Sara Pugach's Africa in Translation is a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarly literature on both colonial linguistics and the role of missionaries as colonial agents. As such it complements recent work by Thomas Stolz; Ingo Warnke; Nils Oerman; and, for the French empire, J. P. Daughton and Elizabeth Foster. Among the book's strengths is its clear chronological overview of the evolution of Afrikanistik—defined as the study of African languages and literature—from its origins among Protestant German missionaries working abroad into an academic discipline squarely centered in the metropole. By focusing on the career of Carl Meinhof, Pugach is also able to convincingly demonstrate that the discipline not only became increasingly professional and concerned with race, but also provided ideological support for South African policies of segregation and Apartheid.

The book opens with a look at early German missionary linguists in the precolonial era, arguing that their pietist principles and experience working for foreign missionary societies in Africa rendered them committed universalists who saw language as a tool for evangelism rather than larger national or patriotic goals. Nevertheless, Pugach demonstrates that they got caught up in the nineteenth-century comparative philology movement, which sought to describe the structure, historical development, and interrelatedness of languages. In doing so, German missionary linguists eschewed racial criteria in favor of civilizational and cultural markers when describing African language groups.

That all began to change in the mid-1880s with the annexation of the German colonial empire and the creation of the Seminar for Oriental Languages that, due to its affiliation with Friedrich-Wilhelms University, transformed the field of African studies into a quasi-academic discipline. In keeping with the Seminar's focus on transmitting practical knowledge designed to facilitate the administration and exploitation of Germany's new overseas possessions, its language classes were geared toward teaching basic communication skills to settlers and colonial officials in a metropolitan setting so as to alleviate the need for interpreters and maximize the potential for German control. Pugach argues that although missionaries remained committed to fieldwork and retained their position as Afrikanistik leaders, the practical nature of the Seminar's offerings combined with competition from civil servants, military officers and settlers who began publishing their own linguistic work emphasizing the political and economic needs of the empire ultimately led to declining interest in philology and a shift in missionary thought from universalism to a shared nationalist emphasis on supporting the colonial endeavor with more utilitarian language studies.

Pugach makes a very compelling case that further changes in Afrikanistik were set in motion by the rise of Carl Meinhof, Germany's leading expert on African languages and a staff member in both the Oriental Seminar and, after 1909, the newly created Hamburg Colonial Institute. Shortly after the turn of the century, Meinhof developed a system for classifying African languages into groups using a combination of linguistics and concepts borrowed from anthropology. This system, which often conflated linguistic and physical terms when describing Africans, not only injected a degree of biological racism into German language studies, but was also used to reassert control in the face of colonial protests and African mobility by tracking the supposed ethnic affiliations and geographic origins of subject populations.

Meinhof had an equally profound effect on the professionalization of African studies in Germany and the methods employed when teaching colonial languages. In addition to advocating the study of the morphology and structure of African language groups, which would supposedly provide the key to understanding individual member languages, he also created a phonetics lab in Hamburg using African teaching assistants and the latest scientific technology to investigate and record the mechanics of pronunciation. Both the lab and the Institute's language courses provided what Pugach describes as the quintessential hypermetropolitan space in which formally trained academics could observe African peoples, languages, and cultures in a controlled environment. Given Meinhof's academic stature, his ideas naturally had a profound effect on the course of Afrikanistik for the duration of the interwar period. Pugach also shows that they were similarly influential in South Africa where several of Meinhof's former students eventually went on to shape policy and ethnological discourse in support of segregation and the post-World War II policy of Apartheid.

Although generally successful, the book does have its flaws. Despite her use of an impressive array of published sources as well as documents in government and mission archives across Germany, Switzerland, Britain, and South Africa, her extensive bibliography has some curious omissions, including the work of Anne Brumfit and William Samarin, which would have shed additional light on her subject matter. She also overstates her claim that by the turn of the century German missionaries had shed their universalism in favor of a nationalistic approach to empire. As Benjamin Lawrance's work on Togo and my own work on Cameroon has shown, German missionary reactions were much more complicated and often included the pursuit of language policies at odds with those of the local colonial administrations, in part because they believed that nationalist interests were ultimately less important than evangelism. Finally, Pugach's chapter on African teaching assistants at the Seminar and Colonial Institute, while fascinating, was too truncated and based on limited examples to fully support her contention that they both accepted and challenged German notions of race. In spite of these minor issues, Africa in Translation is an engaging and important work with much to offer readers interested in linguistics, missionary studies, German culture, and European imperialism.