounts the emic perspective of P/c believers. Knowing their claims, however, Kalu acknowledges the contradiction
between insiders’ accounts and his perspective. P/c, writes Kalu,
has a certain uniqueness which could best be understood from its fit in African primal
worldview [sic; italics in original]. It is a strand in the element of continuity between
African traditional religion and Christianity. Its problematic and idiom are sourced
from the interior of African spirituality and the resolutions are a reconstruction of that
source from Christian and biblical perspectives. (latter italics mine; 2000b: 104; see
also Kalu 2008a: 67, 175-178)
In the possible ‘reconstruction. . . from Christian and biblical perspectives’
Kalu discerns a congruency between the African primal world-view and Christianity, yet his sensitive descriptions of the P/c experience indicate that
converts experience not a shattered world rebuilt—as idiom facing new problematic discovers a resolution—but a new world discovered (Kalu 2003c).
This assertion of continuity between abiding African needs and Christian
revivalism cannot but contradict P/c believers who claim to have left behind
their former world-view (Kalu 2005a: 307; 2005b: 45).
Others also describe the Christian identity of new believers in light of preexisting cultural realities. Birgit Meyer’s acclaimed study of P/c among the
Ewe of Ghana exemplifies this tendency. She shows how the demonization of
traditional spirits allows P/c Christians to maintain their beliefs, enabling convictions about their power despite conversion. Meyer writes, ‘Pentecostalism’s
popularity in Africa may to some extent be due to the fact that it offers a ritual
space and an imaginary language to deal with the demons which are cast out
in the process of modernity’s constitution, but which continue to haunt people the more they try to progress’ (1999: 216). Meyer’s metaphorical ‘haunt’
suggests the deeper level where ongoing preconversion consciousness impinges
on P/c believers.
To address the problem of anthropology’s continuity thinking, Robbins
draws a more overtly theological distinction between different levels of belief,
what he calls ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’. The former implies deeper convictions
of trust and commitment; the latter assent to propositions, a shallower level
that many view as not universal but traceable to Western Christianity in particular (Robbins 2007: 14ff; see Ruel 1997). Robbins uses this distinction to
determine whether a culture is Christian or not, depending on how much they
128
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
‘believe in’ Christian truths instead of simply affirming Christian propositions
in the ‘believe that’ mode.
Robbins applies this distinction to his study of Urapmin converts in New
Guinea. He sees them holding new Christian and older identities in an unresolved and uncomfortable tension, practicing what some call ‘transcendental
reduplication’ (Ellis and ter Haar 2004: 16), or, as Robbins says, possessing a
complex double consciousness at once fully Christian and fully Urapmin
(2004: xxvi). Unlike Kalu, who sees P/c reconstructing a primal world-view,
Robbins says of the Urapmin,
They did not adopt Christianity in bits and pieces seized upon as syncretic patches for
a traditional cultural fabric worn thin in spots by their attempts to stretch it to fit new
situations. Rather, they took it up as a meaningful system in its own right, one capable
of guiding many areas of their lives. (2004: 3)
Despite coexisting and unreconciled meaning systems, Robbins contends that
the Urapmin inhabit a Christian culture because they recognize the incongruities, and mostly want the Christian self-understanding to prevail (2007:
15-16).
Others in the anthropology of Christianity emphasize what new Christians
consider themselves leaving behind (Engelke and Tomlinson 2006; Tomlinson
2009). Matthew Tomlinson sees Christianity in Fiji as a ‘metaculture’ that
encourages reflection on culture itself. Fijian Christians use Christian discourse to name Christian identity by way of the past they have abandoned.
Tomlinson writes, ‘Culturally speaking, Christianity is especially effective at
generating metacultural reflections expressed as dissatisfaction with reified
“culture”. It prompts people to reflect on social processes in which they are
enmeshed and to see the mesh as a net or trap rather than a liberating network’
(Tomlinson 2009: 20).
Hodgson and Engelke on Continuity and Conversion
Both Hodgson and Engelke consider continuity and discontinuity in Africans
becoming Christian. Like others, they distinguish levels within identities to
grasp that dialectic more precisely, changes at one level coexisting with continuities at another. They also consider what converts believe they leave behind.
Their contribution lies in the conceptual tools they use, semiotic ideology and
inculturation, which specify distinctions others have discerned, foregrounding
agency within the theological reasoning carried out by African Christians.
Hodgson shows that Maasai women implicitly detect continuity between
their pre-Christian and Christian self-identification, mediated through adherence
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
129
to God/Eng’ai. The missionary-initiated processes yielding conversions among
Maasai women are both theological (in an abiding proto- [or perhaps near]
monotheism cohering with women’s traditional intimacy with Eng’ai) and
historical (in responding to precolonial and colonial trends that had eroded
women’s spiritual power). Hodgson does not use theological language analytically, but what she discerns in Maasai women’s attraction to Catholicism represents an implicit theology, one fundamentally gendered. Hodgson shows
that their embrace of Catholicism creates a distance between Maasai women
and some Maasai men. The latter often see Christianity as culturally alienating
(Hodgson 2005: 252-254), but for women conversions push inculturation
forward, moving the Catholic Church in a new direction, creating a ‘church
of women’ (ibid., 230-255).
Yet Hodgson observes that amid the comparative ease of conversion at the
level of God/Eng’ai, Catholic women also betray an incompleteness in their
new identity. She notes their underdeveloped devotion to Jesus, evidence of an
ongoing theocentric rather than Christocentric orientation (ibid., 224). She
thus detects continuity with what Engelke would see as their pre-Christian
semiotic ideology. Maasai women approach their supreme divinity as they did
in the past, though their naming of that being has changed. To use Robbins’s
categories, their belief in the Christian God continues their long commitment
to Eng’ai, while their Christian ‘beliefs that’—about Christ, for example—are
slower to change. Their partially Christianized identity suggests the ongoing
nature of the process of inculturation.
In Engelke’s case, continuity with their preconversion past among Friday
apostolics rests on two bases, each analyzed using the notion of semiotic ideology. First, vapostori possess abiding predispositions deriving from their mostly
Shona culture. One clear example lies in the apostolics’ singing. Engelke discusses their Christianized music with reference to the aural cultural logic of
the Shona, who use the verb ‘to hear’ (kunzwa) as a default verb for perception
when other languages would use taste or smell (2007: 202ff ). Unlike the written word, which is prohibited from entering the place of worship, the word
spoken and especially sung has a prominent place. Their songs, almost alone
among their religious practices, avoid the unreliability tainting written texts
and persons like prophets. A Shona-based semiotic ideology, prioritizing the
aural as trustworthy, persists despite new religious identity.
