Domesticating a Religious Import bears the mark of its author's frustrated ambitions. Historian Nicholas Creary conceived the book as a study of inculturation, the process by which ‘African Christians shed the European cultural influences from Christianity and transformed it into an African religious expression’ (p. 10). He planned to conduct research in several Jesuit mission stations in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. But the archives in Mozambique were closed to him, and the ongoing political turmoil in Zimbabwe limited the scope of his fieldwork. Creary was compelled to focus on one mission station – the Chishawasha Mission, in the heart of Shona territory. The limited character of his research – Creary conducted 28 interviews, only six of them with laypeople – in turn shaped his argument. The book's structure mimics the structure of the Jesuit archive in which Creary worked. There is a chapter on nuns and their legal status in relation to their families; another on the tensions between students and the conservative lecturers of the theological college; a third on marriage and the problem of polygamy. In each instance Creary faithfully summarizes the minutes and reports that Jesuit missionaries composed as they reconciled Shona cultural practice with their own, ethnocentric conception of Catholic theology.
Creary sets out to prove that Christianity was ‘one of many elements that contributed to the development of distinctively African world senses’ (p. 10). His evidence doesn't allow him to sustain such grand claims. Creary's insights are more modest: he mines the Jesuit archives to illuminate the ways that Shona men and women used the rhetorical and legal resources that missionaries offered. One chapter offers a ten-page study of Clara Margwisa, a young woman who wished to become a nun against the wishes of her father. She had the support of the vicar apostolic, who organized an exile for her in Matabeleland and who interceded on her behalf with the government's Native Affairs department. Creary reads her case file as evidence of the tension between ‘customary law’, which upheld fathers' prerogatives over their children, and the Jesuit mission, which sought to defend young women's right to choose a religious vocation. He argues that Clara Margwisa was well aware of this tension of empire, and she exploited it, framing her ambitions in such a way as to capture missionaries' attention and support. In this and in other places Creary's book does indeed show Africans to be ‘agents in their own right within the church, and within the drama of history’ (p. xi).
But more often, African actors disappear from the storyline, and Creary's narrative becomes a straightforward précis of the files he has read. A chapter on the Catholic Association – an organization of laypeople – is aptly titled ‘A “Do-Nothing” Organization?’ Creary contents himself with a summary of the minutes and correspondence that the Association's organizers composed. Here an opportunity has plainly been missed. When the Association's spiritual advisor exhorted members: ‘Let others buy motor cars and put asbestos or zinc on their roofs. Catholics want to make a show in heaven’ (p. 158), he was making an argument about asceticism, outlining a subjectivity that contrasted with the identities marketed in the economy of advertising and consumption. Creary does not investigate the larger social arena where Catholics defended their particular lifestyle. When at the end of the chapter he comes to a section on the ‘African Voice and Perspective’ (p. 161), Creary can only mention Association members' frequent requests for spiritual retreats. Here as elsewhere in the book it is difficult to see how Catholic ideas resonated outside the Jesuits' hearing, in the wider world of argument and debate.
The problem is to do with his sources, but it is also a conceptual deficit. Creary's central concern is inculturation, which he thinks to be a ‘process of social liberation that paralleled the struggle for political liberation’ (p. x). For Creary, Shona culture is fixed, a pre-political foundation against which religious innovations can be measured. There are ‘non-negotiable elements in VaShona culture that cannot be – and have not been – compromised’, he argues (p. 249). Among these cultural footings Creary focuses particularly on kurova guva, the ritual by which Shona people drew ancestors into productive relations with the living. Creary laments the Catholic bishops' failure to embrace ancestor veneration, arguing that it represents a ‘chronic pro-Western and anti-African bias in the Catholic church's theology of inculturation’ (p. 240). But for whom is ancestor veneration – or lobola, or any other practice – a foundational aspect of Shona culture? And for whom is inculturation liberating? For Creary, the Shona are undifferentiated in their embrace of culture and unanimous in their assent to its principles. He ignores the partisan work of culture-building, the editorial effort by which (some) elements of social practice are made into a cultural heritage while others are discarded. How far did ancestor veneration elevate male elders' authority, and place other formulations of kinship and family life at the margins? Instead of seeing ‘inculturation’ as a liberatory embrace of African culture and humanity, we might better see it (where it occurs) as an aspect of the larger process by which traditions are invented, cultures are clarified, and heritage is composed.
Domesticating a Religious Import is a curiously antique book. The best of the new scholarship on Christianity in Africa shows how missionaries worked with African translators, ethnographers, and culture brokers to give textual substance to hitherto changeable traditions and customs. Creary, by contrast, presumes that Africans already had their domestic habitus in order prior to missionaries' arrival. His book gives us real insights into the institutional history of the Jesuit mission, but it can do little to illuminate the dynamic work by which a particularly Catholic account of Shona identity was made.
