Much scholarship on colonial Christian mission in East and Southern Africa places education and healthcare in the centre of mission life – and the mission project of conversion. Missions are often considered as schools and as healthcare facilities, and missionaries are often considered as teachers and doctors. Indeed, mission education is a key terrain for mission historians to explore how colonisation, Christianity and civilisation shaped and were shaped by indigenous African converts. Importantly though, Michelle Liebst’s book examines how mission stations and missionaries were also sites of labour.

Examining the period prior to the institutionalisation of mission education, Liebst focuses on the British Anglican Universities’ Mission to Central Africa mission sites from around 1860 to 1930 in Zanzibar and Tanganyika. Under the shadow of the slave trade, much of the labour force was made up of enslaved, ex-slave and non-slave Africans and Indians. These labourers are the key subjects of her text. She uses an impressive blend of missionary records, letters and publications alongside Zanzibar and Tanzanian oral history to study how Africans on the mission sites trained in industrial skills, performed domestic services and diversified their livelihoods. As she establishes, their labour was caught at the crux of colonial, religious, cultural, racial and gender tensions. These tensions were particularly influenced by the location of the labour and labourer: in the rural mainland Magila or the coastal towns of Zanzibar.

Liebst explores these key themes through five case studies that each span the period from 1860 to 1930. Each chapter evidences a fundamental paradox of UMCA missionaries: they attempted to protect Africans from worldliness (slavery, materialism, modernity, industrialisation), while simultaneously acting as the worldly employers of African labourers. Despite UMCA abolitionist motivations to support ex-slaves, missionary prejudices towards African ex-slaves often undermined the Africans’ social mobilisation. And yet, Liebst’s explorations indicate how mission sites – as labour opportunities – had more effect on Africans than the missionaries themselves (and their prejudices). What ultimately becomes clear throughout Liebst’s work is how the African labourers took advantage of mission labour opportunities to innovate and shape their own livelihoods.

Some chapter case studies, however, more strongly support this project than others. For instance, chapters i and ii intricately trace the web of local socio-political power and statuses but do not offer much exploration of the labour itself. In chapter i, Liebst begins her study with the UMCA mission lime-burning confrontations in late pre-colonial Magila. Relying on the UMCA missionary John Farler’s account, Liebst narrates how Farler hired immigrant labourers in the 1880s to burn lime for the building of a church. But her main argument focuses on how missionaries like Farler were treated as one of several local power-brokers among Bondei and Shambaai indigenous groups. Like the other power-brokers, missionaries (as well as conversions) were viewed within the lens of socio-political confrontations and alliances.

Chapter ii begins with the case study of the UMCA church built on the grounds of the former slave market. Liebst points out that despite their rejection of the slave trade, UMCA missionaries utilised both ex-slaves and hired slaves in their labour force for the church. Her analysis then mostly explores the UMCA’s attitude to the ex-slaves on the Mbweni farm or ‘shamba’. While her explanation of UMCA’s incongruent abolitionism is interesting, it perhaps would have benefited from further consideration of UMCA’s metropolitan Anglo-Catholic influences (such as Christian Socialism) that coloured their strange outlook on abolition.

Moreover, while her case studies in chapters i and ii offer valuable insight into the social statuses of missionaries and ex-slaves within local dynamics, they speak little as to how the actual labour of lime-burning and church building fit into these socio-cultural webs. For example, it is striking that both of her case studies exemplify the labour of church building in the late nineteenth century; however, she does not probe the significance of a church specifically being built by ex-slaves and enslaved persons. And while Liebst gives some description of the physical labour involved in both cases (pp. 59, 81), further considerations of the materiality of the labour could have deepened her inquiry. Of course, it would be difficult to recover the labour experiences of ex-slaves and hired slaves on these building sites, but some acknowledgement of this limitation would have been welcome.

Chapter iii examines the ex-slave students at the mission boys’ school in Kiungani. Liebt explores what academic and labour opportunities the mission offered ex-slaves and how this affected their social standing and mobilisation within and beyond the mission. This chapter provides much useful archival data on the life of ex-slave students in a UMCA mission (see especially Tables 3–6), as well as insight into UMCA mission perspectives on ex-slave status. But as with the preceding chapters, her argument predominantly follows socio-cultural notions of respectability for ex-slaves. Liebst traces how the ex-slave identity was shaped by the Arab-influenced ‘heshima’ alongside the UMCA’s Christian moral respectability – all tied up in civilisationism. She concludes that the mission’s concerns for creating and maintaining the ex-slave’s respectability ‘simultaneously undermined and perpetuated slave status’ (p.124). Such frameworks were inadvertently tied to the boys’ labour in the schools, but not explicitly.

The last chapters are the strongest because they most clearly attend to the social, cultural and physical nature of the labour itself. In chapter iv, Liebst turns to the case study of the Mbweni girls’ school – attending to the often hard-to-reach historical subject of the female ex-slave. Centralising the female ex-slave students’ labour, Liebst traces how these girls and women learned and performed domestic skills like catering, housekeeping, needlework and cultivating. Such tasks simultaneously worked to maintain the mission and trained them to meet the ideal of Christian wives. Liebst demonstrates convincingly that female ex-slaves at Mbweni not only navigated various indigenous and colonial gender expectations, but were able to use these expectations to their advantage to establish their own careers, communal networks and social status. The stories of Mbweni graduates like Kate Mabruki are most telling; not only did Kate have a long career as a teacher, independent of her husband’s job, but she also was able to utilise her Mbweni connections to return to the mission after the collapse of her marriage (pp. 137–9).

Chapter v probes the similar, yet contrasting nature of male domestic service or ‘uboi’ in Magila on the missions and among European colonials. Liebst traces how the uboi work – and the associated ‘boi’ identity – had particular social, racial and gender meanings that changed over time. Caring for children, housekeeping, cleaning and acting as personal servants, bois were at first associated with child labour and slavery, but became more professionalised as they established themselves in the wider labour market beyond the mission. Most impressive is Liebst’s deft investigation of the linguistic significance of ‘uboi’/‘boi’ and its similarities with other Swahili terms. Such excellent linguistic analysis is evident throughout the work. She persuasively demonstrates that bois – like the Mbweni girls – navigated conflicting cultural expectations (Arab, European, African) and gender expectations to use their ‘boi’ identity as part of a long strategy to mobilise their social status. Both chapters well exemplify Liebst’s argument for the native Africans’ creative responses to their mission environment to create their own livelihood paths.

Building on the growing field of global labour history, Liebst prompts the historian of Christianity to consider the material reality of the mission site. Liebst’s breadth and depth of archival sources will provide valuable insight to those studying Zanzibarian and Tanzanian history. But although the work’s title emphasises ‘labour’, much of her analysis could perhaps better be described as an analysis of ‘livelihood’ – mostly focusing on the social, racial and gender tensions as well as statuses of personhood that touch on issues of ex/slavery on the mission site. Indeed, the multi-dimensions of ‘livelihood’ on the mission is a well-argued topic in her conclusion. Liebst’s work overall could have benefitted from better signposting to indicate the links between each chapter. Several referencing inconsistencies across chapters also posed some issue – as historical persons are irregularly introduced in various chapters.

Nevertheless, historians of Christianity will appreciate this investigation of a wide range of converging socio-cultural forces on the mission site that consider the ‘worldly’ aspects of mission.