Second, apostolics also evince continuity with their past by implicitly presupposing a ‘typical’ Christian background against which they define their
current practices and identity as superior. Most were Christians of another
sort before joining—‘cradle apostolics’ are rare (Engelke 2007: 157ff )—and
Engelke shows that their worship often betrays possession of biblical knowledge
130
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
even when liturgical action belittles the written or ‘dead’ word (ibid., 198199). Echoing Meyer’s insights about the ongoing ‘haunting’ by demons evident in the antidemonism of Ewe Pentecostals, Engelke notes, ‘As a negative
declaration, “We are the Christians who don’t read the Bible” contains a
dependency. As this study shows, that dependency is reconfigured through the
elaboration of a live and direct semiotics but is always, in the end, there’ (2007:
198). Engelke appreciates that vapostori beliefs—in the shallower propositional sense of Robbins’s ‘beliefs that’—are new. Their professed semiotic ideology—proclaimed in stories of their founder and successor prophets, their
approach to reading in liturgy, and their healing rituals—prefers a ‘live and
direct’ faith that differentiates them, producing an elitist sense of their own
religious superiority. Their refusal to embrace the standard materiality of other
Christians signifies their possession of mutemo, Shona for ‘law’ or ‘knowledge’,
the distinguishing mark of the mature believer (2007: 139ff). Yet their ongoing aural focus and reliance on a Bible always present in memory even when
banished in worship reveals that their semiotic ideology has continuities with
their prior religious identity.
Both Hodgson and Engelke, therefore, address the relationship between
continuity and discontinuity in Africans becoming Christian addressed in
the many studies of what Engelke calls ‘the break with the past’ (2004: 85).
More importantly still, the concepts they develop are compatible with each
other and help name what happens when African Christians make the Christian faith their own. I contend that the process of inculturation Hodgson
describes—inculturation analogous to localization and indigenization—is
best understood not by reference to ‘culture,’ a term notoriously hard to use
analytically,5 but with semiotic ideology. Discerning distinctive semiotic ideologies in those evangelized, and how becoming Christian contested, confirmed, or transformed pre-existing approaches to religiously significant signs
and practices, grasps the processes of inculturation over time—and religious
identities thereby change.
These concepts, linked together, suggest the importance of understanding
the symbolic realities that African Christians care about and how they show
that care. In becoming Christian one naturally values new, specifically Christian symbolic entities. Over time changes occur more deeply in the relationship believers have with religious signs and practices—that is, in semiotic
ideology itself. How particular aspects of an abiding prior semiotic ideology
persist after change in religious identity differs in various cases. Foregrounding
evolving semiotic ideology places changes in a processual perspective that prioritizes believers’ theological work as they adopt a new faith more fully. Inculturation in African Christianity thus identifies a process in which believers
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
131
forge a Christianized semiotic ideology that feels natural, progressively adopting both Christian symbolic values and a semiotic ideology that marks them
as Christian.
Christianity has no single semiotic ideology. There have been centuries of
dispute, for example, about Christ’s ‘real presence’ in the Eucharist, Christ’s
or the Holy Spirit’s accessibility to ordinary believers, and how the Bible
communicates truth. Convictions about such matters shape denominational
identities. Inculturation—an implicit process, not a self-conscious pastoral
strategy—names how African Christians make the faith their own through
effective adjustments to new symbolic resources. Over time, many African
Christians have developed semiotic ideologies that are demonstrably Christian, in alignment with fellow believers elsewhere.
Recently Solmon Zwana discussed ‘tombstone unveiling’, which began in
the 1980s in Zimbabwe (2008). Once a tombstone is ready for placement,
Zimbabwean Christians gather to commemorate the deceased. Certain P/c
believers accuse Christian participants of syncretism, observing here an illicit
continuation of traditional Shona kurova guva rites long held for ancestors.
Zwana instead discerns African Christians seeking to resolve conflicting categories of identity. The notion of semiotic ideology can help specify Zwana’s
instinctive assessment. Felt connections to the dead continue before and after
Christian conversion and are naturally tended by ritual observance. Yet there
is discontinuity in the signs themselves—now Christian and shaped by modernity via new material culture. Inculturation, if it proceeds, will resolve the
identity conflicts as African Christians locate tombstone unveiling within
their evolving faith.
Unlike certain P/c believers, many African Christians do things like tombstone unveiling unapologetically. They feel little need to posit an empty meaninglessness before their Christian conversion (Orobator 2008: 127-137).
Instead, many discern a comfortable fit between their African and Christian
identity. Some of their families have long been Christian, so they lack the
sense of being converts. Making sense of African Christians of this sort is a
new challenge for those studying African Christianity.
Generations in African Christianity: Toward Postmissionary Christianity
Many Christians in Africa increasingly possess a semiotic ideology like their
co-religionists elsewhere: for example, many Nigerian Igbos, Tanzanian Chaggas and Fipa, and Baganda in Uganda. In each group a large percentage is
Christian and their Christian identity—usually linked to so-called mainline
132
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Christian bodies—seems deep compared to their neighbors. Something profound in such groups has changed over time—not simply in the significant
signs and practices among them, but in their relationship to those signs and
practices, that is, their semiotic ideology. Christianity is inculturated among
them to a profound degree.
So far the anthropology of Christianity, following a long trend in classifying
African Christianities, has not substantially addressed such Christians. In light
of this historiographic bias, a bias also continued by Ogbu Kalu’s too-narrowly
construed ‘trail of ferment’, the study of African Christianity needs to develop
a historical approach to African Christian communities in order to capture the
collective identity of African Christians over time, especially African Christians who partake in missionary-founded churches. Scholarship on African
Christianity needs to develop a notion of generations analogous to Ira Berlin’s
groundbreaking work on slavery in the United States.6
A developed theory of generations of African Christians lies beyond my
scope here, but certain foundations for such an approach already exist. Ogbu
Kalu’s comprehensive efforts to tell the story of African Christianity and
approaches in the anthropology of Christianity like Hodgson’s and Engelke’s
establish grounds for a generations-based approach. Kalu, along with many
others, shows why Africans were drawn to Christianity and how they harnessed its resources for their needs. His historical and theological approach,
however, lacks conceptual tools that the anthropology of Christianity provides, tools lending themselves to comparative studies of Christianization.
Semiotic ideology and inculturation represent such tools, directing attention
to the theological work of African Christians in making Christianity their own.
