Although revival was a great catalyst for the expansion and transformation of Christianity within Africa, it has often been neglected as a subject for research because of its antecedents in European missionary activity. Instead scholars have preferred to work on supposedly more exotic movements of Christian independency in a misplaced search for African authenticity. Yet movements of reform within mission churches were more widespread than movements of secession from it and often the two actions were linked. The revivalist activities of women and youth within mission churches in Manicaland, Zimbabwe saved them from seceding to the great apostolic movements of Maranke and Masowe during the 1930s. Furthermore, independence movements were often less independent than they initially appeared, having connections with American and European Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. In Making African Christianity, Robert Houle recounts how Zulu Christians in a well-established mission church drew upon the spiritual resources of a small US holiness mission to indigenise their faith and assert greater independence. A central plank of his argument is that while some African Christians did join early movements of South African Christian independency, most were able to stay within mission Christianity due to the sense of personal empowerment and authority gained through a closer experience of the Holy Spirit. Zulu Christians had no wish to leave churches that they built with their own hands and where they had marked their rites of passage.
Houle's narrative begins in 1835 with the arrival of missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABM) in colonial Natal. He argues that adherence to the resulting African Zulu Mission (AZM) initially had a strong instrumental dimension. First generation converts (amakholwa) were drawn by the new clan affiliations they could construct under ‘missionary chiefs’ and the pull of literacy, trade, land, and employment. New mission elites emerged who cultivated respectability through conspicuous consumption. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, this elite lifestyle had been undermined. Its distinctiveness had diminished as more Zulu acquired Western consumables through labour migration and conversion spread beyond mission stations to more ordinary rural dwellers. White settlers were unwilling to share equality with amakholwa and the colonial state curtailed their opportunities to accumulate. This was the context of the revival, which was initiated by missionaries from the Hephzibah Faith Missionary Association (HFMA) in Iowa. Leading revivalist George Weavers and his Zulu interpreter, Mbiya Kuwayo, preached a message of inner consecration and sanctification that freed believers from the need to possess external markers of faith and their dependence on the mediating role of missionaries. Only at this juncture, Houle contends, could Zulu believers ‘call the faith their own’ (xxviii).
Houle's study has admirable qualities. He takes the long view, examining religious change across generations, alert to both movements of accommodation with surrounding Zulu culture and acts of disjuncture in moments of revival. He takes seriously the power of religious ideas, considering the nature of the revival with its core message of inner purity and the new forms of spiritual authority gained through prophetic utterance and the subsequent transgression of boundaries within the mission church. He shows how Zulu Christians imaginatively engaged with the scriptures in their prayer and sermons and demonstrates the personal transformations Christianity brought through close attention to conversion narratives. This emphasis on the religious passions is a powerful antidote to earlier work on the AZM, which built its history into an anti-colonial narrative by tracing the careers of some of its most exceptional members such as John Dube, founding president of what would become the African National Congress. But Houle has replaced this nationalist narrative with his own teleology of indigenisation. It is more useful to see the revival as a form of religious politics than as an engine of ‘naturalisation’ that delivered a more authentic African church. The respectable Christian elites and patriarchs who held sway prior to the revival were no less Christian than the social categories that rose to prominence following Weavers's preaching. Houle also struggles to weigh the significance of the HFMA. Weavers worked within an ambiance of radical evangelical missionary activity, particularly the Zion Movement from Chicago. It would have been useful to reconstruct the osmosis between these revivalists and the AZM. Greater insight would also have come through deeper comparison with the East African Revival. Here religious transformation was catalysed through contact with a small holiness mission emanating from the Keswick Movement, but East African Revivalists also drew on a powerful internal movement for reform within Anglicanism. Nevertheless, Houle's singular study is a valuable contribution toward a hitherto understudied aspect of African Christianity. At the turn of the twentieth century, many small radical evangelical missionary movements entered Africa preaching combinations of divine healing, holiness, the gifts of the Spirit, and news of impending end times. Some remained sectarian and transgressive, others like the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa became significant movements, but together they shaped the histories of independency, revival, and Pentecostalism.
