Recent studies of the motivations and aims of British missionaries in the empire have tended to focus on the period from the missions’ origins through 1914 and a main preoccupation has been the question of missionary complicity in the project of establishing and maintaining imperial rule. Far fewer studies gauge the role of missionaries in the events surrounding the empire’s demise from the late 1940s through the 1960s. To help to fill this gap, John Stuart has provided a compelling and richly sourced survey of protestant missionary responses to some of the most controversial episodes in the history of the end of British rule in Africa.

The study hinges on three primary catalysts that fueled debate at the end of empire: the South African “Colour Bar,” the construction of the Central African Federation (inaugurated in 1953), and the so-called Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya throughout the 1950s. Stuart shows how missionaries organized a robust public campaign to condemn South Africa during the Second World War. While this was a principled stand for missionaries, they also were motivated by fear that the expansion of South African influence among settlers in Southern Rhodesia and elsewhere might provoke “race war,” which many believed was heralded, too, by the rise of African nationalism. One fascinating chapter discusses the succession crisis that occurred in Bechuanaland when the Bangwato prince Seretse Khama married a white English woman, Ruth Williams, in 1948 (the year of the National Party’s electoral victory in South Africa). The marriage was denounced by South African officials. While many missionaries in Africa and Congregationalists in Britain supported Seretse, London Missionary Society (LMS) officials in Britain sought to maintain a neutral position as the idea of confirming Seretse’s uncle as chief was floated in the Commonwealth Relations Office. Yet among the Bangwato people there was overwhelming support for Seretse. The British government decided to permanently banish Seretse from the Protectorate as a political expedient, and protests erupted on the Bangwato Reserve. Many Bangwato people saw LMS inaction as a betrayal.

The Church of Scotland mission suffered similar difficulties in forging a united front between its missionaries in the field and its leadership at home on the matter of the Central African Federation. Colonial officials in London argued that the federation of the settler colony of Southern Rhodesia with Nyasaland (Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) was necessary in order to provide a check against South African expansionism. The plan for federation favored Southern Rhodesian settlers, and African nationalist leaders in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, reflecting the majority African opinion, viewed federation as a transparent attempt to suppress African rights and claims to self-rule. Some missionaries supported the government line and argued that, given the threat of South Africa, the Federation was the only sensible solution, although they warned that more needed to be done to ensure that African interests were safeguarded. Other missionaries of the Kirk, especially those from the Iona Community who fused Christian faith with left-wing politics, sided with African opinion and even cultivated friendships with nationalist leaders like Hastings Banda and Kenneth Kaunda.

Of all the church missions covered by this study, the Scottish missionaries to Africa were the most successful at bringing the issue of African nationalism and independence to the center of debate at home. Authorities of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) brooked less dissent in the ranks in Kenya in the 1950s. The violent prosecution of the Mau Mau Emergency by the imperial authorities has recently been covered by major works by Caroline Elkins and David Anderson, and Stuart uses these to establish the context of CMS activity in Kenya in the 1950s. The CMS was slow to publicly criticize the colonial governor Evelyn Baring and the British government, although knowledge of violent abuses at government camps disturbed many CMS missionaries and provoked heated debate. The CMS did undertake to organize fund-raising efforts for relief of dependents of captive Mau Mau suspects and to improve conditions in the numerous Kikuyu villages now enclosed by barbed wire, but the mission was plagued by difficulty in shedding its apparent connections to empire and the Emergency government.

Stuart is concerned throughout to chart the transformation of the larger project of overseas mission, and a final chapter takes up this question directly. The period of decolonization saw a marked decline in the sending of missionaries from the United Kingdom. Emerging in its place, the African church became the decisive evangelical force on the continent. In some ways the overseas mission story parallels the dynamics of devolution of colonial rule at large. Church authorities in Africa and their parent organizations in Britain were committed, at least in official pronouncements, to ceding increased control of church operations and mission to the indigenous Christian church that overseas missionaries had helped to create. But there were stark differences between principle and practice. Alice Lenshina’s Lumpa Church movement won scores of converts in Northern Rhodesia, but Stuart shows that missionary opinion was split over how to receive this revival. Some saw Lenshina’s influence as a positive and even unprecedented force for promoting the gospel. Others saw the Lumpa Church, with its high level of nationalist membership, as a threat.

An important insight of this study is that missionary responses to nationalism and to the end of empire were diverse and contingent on political maneuvering in Africa and in Britain and on rapidly changing events. This point is best made by eschewing generalizations for a deeper exploration of the particular debates within each mission, and Stuart does this remarkably well. His comprehensive exploration of mission archives, government records, and published works by outspoken missionaries is impressive, and he reads these with a keen ability to follow the political story even down to the level of personal antagonisms between individuals. Stuart’s attention to the context of African nationalist politics, sometimes shifting in response to missionary activity, ensures that the focus on the African dimension of the story of the end of empire is not lost.