Still lacking, however, are concepts of a more sociological sort that consider
African attachments to Christianity brought by missionaries. Inculturation, as
Hodgson’s work suggests, involves theological and symbolic creativity but also
interacts with social dynamics affected by factors like gender, colonialism, and
missionary practices. A generations-based approach to African Christianity
also thus needs concepts that consider belonging as a feature of African Christian experience. Before discussing such belonging, however, it is worth recognizing what already can contribute to a generations-based approach to African
Christianity.
From the Appeal of Christianity to African Christian Peoples
Kalu and others have shown that Africans have embraced Christianity for
many reasons. Many of the earliest converts in sub-Saharan Africa were marginal people. Not few were slaves arriving at missions after purchase, delivery,
or escape (Kollman 2005; Hartneit-Sievers 2006: 98ff; Martin 2009: 46-50).
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
133
Those who came more willingly—women, outcasts, refugees—often arrived
pursuing pragmatic goals like security and sustenance (Ranger 1993). Research
continues to shed light on such attractions (Maxwell 2006), emphasizing
the appeal of, for example, mission-provided medicine and education.7 Kalu
and others have emphasized the ontological fit between P/c Christianity especially and African cosmological presuppositions, stressing P/c’s promise of
pragmatic help.8
Recent studies only underscore the varied reasons Africans come to Christianity. Isabel Mukonyora, for example, argues that contemporary Zimbabwean women join an AIC there because its narrative of prophetic founding
in the wilderness invites Shona women into their own religiously based wilderness in which they escape male domination (2007). Walima Kalusa explores
David Livingstone’s preaching to the nineteenth-century Kololo kingdom,
which drew younger men who used Christian discourses to empower themselves against their elders. Kalusa argues that Christianity thereby divided the
kingdom, allowing its conquest (2009). Patrick Claffey shows how social and
political realities in Dahomey and its successor nation-state, contemporary
Benin, have long made Christianity a source of security amid profound social
fragility (2007). Claffey favorably cites Achille Mbembe’s warning that ‘the
proliferation of the divine’ in today’s African political discourse signifies ‘intellectual atrophy’ and applauds a bishop who challenges his people, ‘Let’s stop
seeing the devil everywhere and let’s start building’ (ibid., 272-273). But he
appreciates Christianity’s role as a potential solution for—and commentary
on—contemporary Beninois social experience.
One promising thread in the ongoing appeal of Christianity in Africa has
been a closer look at how the faith promotes the needs for which it offers a
possible but often elusive solution. Birgit Meyer, for example, shows how P/c
both at times preaches prosperity and warns of the seductiveness of wealth.
Such ambivalent preaching, she suggests, creates existential longings that draw
people to promises of Spirit-led power (2007: 22-23). Similarly, Rijk van Dijk
shows how Ghanaian P/c promotes a dual understanding of vulnerability.
Christian preaching promises deliverance from spirits that can prey upon
believers, yet at the same time promotes a necessary vulnerability required for
being ‘slain in the spirit’ and acknowledged as a P/c healer (van Dijk 2007).
In discussing Christianity in Fiji, Matt Tomlinson aptly observes something
increasingly the case in Africa: religious media presents ‘a cultural scenario
wherein Christianity creates irresolvable tensions while holding out the promise of recuperation’ (2009: 15).
Alongside greater insights into how Christianity has appealed to Africans,
other research examines how Christianity operates among those who define
themselves as Christian. Brian Howell shows that for Baptists in the Philippines,
134
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
the ‘localization’ of Christianity always means that transcendent values make
sense to people on the ground (2008: 2ff, 219ff ). Thus Christian discourses
and practices help Filipino Baptist communities define themselves, both in
relation to global Christianity and especially against one another. Francio
Guadeloupe’s research on the place of Christianity in the Caribbean reveals
the opposite. There Christianity does not differentiate groups from one
another but brings them together, serving as a ‘metalanguage of inclusiveness’
producing an ‘all-inclusive politics of belonging’ (2009: 74, ix). In both cases
Christianity no longer feels new, but instead defines a present reality comfortable for believers.
Recent work in Africa has also stressed Christian identities emerging from
inculturation (or localization or indigenization). Several emphasize the complex roles of reading and literacy in constructing identity (Keller 2005; Landau
2007; Sanneh 2009) and transmitting religious authority (Gunner 2002; Bielo
2008; Kirsch 2008; Gifford 1996). Missionaries have produced more linguistic knowledge than any other group, one consequence being African Christian
communities shaped by their efforts (Errington 2008: 13). Yet language has
functioned differently in different situations, with Catholics and Protestants
viewing local languages in light of varying semiotic ideologies. Catholics traditionally saw literacy as encouraging incorporation into a ‘global community
of ritual belief ’, while for Protestants it fostered in believers the inner transformation of genuine conversion (ibid., 95-97).
There are insightful studies of the formation of mainline African Christian
groups in particular places in Africa: of Presbyterians among the Thonga of
Zambia and Mozambique (Harries 2007); Methodists in Ghana, and especially their inculturated music (Essamuah 2003); Catholic-educated males in
Zambia (Pritchett 2007); Catholics among the Fipa (Smythe 2007) and
Lutheran influences among the Sonjo (Vähäkangas 2008) in Tanzania; Adventists in Tanzania (Höschele 2007); Lutherans among the Ovambo of Namibia
(Miettinen 2005); and Catholic women in Congo-Brazzaville (Martin 2009).
Other studies have explored the political strategies of Catholics in Uganda
prior to independence (Summers 2009), and examined Catholic Charismatics
in Cameroon (Lado 2009).
Despite such studies, anthropological analysis of mission-produced African
Christianities remains underdeveloped. There are many such Christianities,
with substantial differences even among contiguous groups of co-religionists
evangelized by different missionaries or with different historical experiences.
Notions like semiotic ideology and inculturation invite attention to changes
in religious self-understandings, but fuller comparative work needs to be done
to understanding the array of historical changes that take place in the long
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
135
move from a people not exposed to Christianity to one for whom Christianity
is taken for granted as part of their identity. Particularly needed are insights
into the nature of belonging to mission-founded churches that African Christians have experienced. Inculturation has certainly occurred at the level of
theological ideas, but generations of African Christians have also been formed
by historically specific relationships of attachment.
