Christopher Tounsel's Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan contributes to a larger body of literature that welcomingly obscures the boundaries of religious and political epistemologies in African historical scholarship. The importance of Tounsel's book is that it reorients the larger ideational contexts with which we approach Sudan's and South Sudan's past, over the previous two centuries. This book does not propose a materialist reading of race, ethnicity, and religious practice. Rather, it challenges its readers to take seriously the ways in which South Sudanese reworked Christian theology to image the world's newest nation-state.

The opening chapter of the book focuses on the formation of the Nugent School between the First and Second World Wars. As Tounsel explains, Church Mission Society (CMS) missionaries established the school in Loka, South Sudan, as part of a larger strategy to weaken the influence of Islam and to create an educational and theological buffer between Khartoum and Uganda. The significance of the school illustrates several larger themes in South Sudan's missionary history. First, the school was designed to create a masculine class of Christian ‘warriors’. Second, the school reified ethnic identifies in the colonial state, although we are not shown how ethnic fluidity worked in nineteenth-century Sudan. Finally, missionaries believed that spiritual transformation would assuage ethnic tensions throughout the region. While the chapter does an excellent job of highlighting what was at stake for European missionaries in the formation of the school, there is surprisingly little focus on local intellectual histories. The chapter does show how Father John Kiggen used Nuer glosses to imagine ethnic classification (37), but this raises a larger set of unexplored questions. In what ways were South Sudanese intellectuals actively shaping the translation processes and the production of vocabulary? How were local converts translating Christian themes into local cosmologies and linguistic registers? The chapter does talk about the idea of wei, or ‘to breathe’ or ‘breath’, but we still do not see how the idea changed over time and the ways it was contested in Dinka communities.

The second chapter, like the first, begins by accentuating European historical imagination: the 1951 epic film Quo Vadis. The film was banned by the Ministry of the Interior in Sudan ‘amid speculation that its grisly portrayals of Christians being crucified, burned alive, and gored by ravenous lions could have a provocative influence among Sudanese audiences’ (45). The book uses this opening vignette to introduce the readers to the Torit Mutiny of August 1955. Like Nugent School, the Equatorial Corps had been designed to function as a non-Muslim military unit in a world characterized by the legacies of slavery and Islamic military organization. Indeed, Tounsel impressively draws from archival material that he unearthed in the Billy Graham Center Archives, South Sudan National Archives, and Sudan Archives in Durham to convincingly show how the ideological and discursive legacies of slavery did not dissipate quickly in South Sudan (58–62). The Equatorial Corps was based in Torit, in Eastern Equatoria's Latuholand. The immediate genesis of the revolt was an Arab officer calling a black sergeant-major a slave, an offence which compelled Torit troops to attack North Sudanese officers (54). The principal wave of violence left 361 northerners and 75 southerners dead. As the book argues, the mutiny is an important moment in the development of southern Christian nationalism. ‘As mutineers looked to protect themselves from another instance of northern “subjugation,”’ argues Tounsel, ‘the mutiny foreshadowed the way in which history—whether Sudanese or biblical—would be used to inspire and comfort southerners during the ensuing civil wars against the government’ (66). Violence spread from Torit to Juba, Yei, Terrakeka, Tali Post, Rokon, Kajo Keji, Yambio, and Meridi. At the heart of the uprising was a theological claim on time and providence. As one organizer declared, ‘The hour of vengeance against the Moslems has come, do you understand? It is war to the end’ (54).

Contrary to materialist approaches, Tounsel uses Chapter Three to propose that the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–77) was propelled by an ideational world of political theologies. South Sudanese used their bibles to compare their plight to Israel's captivity and liberation in Egypt and Babylon. The book argues that South Sudanese Christian thought developed in a world shaped by state-sponsored Arabization and Islamization (69), culminating in constitutional reforms and educational policies throughout the early to mid-1950s that marginalized Christian citizens. The chapter builds upon interviews, autobiographies, and archival material in the Comboni archives to explore how Sudanese activists and religious leaders — including Bishop Ireneo Dud, J. M. Deng, William Levi, Michael Maror Liec, Elia Seng Majok, Juliano Kita, and Severino Fuli Boki Tombe Ga'le — structured speeches, letters, and other writings around biblical stories. What we do not learn is how or if these theological claims connected with dreams, visions, healing sites, the natural world, vernacular debates among community members, and the longue durée of cosmological contemplation, nor how such articulations changed over time. On page 83, for example, we are introduced to the lyrical compositions of the itinerant revivalist Sosthenes Dronyi. The song is laden with powerful metaphors and linguistic claims about land, God, occupation, and salvation. Be we have no sense about how these ideas circulated throughout the region, or the larger epistemological worlds out of which the idioms and claims were borrowed and refashioned.

