This “institutional history” (12, 270) narrates an important African Catholic story about the unfolding of mission-founded churches. Enyegue, a Cameroonian Jesuit priest-director of the Nairobi-based Jesuit Historical Institute in Africa, here adapts his Boston University dissertation about mid-twentieth-century Jesuit efforts in Chad and Cameroon. He detects “competing Catholicisms,” as evangelizing efforts in the two regions-become-countries – a considerable area even if not the title's “postcolonial French Africa” – evolved differently amid similar challenges.

Informed by extensive research in Jesuit and other archives, the book's three parts – each three chapters – unfold chronologically, the first two on Chad from 1935 to 1975, the third on Cameroon from 1962 to 1978. Despite the event timeline (xvii–xix), the story's intertwined quality is hard to follow since Jesuits in the two places remained separated until the late 1960s, sponsored by different French Jesuit provinces, and the narrative can feel disjointed. Frustrating typographic errors also hamper the text (e.g., 72). Yet Enyegue describes well how Catholicism in Chad remained small, while Cameroon saw considerable Catholic growth, including its own Jesuit priests. Enyegue highlights the 1973 Jesuit decision to create a vice-province combining the two previously separate jurisdictions, which frustrated strong Cameroonian Jesuits who saw ongoing racism in the persistence of “missionary Christianity” blocking Africanization of Jesuits and the church.

Most of the book capably narrates Jesuit evangelization in Chad. French Jesuit missionary leaders are protagonists as Enyegue outlines struggles to build the church while balancing French national interests, a civilizing mission, and evangelizing among traditional believers, diverse forms of Islam, Protestantism, and Chadian anti-colonialism. Post-independence nationalism complicated existing Jesuit attempts to Christianize yondo, the traditional initiation of the Chadian Sara people, yet comparative Catholic openness to local culture allowed an avoidance of repression faced by Protestants, who condemned the rites, angering the first president. Once government repression passed, Paul Dalmais, French Jesuit archbishop in Chad, faced criticism for not protesting against persecution visited upon Protestants. Enyegue's salutary attention to the politics in these inculturation efforts unfortunately overlooks anthropological and theological issues.

Better known than Chad's French Jesuits are three influential Cameroonian Jesuit priests who become prominent in part three of Competing Catholicisms. These criticized the 1973 formation of the vice-province for both being led by an expatriate missionary and adhering to colonial boundaries. Each questioned expatriate missionary work, gained an international reputation, and remains admired as a pioneer of African Catholicism. Engelbert Mveng, the first Cameroonian Jesuit, became an admired artist and cultural analyst. His paintings in the Nairobi Jesuit seminary chapel, one gracing this book's cover, are among the most recognized works of African Christian art. Fabien Eboussi Boulaga achieved renown as a prominent African liberation theologian and his Christianity without Fetishes (translated by Robert Barr; Orbis Books, 1984) remains a landmark text. Another distinguished theologian, Meinrad-Pierre Hebga, was Jesuit superior in Cameroon until 1973, and his research on the compatibilities between African spiritual beliefs and Catholicism shaped his embrace of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. He later founded a local Catholic Charismatic group, Ephphatha, a story captured in fellow Jesuit Ludovic Lado's 2009 Catholic Pentecostalism and the Paradoxes of Africanization (Brill).

Comparing and contrasting the Jesuit experiences in the two places allows Enyegue to capture ironies and contradictions in the Catholic Church's development in differentiated settings and conditions. His important contributions to the history of African Christianity include analyzing how appeals to “universalism” sidelined desires to Africanize the Jesuit presence, the uneven application in Africa of Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe's calls to embrace social justice, Jesuit innovations in Chad's evangelization, and the difficulties of Catholic leadership in post-colonial Africa as seen in the experiences of Archbishop Dalmais. His archival research draws attention to diverse theological and ideological positions of missionaries and African Catholic leaders, and how these generated practical outcomes.

Enyegue's focus on the 1973 formation of the vice-province integrating Jesuit efforts in Chad and Cameroon highlights the ways intra-Jesuit differences could thwart Vatican aspirations toward Africanizing church leadership shared by African Jesuits themselves. Yet the 1973 decision need not indicate a firm contrast between a laudable “Africanization” and a lamentable continuation of “missionary Christianity.” Given the subsequent histories of the famous Cameroonian Jesuits – Mveng consistently in tension with his confreres until his tragic and still mysterious murder in 1995, Eboussi leaving the Jesuits disillusioned, and Hebga facing questions about his leadership capacities despite admired achievements – the formation of the vice-province and decisions about its leadership might have reflected other factors and not simply an ongoing desire for a missionary-dominated Church. The decision understandably disheartened these African Jesuit pioneers, but using the episode to draw a strong distinction between missionary Christianity and an African Catholic Church seems unwarranted.

This is especially true given Jesuit history in Africa after 1978, when Enyegue's story allegedly ends. He bookends Competing Catholicisms with episodes from an intriguing missionary career that undermines any clear and obvious distinction between African and missionary Catholicism. French-born Jesuit Eric de Rosny served in Cameroon from 1957 and as first provincial of the new Jesuit West African Province from 1984 to 1990, which ended the 11 years of the vice-province. The book's introduction begins in 1970 in France, when, reeling from anti-missionary sentiment among his Cameroonian confreres, de Rosny questioned returning, eventually deciding that only a truly Africanized missionary could justifiably enact the missionary vocation. He thus became a Cameroonian citizen and underwent initiation into a secret society for healers in a local ethno-linguistic group. The conclusion describes de Rosny's 2012 funeral in Paris, which honored him as an elder healer in that ethnic group, and links his career with Hebga's own, with its many complications. Enyegue questions de Rosny's higher profile in today's Cameroon given Hebga's arguably more important achievements, yet Hebga's own conflicts with fellow Cameroonian Jesuits suggest the difficulties of drawing definitive conclusions.

Indeed, Enyegue's own introduction and conclusion suggest the risks of any oversimplifications. His gentle and prudent – if perhaps, anti-climactic – concluding sentence suggests that institutional Catholicism in Africa, with its varying agents and components, is indeed “a work in progress” (272). This is an important work in African Catholic history, and I look forward to Enyegue's future publications.