Theorizing African Christian Belonging
However it happened, there are many African Christian communities that
trace their origins to missionary activity and consider themselves in continuous connection to an inaugural missionary foundation. Determining when
such Christians stop being ‘missionary Christians’ is a common but rarely
helpful (and often insulting) consideration. Not only are missionaries long
gone in many cases, but these are African Christians, no less so than African
Christians in AICs or contemporary P/c. Wherever African Christian identity
has been achieved, it has been an African Christian achievement.
A generations-based approach will not ignore the intellectual and symbolic
work done by African Christians in achieving their collective identity. Yet
understanding generational changes requires attention both to theological
changes discernible via concepts like semiotic ideology and inculturation, and
to sociological changes at the level of belonging. Both are needed for a full
understanding of how African Christians modified their investments of energy
and creativity in relation to churches. Becoming and remaining Christian has
always involved practices as well as ideas, bodies as well as symbols.9
Belonging of a religious sort tends to be a sociological topic and is rarely
considered in relationship to missionary practices.10 Grasping the kinds of
belonging that African Christians have had with mission-founded churches
over time is difficult, especially in early stages of missionary activity. Sources
that offer clues to such belonging are usually missionary or colonial writings
shaped by concerns other than understanding the evangelized.11 Also hampering the discernment of evolving African agency and identity in the wake of
missionary evangelization are the few historical studies of African Christians
who shaped mainline Protestant and Catholic bodies on the continent, which
makes comparison between cases difficult.12
As many have suggested, the forging of Christian identity in Africa has been
shaped by various factors. These include the decisive role of translation of the
Bible and other Christian texts into local languages; the indispensable reliance
on African intermediaries in processes of evangelization (Brock 2007); the
impact on evolving Christian communities of large-scale historical processes
136
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
like colonialism and its many aftermaths; the gains and costs of international
relationships for religious bodies on the continent; and the development of
indigenous leadership within churches.13 Yet researchers have been slow to
develop comparative approaches to evolving African Christian agency and
identity that consider belonging in particular.
In considering theories of agency in the social sciences, literary theorist
Wendy Belcher wants to move toward a ‘reciprocal enculturation model of
encounter’ that would acknowledge the agency of all involved in colonial
(in this case, missionary) interactions, even if they were ‘unequally armed’
(2009: 221). A historical approach to African Christianity that attends to successive generations of African Christians and the belonging implied, following
Belcher’s suggestion, will necessarily therefore strive to understand the roles of
missionaries, whose activities had real consequences in shaping African Christian identity. Cultural differences among African believers certainly matter in
explaining differences even within Christians of the same denominational or
ecclesial affiliation—indeed, they remain pivotal. Acholi Catholics in northern Uganda practice their faith differently from Baganda Catholics in the
southern Uganda diocese of Masaka, for example. Yet certain differences come
not from culture in the normal sense. After all, the former trace their faith
to mostly Italian Comboni missionaries (many still remaining), while the
latter were first evangelized by the White Fathers, or Missionaries of Africa,
and differing missionary strategies attributable to the two groups also shaped
the eventual kinds of Catholic communities that emerged.14 Similarly, African
Anglicans, though part of a worldwide communion whose features they
increasingly shape, nonetheless differ, one reason being the original missionaries who evangelized them—for example, whether from the more evangelical
Church Mission Society or the ‘higher-church’ Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (Ward 2008).
Some recent work examines generational changes in African Christians in
relation to missionary activity. For example, Axel Harneit-Sievers studies Igbo
identity and social belonging through various historical processes. He notes
how Christianity differentiated ‘town-people’ from an increasingly larger
number of ‘church-people’ as the twentieth century progressed and more Igbo
joined mainline Christian bodies. Over time the distinction faded as Igbo and
Christian identity coalesced, but important stages marked the way: symbolic
contests showing the impotence of traditional spirits, discernible advantages
that emerged from colonial-era education, the conversion of crucial elites.
Relations between missionaries and the emergent Igbo took many forms, yet
over time ‘local identity and Christian identity no longer appeared as fundamental contradictions’ (2006: 289).
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
137
Admittedly, missionary practices, though invariably important, have not
been equally decisive everywhere, and never except in relation to and dependence on Africans who received, contested, or modified them. Ogbu Kalu’s
study of the evangelization of the Igbo models one way to correlate differing
missionary strategies and their outcomes based on the proclivities of particular
regions—mostly determined by how the features of pre-existing locally revered
deities cohered with distinct missionary presentations (1996; 2000a). Like
Hodgson and others, Kalu shows inner connections between evangelistic message and ready-made religious predispositions, so that congruency between
the two or its lack explains the local reception.15 Unfortunately, though attentive to some aspects of what Engelke would call semiotic ideologies, Kalu
overlooks the colonial and other historical contexts in which such receptivity
was produced and/or discovered. More studies are needed that show how and
why missionary strategies—always, one must insist, dependent on Africans
evangelized—fostered the kinds of Christianity found in Africa, inside and
outside AICs. A useful generational approach would necessarily acknowledge
the full range of African responses to Christianity, in particular capturing the
historical aspects of belonging to missionary-founded churches.
Kalu considers such belonging in an oblique way when discussing the ‘mission Christianity’ that lies outside the trail of ferment he celebrates. He mentions E. P. Thompson’s notion of the moral economy, adapting it to consider
the shared expectations created in African Christians and missionaries about
their mutual accountability to each other. Such shared expectations of accountability, as Thompson shows, are often discovered only when they are perceived
to have been violated, generating protest. Kalu also links the moral economy
forged by missionary evangelization to A. E. Hirschman’s triplex of exit, loyalty, and voice, which Kalu uses to differentiate African responses to Christianity. Believers, Kalu says, faced options of leaving the missionary-prescribed
religious order through exit, remaining through loyalty, or acting on their
grievances through exercises of voice.16
Although promising, Kalu’s uses of these concepts are abstract and ignore
the long-standing discussions about the relationship between structure and
agency within which these concepts appear, a discussion that seeks to appreciate constraints on human action without denying the range of human capacities (Archer 2003; Duncan 2003; Kollman 2005: 18). He also restricts his
discussion of exit, voice, and loyalty to the missionary encounter and its
immediate aftermath. Kalu’s preferences reside with those exiting, and he thus
foregrounds AICs and more recent P/c, yet many African Christians have
remained within missionary-founded Christianities. Understanding their agency
through awareness of modalities of voice and loyalty as they maintain and
138
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
modify their belonging represents a necessary step in forging a notion of generations for purposes of comparison and classification.
