The archives of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika are located in a church-owned office building in Dodoma, Tanzania's capital city. In 2002, when I went through them, there was a cabinet in the archbishop's office stacked with handwritten logbooks, some of which dated to 1876, when the Anglican mission was established. Downstairs, in a disused bookshop, there were diaries composed by church teachers, records from church committees, and handwritten word lists in the Gogo and Kaguru languages. It was perhaps the richest church archive in eastern Africa.

Why did churchmen in central Tanzania create so much paperwork? Unlike the great Protestant missions of colonial Africa, the Anglican mission in central Tanzania was built at a crossroads: the first mission station established in 1876 at Mpwapwa, where the caravan routes intersected (53). The mission's constituents were wayfarers, porters, and liberated slaves. There was no single community that missionaries could address, no “Yoruba” or “Zulu” people to whom the mission could be directed. Neither was there a traditional leadership that could be enlisted to serve the mission's purposes. Missionaries worked in a setting where water was in short supply, agriculture was uncertain, famine was common, political authority was contestable, and people were mobile. Identities had to be flexible.

Needing a structure to work with, missionaries and African converts set out to organize the cultural architecture of the people they sought to convert. The church archives in Dodoma overflow with evidence of assessment. The word lists were composed by uncomprehending missionaries hoping to get a handle on vernacular languages. The logbooks are full of testimony and argument over marriage and inheritance (Derek R. Peterson, “Morality Plays: Marriage, Church Courts and Colonial Agency in Tanganyika, c. 1880–1928,” American Historical Review 111, no. 4 [October 2006]: 983–1010). These and other texts reflect missionaries’ and African converts’ desperate attempts to understand and regulate routines in a place that was deeply multicultural.

In this book, Mwita Akiri uses this remarkable archive to write a revealing study of the history of Christianity in central Tanzania. The book grows out of Akiri's 1999 dissertation, which he composed at the University of Edinburgh. At the core of the book is the foundational insight: it was African Christians, not British missionaries, who authored central Tanzania's Christianity. In the most illuminating parts of the book, Akiri reconstructs the biographies of several dozen Kaguru and Gogo Christians. Working from the church archives, from diaries made by church workers, and from oral interviews, Akiri sheds light on the private, often invisible labor that Africans did on behalf of the Anglican mission. One of the most affecting parts of the book describes the anxiety that a teacher named Danieli Mbogo felt when, in the middle of the growing season in 1908, he was obliged to relocate himself to another school forty miles away. He had already planted a garden with sorghum. His new assignment obliged him to sell off his crop and to pin his future on his slim cash salary and on the generosity of his new neighbors. Akiri's biography captures Mbogo's fearful reckoning as he worked through the consequences of his new employment.

Mwita Akiri is a bishop of the Anglican Church of Tanzania, and at certain places in this book a programmatic view of church life comes to the fore. He argues that missionaries made little effort to “explore points of contact with issues in the pre-Christian life of potential converts” (154). He is particularly emphatic about the catechism, which in his view “does not address the aspirations and issues arising from the pre-Christian heritage of the converts” (332). The first substantial chapter is about “Gogo and Kaguru Societies in the Late Nineteenth Century,” with subsections on “Gogo Social Structure,” “Aspects of Kaguru Religion,” marriage, and so on. That is how theologians are obliged to approach church history in Africa. If the effectiveness of “cross-cultural mission” is to be evaluated, theologians must identify the components of the old religion, outlining its theology and its architecture, in order to study how effectively missionaries engaged with it.

For central Tanzania—as for most other places in Africa—the theological method covers up a more complicated past. It imposes a static framework on the interpretation of cultural history, making it seem as though—prior to missionary work—African peoples lived in separate bubbles and spoke discrete languages. What if—instead of seeing culture as if it were hard-coded into people's identity—we focused on the creative work in which missionaries and African converts were engaged? One of the first missionaries in central Tanzania, J. T. Last, was initially convinced that Gogo people had “no literature or any traditions likely to lead their minds to discover a higher state of righteousness.” Shortly after he made this appraisal, he began to compose a dictionary, with columns for English concepts and Gogo equivalents. By 1902, missionaries had concluded that “their language is remarkably complete; their traditions are such as to amply repay the time and effort required to master them; while their parables and tribal laws are assets of no mean value” (Derek R. Peterson, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent [Cambridge University Press, 2012], 7). The work that Rev. Last and his colleagues did helped to establish “Gogo” language and religion itself as an inheritance, an asset that a later generation of Africans would elaborate. In central Tanzania, as in many other places, people came to know themselves as possessors of distinct cultures as they took on the task of defining and defending their way of life in comparison with Christianity (John Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba [Indiana University Press, 2003]).

In Christianity in Central Tanzania, Mwita Akiri has written a rich, illuminating book that brings the life histories of Christian men and women into focus. A more dynamic approach to the cultural history of central Tanzania, however, would have made the stakes clearer. Even as they sacrificed themselves for the Christian mission, church workers like Danieli Mbogo were also composing ethnographies, writing histories, and shuttling between economies. They were not spokesmen for frozen or archaic cultures. They were creating new ways of living.