Nicole Eggers’ splendid monograph focuses on the history of the Kitawala movement in Eastern Belgian Congo, what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), from the early twentieth century to the present. The movement’s antecedents lie in the US-derived Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses), which arrived in Central Africa in the 1920s. The Society’s limited numbers of missionaries and reliance on literature as a means of proselytizing meant that Watch Tower very quickly evolved away from its American prototype to take on a variety of forms as a healing and religious movement that had great appeal among mining communities and rural dwellers across Central and Southern Africa. As Fred Cooper has observed, it was one of several religious movements that rivalled African nationalism as a model of liberation, an alternative trajectory into the future, from the 1950s onwards.

Drawing on four periods of fieldwork, the monograph deploys a wealth of new data, oral histories, texts produced by Kitawala members, and formal colonial archives in Belgium and the USA. These sources are used with great insight and empathy in dialogue with the history and historiography of the Belgian Congo/DRC and the wider region of Central Africa. Eggers displays a deep grasp of the relevant pre-existing Western scholarship but has gone beyond it to engage with colonial sociology and work by several generations of African scholars who are often overlooked. Her writing is clear and engaging, deploying theory in a manner that enlightens rather than obscures, while displaying great reflexivity about methodology and the researcher’s positionality.

Kitawala/Watch Tower is a well-worked field of research in the history of Central Africa. There are fine studies by John Higginson, Nancy Hunt, Karen Fields and Sholto Cross and influential articles by Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Jean-Luc Vellut. The movement has been variously interpreted as a vehicle of anti-colonial resistance, of witch finding, of delegitimating colonial and customary authority, and as a facet of rural class consciousness, and I was curious to see whether Eggers could bring anything new to the scholarship. In fact, her study innovates in at least three significant ways. First, she is far more attentive than other scholars to the movement’s internal dynamics. She situates Kitawala within a long history of healing institutions in Central Africa that have wielded power to alleviate the maladies experienced by their communities. Here, she explores the inward-facing agency of prophets and healers who used medicines and ‘cleansing’ violence against members of their own communities who were believed to have abused their positions, broken social norms or endangered the social fabric. She examines how social healing is double-edged, sometimes constructive and at other times harming the vulnerable and marginalized who were deemed antisocial. Second, she explores the intellectual creativity of the evangelists, healers and prophets who fashioned spiritual responses to crises thrown up by rapid socio-economic change. Rejecting the notion of syncretism precisely because it was a colonial label that depicted confusion and occluded the religious innovation of African agents, she shows how local religious leaders blended and exchanged ideas and idioms from a rich and varied corpus of biblical and traditional ideas. She is attentive to a variety of texts, from the Bible and novels to adherents’ writings given to her in the field. Beyond texts, she recorded leaders’ prophetic utterances that sprang from God and the spirits. This emphasis on popular religious creativity, or unruly ideas, adds an important new strand to the emerging field of African intellectual history. Lastly, Eggers genders the scholarship on Watch Tower, challenging the stereotype of a movement animated by male revivalists and revolutionaries. She explores the gendered nature of spiritual and therapeutic power within the church, particularly the centrality of so-called female prayer chambers. Combining these three themes, Eggers has produced a rich, layered history of Kitawala/Watch Tower that draws out the fine grain of religious change in response to exigences thrown up by wars and famines, disease, labour migration and new structures of local authority. This is an outstanding book that deserves to be read widely.