In efforts to understand modulations of belonging, Hirschman’s notion of
voice has particular potential. Originally, voice for Hirschman indicated an
effort to change the context in which economic or political options are presented. Voice can take many forms—as Anne Norton writes, ‘Belonging may
be expressed as affirmation or rebellion’ (2004: 61)—so making sense of it can
be demanding, especially when historical sources are few or opaque (Comaroff
and Comaroff 1997: 42-53). Yet collective voice—exercised, for example, by
African Christians—evinces a collective achievement, usually some type of felt
belonging. It can thus disclose loyalty to a particular church. Understanding
how African Christians have belonged to mission-founded churches thus
means attention to evolving modes of collective African Christian voice.
Collective voice emerges slowly in the historical record, but it is reasonable
to assume that shared identity precedes the historical appearance of collective
voice. Helpfully, Guillermo O’Donnell distinguishes between ‘horizontal’ and
‘vertical’ voice to consider the delay between the formation of a collective
identity and its historical manifestation (1986). Horizontal voice, he says,
arises when people realize their common interests and articulate those interests
to each other. Because it remains horizontal—for example, among newly
evangelized African Christians—it usually remains invisible to the historical
record. Vertical voice, however, articulates those developed interests to those
above and thus is more likely to be discerned historically. In considering African Christians, their vertical voice regularly emerges within missionary records,
often when missionaries in frustration record the protests of the evangelized.
Such evidence suggests a shared identity that perceives interests in common
against the missionaries. The existence of such a shared identity, articulated in
vertical voice but earlier developed in horizontal voice, represents an important stage in emerging African Christian identity.
Collective African Christian voice directed against missionaries is evidence
of what Jane Mansbridge calls ‘oppositional consciousness’, a group’s awareness that it possesses interests different from those above them in a social hierarchy (Mansbridge and Morris 2001). This sort of awareness allows resistance
and can generate Hirschman’s option of exit. More importantly for the story
of African Christianity, however, it can also generate horizontal and then vertical voice, producing African Christians not dependent on missionary approval
even when their Christian identity depends on missionary activity. Vertical
voice expressive of oppositional consciousness, a voice loyal enough not to
exit, indicates belonging that has been decisive in the evolution of African
Christians. In any theory of generations of African Christians, the presence of
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
139
a vertical collective voice, often in protest, represents an important indicator
of waning missionary dependence and the emergence of undeniable and
robust African Christianity.
Missionaries often unknowingly fostered horizontal collective voice and thus
the collective Christianity identity that vertical voice marks. Recent research
in historical sociology suggests the importance in such social processes of what
is called ‘social caging’, in which social authorities restrict capacities for exit,
thereby forcing different emergent social formations. Here voice is profoundly
constrained, yet does not disappear (Clemens 2007: 534-536). One task for
the study of African Christianity lies in connecting how missionary practices
often linked to something like social caging helped foster collective identity,
forging generations of African Christians even when such practices were
resisted (Kollman 2005: 283-289).
Conclusion
This article’s first part began by observing that the day for single-volume, single-author studies of African Christianity may be past since the diversity and
complexity of the topic eludes individual perspectives. Yet classifying Christianity in Africa will continue. One near constant in past classifying schemes—
whether descriptive or analytical; formally enunciated or casually implied,
pejorative or neutral or celebratory in tone; based on religious orthodoxy,
ecclesial independence, African cultural particularity, depth of political engagement, or participation in Kalu’s ‘trail of ferment’—has been their origins in
efforts to account for religious phenomena that eluded existing categories.
Early-modern European observers of Ethiopian Christians at prayer, for example, puzzled over the ritualistic fervor they witnessed, while a late seventeenthcentury Kongolese prophetess possessed by St. Anthony, Beatriz Vita Kimpa,
disturbed Iberian Catholic missionary expectations. Later, Europeans called
different sorts of AICs disloyal, syncretic, or a bridge back to heathenism,
drawing on theologies of the church focused on centralization and uniformity,
and a discursive tradition seeing fetishism as the fundamental feature of African religious life (Pietz 1985, 1987, 1988).
Today African Christianities continue to evolve in two different large-scale
ways. First, different forms of P/c befuddle settled generalizations of the past:
though run by Africans, they attack African beliefs, thus paradoxically belittling their heritage while also sharing its supposed presuppositions about the
power of evil spirits by attacking those spirits. Although sometimes claiming
to be above politics, African Pentecostals have increasingly shaped political
140
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
contests while also equipping participants with skills deemed appropriate for
national and international leadership.
Second, Africa houses ever-larger groups of Christians belonging to mainline Protestant churches and the Catholic Church. African novelists like Ngugi
wa Thiongo and Chinua Achebe have skillfully depicted the unsettling nature
of the arrival of Christianity in African communities. Other historical examples, such as the rapid Christianization of the Baganda in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, however, and settled Christian identities among
contemporary Igbo depicted in recent novels by the Nigerian Catholic Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggest that Christianity’s appearance can be welcomed and then become quite natural (Adichie 2003). Yet the study of African
Christianity shaped by classification has not well captured such Christians.
Needed now are notions of generations to grasp how African Christians have
both carried out theological work and developed a sense of belonging to see
the churches they embody as their own, and not foreign. The classifications
needed for the future, based in such generational achievements, would show
how such churches emerged over time.
One outcome of a generations-based approach for studying Christianity in
Africa, I believe, will be the lessening of the AIC as a distinctive category that
necessarily captures something important about contemporary African Christian experience. Improved historical practice has shown ever more clearly that
African Christians of all sorts—one-time slaves (Kollman 2005), youths in
boarding schools (Simpson 2003), Catholic women’s groups (Martin 2009)—
have varied experiences of independence and self-initiated behavior in relationship to the larger Christian bodies to which they belong. ‘Independence’,
in fact, can be a misleading title when restricted to AICs. One could argue, for
example, that Nigerian Anglicans show more independence than some AICs
shaped by global Pentecostalism (R. Smith 2006; Ward 2008). As Isabel
Mukonyora recently observed, commenting on a series of articles that examined how Africans had shaped missionary-established Christianity already in
the colonial era, ‘the qualitative differences between missionary-established
churches and AICs are smaller than scholars have made them in the past’
(2008: 250). Such shrinking differences should guide research and encourage
greater comparative appreciation of the Africanizing of Christianity’s many
forms on the continent.
