A leading historian of African Christianity, Ogbu Kalu's scholarly contributions range from early works on historiography and on Nigerian Presbyterianism to a recent overview text and collections of wide-ranging essays on history, religion, and politics. This timely book published by a major press will bring his scholarship to the attention of a wider audience. More than an overview of African pentecostalism, the book places the subject into the contexts of African history, religions, globalization, and contemporary historiographic trends. Kalu deftly and seamlessly moves among history, theology, and social theory, and thus examines the subject from multiple angles within an integrated framework.

Throughout the book, Kalu's central argument is that pentecostalism should be considered an African religion that flows from African roots and addresses African issues and realities. He thus enters current debates over pentecostal identity by insisting that local continuity take precedence over foreign origins and global flows. The book is divided into four sections. The first section discusses the historical origins of African pentecostalism. His periodization demonstrates its origins in religious Ethiopianism, local revival movements, and transformations of indigenous spiritualities. Classical pentecostal missionaries were small in number and often arrived late in the game, in response to preexisting developments. In chapter 4 Kalu provides a useful typology of the scholarship on the vexing relationship between pentecostalism and the older African Instituted Churches (AICs). The second section examines historical trends in the movement from the 1970s to the end of the century. Kalu charts a progression from the emergence of grassroots charismatic revival in the 1970s to the increasing role of media and creation of the “pentecostal big man” in the 1980s to use of pentecostalism for the re-evangelization of Africa in the 1990s. In my opinion this section is the most useful to church historians, as Kalu tracks the details of the internal development of pentecostalism from a spirituality of self-sacrifice to that of success and power. His thesis that the “charismatization” of African Christianity represents the deeper evangelization of the continent, a second stage after the institutional accomplishments of the mission churches, is helpful and convincing. In the third section, Kalu analyzes the interaction between pentecostalism and “African public space.” Chapter 9 is a well-argued analysis of the relationship of pentecostalism to African worldviews. Essays on “pentecostal public ethics,” pentecostalism and politics, and the relationship with Islamic law in Nigeria round out this section. The fourth section is the briefest, and contains Kalu's plea to understand African pentecostalism from the insider perspective as essentially a religious movement. The final chapter is a poignant reflection on the African diaspora and the role of pentecostalism as a transnational force among African emigrants. Ultimately Kalu sees African pentecostalism as a path to the recovery of Africa's important role in world Christianity: “To put contemporary African Pentecostalism in historical perspective, it is reshaping the face of global Christianity” (290).

It is a misnomer to call this book a mere introduction. Although it takes a chronological approach to pentecostal development during the twentieth century, Kalu synthesizes multiple local and regional studies according to his own intellectual map. He also assumes prior knowledge of many historical agents, theories, church histories, and controversies. The book will be the most useful to specialists, both because of Kalu's complex integrative and self-reflective style of scholarship, and because of the copious notes and bibliography. While West Africa is Kalu's area of original research, he does a fine job in synthesizing recent studies from other regions of the continent. This is a transitional volume in the history of African pentecostalism, as one of its chief accomplishments is to raise a multitude of interpretive questions to which answers are not yet apparent. The maturity of Kalu's scholarship is evident in his grasp of an amazingly wide range of material and issues. I believe that Kalu's multidisciplinary approach enriches the study, but his support for a critical yet “confessional” approach to the history of Christianity (82) will not be appreciated by all historians.

The editors of Oxford University Press should be ashamed of how they handled this manuscript. This is the worst copyediting job I have ever seen in an Oxford University Press publication. The text is full of typographical errors. Misspelled proper names are numerous, including L'Epinay for Lalive d'Epinay (10), Matthew for Matthews Ojo (21), Ardell for Ardella Mead (48), Braham for William Branham (58), Sonyika for Wole Soyinka (66), Torpiya for Topia (72), and Elphinck for Richard Elphick (297). Unfortunately these errors detract from a major piece of scholarship.