In Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood, Ulrike Sill sets out to explicate the gender dynamics that operated in the Basel Mission's promotion of Christianity in nineteenth century Ghana. Working with the archives of the Basel Mission in Germany, she identifies all of the available materials in those archives that touch on issues having to do with the Christianization of African women in the nineteenth century and then systematically examines these materials for what they reveal about the ideals of femininity negotiated between the European missionaries and the Africans the missionaries sought to convert. “Negotiate” is the operative term because Sill was not only interested in showing the ideals missionaries sought to impose, or the ideals that Africans refused to give up. Concerned to show the early stages in Christianization as a successful piece of cultural transfer, Sill was also interested in showing the ideals around which some form of consensus emerged between the two groups.

In writing Encounters in Question of Christian Womanhood, Sill was quite sensitive to contemporary debates among historians, anthropologists, and feminist scholars working on Ghana, and more broadly Africa. Hoping to move those discussions along, Sill structured her discussions to simultaneously speak to a number of groups of scholars, historians being only one among these. The result is, from the historian's perspective, something of a slow read. But for someone determined, as Sill seems to be, to keep mission studies firmly grounded in the social sciences, as the social sciences are pursued in Europe, the result is also a solid, careful piece of scholarship that will be cited by an array of scholars for some time to come.

It will be cited because Sill has unearthed some really fascinating material on Christianization as a gendered social process. Coastal Ghana had experienced a European presence for centuries before the arrival of Basel missionaries. A creole culture had evolved, one feature of this culture being the practice of European traders and administrators selecting temporary “wives” from among the creole population. The Euro-African progeny of these unions made up a significant portion of the student population in the schools the Basel Mission maintained for African girls. These schools sought to socialize African girls to the bourgeois Christian ideas of companionate marriage the missionaries brought with them. When the girls grew up, however, the ideas came into conflict with the practice of temporary unions. As Sill explains, missionaries accommodated themselves to the practice at first, in part in deference to the interests of the girls' families. Later though, once they were better established, the missionaries sought to delegitimize the practice by condemning the women living in these arrangements, often devout churchgoers, as prostitutes. Before things got to this point, however, one way missionaries initially sought to negate the practice was by providing examples of true Christian marriage between Europeans and the daughters of the creole elite. The Basel Mission supported a number of interracial marriages between European male missionaries and African women, though this experiment did not last past a few generations. What Sill wants appreciated, however, is the extent to which African Christians saw neither of these developments, both having to do with the curtailment by European missionaries of conjugal intimacy across the racial divide, as degrading. African Christians, especially clergymen, saw it as a victory. There were ever increasing numbers of African catechists, teachers, and pastors, and they needed wives too.

One idea to which Sill comes back again and again is the idea of Christian missions creating space, space for new types of feminine personae to come into existence, and space for these new personae to maneuver. The Christian wife, the Christian church woman, the Christian school teacher, the Christian school girl, all of these were varieties of Christian womanhood that the Basel Mission helped introduce to the Ghanaian Christian landscape. Sill's case is that resistance was not the dominant form of African reaction to the social innovations introduced by missionaries in part because Africans, especially African women, recognized and exploited the opportunities presented by the innovations to change the social terrain. Her most compelling illustration of this case was the change in the treatment of “six fingered” children. Analogous to the treatment of twins in some other West African communities, the peoples Sill studied consigned babies born with defects or other anomalies, like six fingers, to death, perceiving such children as possessed by malevolent spirits. Missionaries began to take in these children, and to find Christian African women to wet-nurse them. Yes, these actions offended local sensibilities, but they also allowed local people to craft new responses to old social issues. If the Christians' God was going to stand surely against the machinations of the malevolent spirit, why not let the child live. And since the child needed to be fed, it made sense that the mother, if no one else, nursed it. In sum, the actions of missionaries created “elbow room” which Africans could use to follow social agendas only secondarily concerned with Christianity.

The absence of a clear narrative structure will most frustrate historians about the book. Sill seems to have been aware of the problem and sought to respond to it by offering a seven-page summary of developments as a conclusion. Perhaps it would be best not to approach Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood as a historical study, however. The chapters of the book are essentially stand-alone treatments of related, yet distinct topics in the gendering of Christianity in nineteenth Ghana. These chapters will add to any scholarly investigation of the connections between gender and faith in African Christianity.