This volume is the outcome of a panel at the 48th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, held in Washington DC in 2005. It aims to re-examine the collaborations between missions and imperial authority and to ‘highlight several aspects of the critical role played by missionaries in the establishment and consolidation of colonial rule in Africa’ (p. 2). The book consists of an introduction and ten chapters in which detailed case studies are presented. It also includes an index. Maps (which would have been useful to illustrate the case studies) are missing. The authors represent different disciplines such as history, the study of religion and anthropology.

Most of the contributions are based on original research and offer new and sometimes fascinating insights. Roger B. Beck analyses the role of missionaries (of the London Missionary Society) as commercial intermediaries and government emissaries on the north-eastern frontier of the early nineteenth-century Cape Colony. He focuses especially on the organization of frontier fairs and the response of the Griqua, who, he concludes, ‘were anxious to develop commercial relations with the colony but not at the expense of their independence’ (p. 33). Yolanda Covington-Ward studies the shifting nature of the uses and meanings of Kongo embodied practices in the context of the many sociocultural transformations that defined the colonial period, drawing particular attention to the practices of trembling and dancing in the prophetic movements and the various reactions by mainline missionaries and colonial administrators. Ogbu Kalu revisits the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh 1910 and its approach to education, which was ‘directed more towards a formation that promotes social maintenance instead of promoting a liberating agenda that reveals the divinity of the human spirit’ (p. 125). Waibinte Wariboko looks into the endeavours to establish a West Indian Church in the Upper Guinea Coast. In his opinion, these South–South interactions were not successful, since the ‘indiscrete reporting about Africa in the Caribbean’ led to a ‘rejection of blackness as part of Jamaica's national heritage’ (p. 185). The other contribution by Wariboko focuses on church–state relations in southern Nigeria, an area which is also studied by Jude C. Aguwa and Chima J. Korieh. Raphael Chijioke Njoku re-examines the church–state struggle in Kabaka's Uganda and questions ‘whether the so-called Christian martyrs were truly martyrs or sinners’ (p. 66). Michael McInneshin researches the overlapping colonization by two European powers, a German state and English missionaries, in the north-eastern corner of German East Africa (currently the Tanga district in Tanzania) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. McInneshin observes that, in spite of some conflicts (which are reflected in the statement of a UMCA bishop that he would rather be a Turk than a German), there were also commonalities: the Europeans fit ‘their descriptions of the land into a worldview that necessitated colonial intervention of one sort or another’ (p. 202). Gideon Mailer focuses on the encounters between American and British evangelical Christian missionaries and the indigenous communities of southern Sudan in the last hundred years and argues that the missionary expulsions which followed the student strikes in 1962 were counterproductive with regards to the assertion of Northern hegemony in the south (p. 229).

The ten chapters thus analyse different levels of interactions. The theoretical approaches vary. While Wariboko and Njoku tend to regard African Christians and missionaries as ‘functional whites’ who cooperated with the colonizers to promote ‘Whiteness’ above ‘Blackness’, Korieh's analytical framework is the dialogue between two cultures ‘attempting to understand, contend with and accommodate each other … within a context in which African cultures were confronted by an externally imposed/dominant/hegemonic culture, but one in which such hegemonic impositions were often influenced by African initiatives’ (p. 165). Although some different theories and approaches are listed in the introduction, a more thorough historiographical discussion of the studies in mission and colonialism would have been helpful. Nevertheless the book is to be recommended for bringing together a number of rich case studies.