Classifications of African Christianity will continue to evolve along with
what they describe. They will also often imply the causes of the vitality to
which they respond. Most such classifications have concerned AICs, and the
ways they were classified suggested the source of their appeal (Burlington
2004: 46-62). Today the limitations of the category of the AIC are revealed by
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
141
the growth of P/c and the global interdependence of nearly all forms of Christianity, not to mention contested notions of what being African might mean
in the face of twenty-first-century globalization (Palmié 2008). In light of
such limitations, concepts like inculturation and semiotic ideology, used in
comparative studies in a developing anthropology of Christianity, can yield a
better understanding of today’s African Christianities. They can capture those
embodying the trail of ferment the late Ogbu Kalu discerned, and apply to the
full variety of African believers. An approach that prioritizes appreciation
of generations that emerged in the wake of missionary evangelization and
then evolved due to the agency of African Christians promises to meet another
need: a temporal perspective on the differing ways that African Christian identities have evolved within communities with a self-conscious historical continuity, as African Christians have made Christianity their own.
Bibliography
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2003. The Purple Hibiscus. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin
Books.
Adogame, Afe, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock, eds. 2008. Christianity in Africa and the
African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London: Continuum.
Akrong, Abraham. 2008. ‘Deconstructing Colonial Mission: New Missiological Perspectives in African Christianity’. In Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff and Klaus Hock
(eds.), Christianity in Africa and the African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered
Heritage. London: Continuum, 63-75.
Anderson, Dana. 2007. Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversion. Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press.
Archer, Margaret. 2003. Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bayart, Jean-François. 2008. ‘Fait missionnaire & the Politics of the Belly’. In Peter Geschiere,
Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds.), Readings in Modernity in Africa. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 92-98.
Belcher, Wendy Laura. 2009. ‘Consuming Subjects: Theorizing New Models of Agency for
Literary Criticism in African Studies’. Comparative Literature Studies 46.2, 213-232.
Berlin, Ira. 1998. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2003. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2006. ‘Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty-First-Century America’. In
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton (eds.), Slavery and Public History. New York:
New Press, 1-17.
———. 2007. ‘American Slavery in History and Memory’. In Gabor Boritt and Scott
Hancock (eds.), Slavery, Resistance, Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-20.
Bevans, Stephen B. and Roger Schroeder. 2004. Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission
for Today. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
142
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Bielo, James S. 2008. ‘On the Failure of “Meaning”: Bible Reading in the Anthropology of
Christianity’. Culture and Religion 9.1, 1-21.
Blanco, John D. 2009. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brock, Peggy. 2007. ‘New Christians as Evangelists’. In Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 132-152.
Burlington, Robert Gary. 2004. ‘I Love Mary’: Relating Private Motives to Public Meanings
at the Genesis of Emilio’s Mutima Church. Ph.D. thesis, Fuller Theological Seminary,
Pasadena.
Cannell, Fenella, ed. 2006. The Anthropology of Christianity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Castles, Stephen and Alastair Davidson. 2000. Citizenship and Migration: Globalization
and the Politics of Belonging. New York: Routledge.
Claffey, Patrick. 2007. Christian Churches in Dahomey-Benin: A Study of Their Socio-Political Role. Leiden: Brill.
Clemens, Elisabeth S. 2007. ‘Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence’. Annual Review of Sociology 33, 527-549.
Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff. 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution. Volume Two: The
Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press.
de Bruijn, Miriam, Rijk van Dijk, and Jan-Bart Gewald, eds. 2007. Strength Beyond Structure: Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa. Leiden: Brill.
Duncan, Graham A. 2003. Lovedale—Coercive Agency: Power and Resistance in Mission
Education. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications.
Duncan, Graham and Ogbu Kalu. 2007. ‘Bazukufu: Revival Movements and Indigenous
Appropriation in African Christianity’. In Ogbu Kalu (ed.), African Christianity: An
African Story. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 245-269.
Ellis, Stephen and Gerrie ter Haar. 2004. Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political
Practice in Africa. New York: Oxford University Press.
Engelke, Matthew. 2004. ‘Discontinuity and the Discourse of Conversion’. Journal of Religion in Africa 34.1-2, 82-109.
———. 2005. ‘The Early Days of Johane Masowe: Self-Doubt, Uncertainty, and Religious Transformation’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 47.4, 781-808.
———. 2006. ‘Clarity and Charism: On the Uses of Ambiguity in Ritual Life’. In Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (eds.), The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in the
Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghan Books, 63-83.
———. 2007. The Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Engelke, Matthew and Matt Tomlinson, eds. 2006. The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in
the Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghan Books.
Errington, Joseph. 2008. Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and
Power. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Essamuah, Casely B. 2003. Genuinely Ghanaian: A History of the Methodist Church, Ghana
in Missiological Perspective, 1961-2000. Ph.D. thesis, Boston University.
Etherington, Norman. 2007. ‘Education and Medicine’. In Norman Etherington (ed.),
Missions and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 261-284.
Falola, Toyin. 2005. ‘Mission and Colonial Documents’. In John Edward Philips (ed.),
Writing African History. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 266-283.
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
143
Gifford, Paul. 1996. African Christianity: Its Public Role. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Gittins, Anthony J., ed. 2000. Life and Death Matters: The Practice of Inculturation in Africa.
Nettetal, Germany: Steyler Verlag.
Guadeloupe, Francio. 2009. Chanting Down the New Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and
Capitalism in the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gunner, Elizabeth. 2002. The Man of Heaven and the Beautiful Ones of God. Leiden:
Brill.
Harneit-Sievers, Axel. 2006. Constructions of Belonging: Igbo Communities and the Nigerian
State in the Twentieth Century. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
Harries, Patrick. 2007. Butterflies & Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries & Systems of Knowledge
in South-East Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Heaney, Robert S. 2008. ‘Conversion to Coloniality: Avoiding the Colonization of
Method’. International Review of Mission 97.384/385, 65-77.
Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Loyalty, and Voice: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hock, Klaus. 2005. ‘Appropriated Vibrance: “Immediacy” as a Formative Element in African Theologies’. In Klaus Koschorke (ed.), African Identities and World Christianities
in the Twentieth Century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 113-126.
Hodgson, Dorothy. 2001. Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 2005. The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Höschele, Stefan. 2007. Christian Remnant—African Folk Church: Seventh-Day Adventism
in Tanzania, 1903-1980. Leiden: Brill.
Howell, Brian M. 2008. Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Jenkins, Philip. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
———. 2006. The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kalu, Ogbu. 1996. The Embattled Gods: The Christianization of Igboland, 1841-1991.
Lagos: Minaj.
———. 2000a. ‘Ancestral Spirituality and Society in Africa’. In Jacob K. Olupona (ed.),
African Spirituality. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 54-84.