The Second Civil War (1983–2005) is the focus of Chapter Four. Central to the chapter's claim is that the Second Civil War ‘destroyed the southern urban life that had been connected with Christianity, and against the backdrop of the government's politicization of Islam, many southerners began to view churches as political allies’ (91). The support and legitimacy of Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), though, reached beyond Sudan. The SPLA's revolutionary radio station — Radio SPLA: The Voice of Revolutionary Armed Struggle — had been based in Addis Ababa. Tounsel effectively shows how the SPLA struggled to operate without the transnational, Marxist solidarity of the Mengistu administration in Ethiopia, which was removed from power in 1991. With their airwaves compromised, revolutionary mobilizers and ordinary dissenters looked to the church to resolve tensions between Nuer and Dinka leadership as the war unfolded. American evangelicals, as well, focused their gaze on Sudan, seeing the civil war as a colosseum for Christian persecution (95–6). Expanding international coverage of Sudan's conflict was met by the influence of the SPLA magazine Update. The publication circulated throughout the world, with authors contributing from Nairobi, Lesotho, Germany, New Jersey, London, and Harare. It was in the pages of Update that South Sudanese luminaries reimagined a martial theology to advocate for the creation of South Sudan. As the writer Isaac Malith declared, ‘Like Biblical Philistine Goliath/The NIF [National Islamic Front]… / But Alas!… / The stone and sling of our SPLA will smash and mash the skull of NIF.… / With sure triumphant victory / We shall shout SPLA Oyee’ (99). The chapter outlines several additional compelling examples where activists used theological tableaux to encourage ongoing resistance against the Khartoum government (102–10).

The final chapter of the book examines ethnic competition in South Sudan following the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It shows how pan-Christian solidarities were often subsumed by ethnic claims and loyalties (115). Where Christian ideologues argued for Christian unification during the Second Civil War, theological claims shifted during the postwar period. As opposed to arguing for unity, partisan activists now underscored God's will to create a world of ethnic diversity. Be that as it may, lofty theological claims about diversity could not prevent civil conflict in the newly-formed state among southern actors. Churches struggled to mitigate postindependence conflict (127), and political theologies could be directed internally against South Sudanese communities just as easily as they could be weaponized against the Khartoum government. As the conclusion notes, ‘[r]ace's centrality in the theological paradigm… must not overshadow the religious approaches taken to interethnic relations—relations that, since December 2013 have been open and violently broadcasted for the world to see’ (136).

Tounsel's reading of South Sudan's history is both critical and compassionate — a balance that is not always found among professional historians. The book is also beautifully written and well structured. But there are areas that warrant further development. As Tounsel readily admits in his closing reflections on sources and methodologies (145–9), the book's primary sources are almost entirely in English. Nuer, Dinka, and Arabic sources are absent. This is a notable concern, as it is impossible to write deep African intellectual histories without taking local languages seriously. Nor is it possible to outline moral economies without engaging vernacular sources. Methodologically, then, the book reduces theological complexities and pluralism into a world of nation states (3, 135). But to what extent were other Christian or Islamic projects not concerned with the state? Or in what ways did Sudan's late colonial historians return to the deep past to complicate royalist historiographies and religious orthodoxies? In 1959, for example, historians at the University of Khartoum conducted research on the dissolution of the region's precolonial Christian kingdoms. Mustafa Musad argued that the internal collapse of the Kingdom of Maqurra was the result of ‘[i]nternal dissensions’, not Islamic or Arab slavery, which only after the fact gave the Sultan of Egypt an ‘opportunity for interference’.Footnote ¹ Additional questions come to mind. What about the use of theology to inspire ideas about migration and non-state mobilities? How were theological claims used to bolster disputes about clanship and the authority of public healers? In what ways did Catholics and Protestants read their bibles, hymnals, prayer books, and missals differently? Did Protestant-Catholic expressions work differently among Nuer and Dinka communities? If so, in what ways? To what degree were Christian images, colors, and icons reworked to create national material culture? Of course, one cannot expect that Tounsel would be able to consider all these questions, in adequate depth, in one volume. It is a promising sign that the extant book prompts them in the first place.

Finally, it is not always apparent how the chapter's introductions relate directly to South Sudanese intellectual histories. For instance, Chapter Five offers a full paragraph on Ridley Scott's Exodus: God and Kings (2014). Were South Sudanese watching the film? Did it inspire protests in Sudanese theatres in ways that mirrored the Scottish National Party's political deployment of Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995)? While the film may help sensationalize the Exodus story, it is not apparent how it is germane to the ideational worlds of South Sudanese thinkers. Even with these questions in mind, Chosen Peoples offers novel insights into South Sudan's religious and political history. By prioritizing political theologies as a question of historical inquiry, it makes an important intervention in both South Sudan's emerging historiography and in the broader trajectories of African intellectual history.