———. 2000b. Power, Poverty and Prayer: The Challenges of Poverty and Pluralism in African Christianity, 1960-1996. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
———. 2003c. ‘Pentecostal and Charismatic Reshaping of the African Religious Landscape in the 1990s’. Mission Studies 20.1, 84-111.
———. 2005b. ‘A Trail of Ferment in African Christianity: Ethiopianism, Prophetism,
Pentecostalism’. In Klaus Koschorke (ed.), African Identities and World Christianities
in the Twentieth Century. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 19-47.
———. 2006. ‘Ethiopianism and the Roots of Modern African Christianity’. In Sheridan
Gilley and Brian Stanley (eds.), World Christianties, 1815-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 576-92 (Cambridge History of Christianity, volume 8).
———. 2008a. African Pentecostalism: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2008b. ‘Changing Tides: Some Currents in World Christianity at the Opening
of the Twenty-First Century’. In Ogbu U. Kalu and Alaine Low (eds.), Interpreting
144
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities. Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 3-23.
———. 2008c. Clio in a Sacred Garb: Essays on Christian Presence and African Responses,
1900-2000. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Kalu, Ogbu, ed. 2005a. African Christianity: An African Story. Pretoria: Department of
Church History, University of Pretoria.
———. 2007. African Christianity: An African Story. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Kalusa, Walima T. 2009. ‘Elders, Young Men, and David Livingstone’s “Civilizing Mission”: Revisiting the Disintegration of the Kololo Kingdom, 1851-1864’. International Journal of African Historical Studies 42.1, 55-80.
Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Keller, Eva. 2005. The Road to Clarity: Seventh-Day Adventism in Madagascar. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kirsch, Thomas G. 2008. Spirits and Letters: Reading, Writing and Charisma in African
Christianity. New York: Berghahn.
Kollman, Paul. 2001. Making Catholics: Slave Evangelization and the Origins of the Catholic
Church in Nineteenth-Century East Africa. Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago.
———. 2005. The Evangelization of Slaves and Catholic Origins in Eastern Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Lado, Ludovic. 2009. Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization. Leiden: Brill.
Landau, Paul. 2007. ‘Language’. In Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empire. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 194-215.
Lovell, Stephen, ed. 2007. Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Mailer, Gideon. 2007. ‘Anglo-American and European Missionary Encounters in Southern
Sudan, 1898-Present’. In Chima J. Korieh and Raphael Chijioke Njoku (eds.), Missions, States, and European Expansion in Africa. New York: Routledge, 203-233.
Mansbridge, Jane and Aldon Morris, eds. 2001. Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective
Roots of Social Protest. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, Phyllis. 2009. Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled
Times. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Maxwell, David. 2006. ‘Writing the History of African Christianity: Reflections of an Editor’. Journal of Religion in Africa 36.3-4, 379-399.
Maxwell, David, ed. 2002. Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of
Adrian Hastings. Leiden: Brill.
Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
———. 2007. ‘Pentecostalism and Neo-Liberal Capitalism: Faith, Prosperity and Vision
in African Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches’. Journal for the Study of Religion 20.2,
5-28.
Miettinen, Kari. 2005. On the Way to Whiteness: Christianization, Conflict and Change in
Colonial Ovamboland, 1910-1965. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Montgomery, Robert L. 1999. Introduction to the Sociology of Missions. Westport, CT:
Praeger.
Mukonyora, Isabel. 2007. Wandering in a Gendered Wilderness: Suffering and Healing in an
African Initiated Church. New York: Peter Lang.
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
145
———. 2008. ‘Commentary’. Journal of Religion in Africa 38.2, 247-251.
Norton, Anne. 2004. 95 Theses on Politics, Culture, and Method. New Haven, CT and
London: Yale University Press.
O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1986. ‘On the Fruitful Convergences of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice,
and Loyalty and Shifting Involvements: Reflections from the Recent Argentine Experience’. Working paper #58. Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute.
Ojo, Matthews. 2006. The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Nigeria. Trenton,
NJ: Africa World Press.
Orobator, Agbonkhianmeghe E. 2008. Theology Brewed in an African Pot. Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books.
Orta, Andrew. 2004. Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the ‘New Evangelization’. New York: Columbia University Press.
Palmié, Stephan. 2008. ‘Introduction: On Predications of Africanity’. In Stephan Palmié
(ed.), Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic
Religions. Leiden: Brill, 1-37.
Peel, J. D. Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Pietz, William. 1985. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, 1’. Res 9, 5-17.
———. 1987. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, 2: The Origin of the Fetish’. Res 13, 23-45.
———. 1988. ‘The Problem of the Fetish, 3: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment
Theory of Fetishism’. Res 16, 105-124.
Pritchett, James A. 2007. Friends for Life, Friends for Death: Cohorts and Consciousness
among the Lundu-Ndembu. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Ranger, Terence. 1993. ‘New Approaches to the History of Mission Christianity’. In Toyin
Falola (ed.), African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi. Essex: Longman, 180-194.
———. 1995. Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920 to 1964. London: James Currey.
———. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture & History in the Matopos Hills of
Zimbabwe. Oxford: James Currey.
Robbins, Joel. 2003a. ‘On the Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism and the Perils of Continuity Thinking’. Religion 33, 221-31.
———. 2003b. ‘What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity’.
Religion 33, 191-199.
———. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in Papua New Guinea.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2006a. ‘Afterword: On Limits, Ruptures, Meaning, and Meaninglessness’. In
Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (eds.), The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in
the Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghan Books, 211-223.
———. 2006b. ‘Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward Relationship?’ Anthropology
Quarterly 79.2, 285-294.
———. 2007. ‘Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time,
and the Anthropology of Christianity’. Current Anthropology 48.1, 5-17.
Ruel, Malcolm. 1997. Belief, Ritual & the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion. Leiden: Brill.
Sanneh, Lamin. 2009. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. 2nd rev.
ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
146
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
Simpson, Anthony. 2003. ‘Half London’ in Zambia: Contested Identities in a Catholic Mission School. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Smith, Jonathan Z. 2004. Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
Smith, R. Drew, ed. 2006. Freedom’s Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial
Alliances with Africa. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Smythe, Kathleen R. 2007. Fipa Families: Reproduction and Catholic Evangelization in
Nkansi, Ufipa, 1880-1960. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Spiegel, Gabrielle M. 2009. ‘The Task of the Historian’. American Historical Review 114.1,
1-15.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Summers, Carol. 2009. ‘Catholic Action and Ugandan Radicalism: Political Activism in
Buganda, 1930-1950’. Journal of Religion in Africa 39.1, 60-90.
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1971. ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th
Century’. Past & Present 50, 76-136.
Tomlinson, Matt. 2009. In God’s Image: The Metaculture of Fijian Christianity. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Tomlinson, Matt and Matthew Engelke. 2006. ‘Meaning, Anthropology, Christianity’. In
Matthew Engelke and Matt Tomlinson (eds.), The Limits of Meaning: Case Studies in
the Anthropology of Christianity. New York: Berghan Books, 1-37.
Vähäkangas, Mika. 2008. ‘Ghambageu Encounters Jesus in Songo Mythology: Syncretism
as African Ritual Action’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.1, 111-137.
van Dijk, Rijk. 2007. ‘The Safe and Suffering Body in Transnational Ghanaian Pentecostalism: Towards an Anthropology of Vulnerable Agency’. In Miriam de Bruijn, Rijk van
Dijk, and Jan-Bart Gewald (eds.), Strength Beyond Structure: Social and Historical Trajectories of Agency in Africa. Leiden: Brill, 312-333.
Walls, Andrew. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis
Books.
———. 2001. The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
Ward, Kevin. 2008. ‘The Empire Fights Back: The Invention of African Anglicanism’. In
Afe Adogame, Roswith Gerloff, and Klaus Hock (eds.), Christianity in Africa and the
African Diaspora: The Appropriation of a Scattered Heritage. London: Continuum, 86-96.
Wijsen, Frans and Robert Schreiter, eds. 2007. Global Christianity: Contested Claims.
Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Zwana, Solmon. 2008. ‘Old Wine in New Wine Skins: Tombstone Unveiling as a Case of
Religious Innovation and Change in Zimbabwean Christianity’. Journal for the Study
of Religion 21.1, 37-52.
Notes
1. Kalu 2005b, 2007, 2008a, 2008c.
2. Jenkins 2002 and 2006; Walls 1996, 2001; Wijsen and Schreiter 2007; Adogame
et al. 2008.
3. Tomlinson and Engelke 2006: 19. A symposium on the anthropology of Christianity
was a feature of the journal Religion in 2003, volume 33, issue 3. For other similar appeals
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
147
see Robbins 2003a, 2003b, 2006b, and 2007; Cannell 2006; Engelke 2006; Engelke and
Tomlinson 2006; Howell 2008: 19-34; Kirsch 2008: 10ff; and Tomlinson 2009: 11ff.
4. Engelke 2007: 2. Of the other AICs tracing their origins to Masowe the most studied is the Gospel of God Church, also known as the Basketmaker Church or the ‘Saturday
apostolics’ (Engelke 2004: 786-787; Engelke 2007: 127-128; 254, n. 4; Mukonyora 2007).
Their approach to Scripture is more typical of Christian groups.
5. See an extended discussion in Kollman 2001: 20ff and recent comments on historians’ reconsiderations of culture in Spiegel 2009.
6. In a series of influential studies (1998, 2003, 2006, 2007), Berlin identifies generations in the evolution of American slavery by foregrounding what can be generalized about
the experiences of the slaves themselves. He acknowledges regional variations and diversities in individual slave experiences, yet discerns collective commonalities sufficient to establish his generational categories. First were the Charter generations, who arrived in North
America before the plantation system and who, though sometimes enslaved, enjoyed reasonable liberties compared to the Plantation generations that followed in the latter eighteenth century, who faced greater constraints. Then came what Berlin calls the Revolutionary
generations, as the Revolutionary War and its aftermath loosened restrictions on African
Americans in the north. Such restrictions were tightened again for what Berlin calls
the Migration generations who endured the half-century prior to the Civil War, to be
succeeded by the Freedom generations. For an introduction to the notion of generations
as used in social science, see Lovell 2007: 1-18, who discusses Karl Mannheim’s foundational ideas.
7. Miettinen 2005: 175ff-219; Etherington 2007; Heaney 2008.
8. See Akrong 2008: 73, as well as Maxwell 2002; Hock 2005b; Ojo 2006; Kalu
2005b, 2008c.
9. The impressive works of Terence Ranger (1995, 1999) and John Peel (2000) represent models for what I propose, but they are exceptional.
10. Studies of belonging generally consider nation-states or ethnic groups, yet religious
belonging both reinforces other potential loyalties and itself represents an important aspect
of human socialization (Castles and Davidson 2000: 134-38). But even Montgomery
1999, a tentative effort at a sociological approach to Christian mission, does not address
belonging.
11. Although there have been some advances in the study of missionary archives
(Kollman 2005: 22-32; Falola 2005), they still lack the kind of sensitivity to archival
modalities of meaning making evident in Ann Stoler’s recent study of Dutch colonial
archives (2009).
12. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography managed by the Overseas Ministries
Studies Center has gathered thousands of biographical sketches of African Christians, and
is a most helpful resource. It can be accessed at www.dacb.org.
13. As David Maxwell notes, appreciating the work of historian Terence Ranger in
developing a notion of popular Christianity in Africa, ‘Mission Christianity became African when it re-sacralised the landscape and made use of local agents in proselytism, preaching and prophetism, and also when Africans seized hold of Christian symbols and powers,
especially literacy’ (Maxwell 2006: 380). For a thoughtful recent discussion of how colonialism should not be overlooked as a factor shaping African Christianity simply because
African agency can be discerned in its midst, see Heaney 2008, which theorizes a notion of
‘coloniality’ in order to capture the subtle ways colonial processes affect Christianization.
148
P. Kollman / Journal of Religion in Africa 40 (2010) 118-148
14. Urban parishes in contemporary Africa—Catholic, Anglican, and belonging to
other mainstream Protestant groups—have their own distinctiveness. They are almost completely ignored by scholars despite their great importance in many African countries and in
representing world Christianity’s face in Africa.
15. For two studies that explain missionary success or failure as rooted in ethnic proclivities of those evangelized, see Orta 2004 and Smythe 2007. A study that explores nonethnicized bases for an inner congruity between missionary message and the needs of those
evangelized is Kollman 2005.
16. For Kalu’s discussions of these notions, originally appearing together in Kollman
2001 (and later developed more fully in Kollman 2005), see Kalu 2005b: 23-25; 2006;
2007: 231-240; 2008b: 35; 2008c: xi, 73, 83ff, 121, 158-159, 168-169. For the original
sources see Thompson 1971 and Hirschman 1970.
Copyright of Journal of Religion in Africa is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not
be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.