Barbara Cooper teaches history at Rutgers University, is fluent in Hausa, has done extensive fieldwork in the Sahel, and published on gender and family life in the Niger Republic. Here she explores how Evangelicals and especially Pentecostalism negotiate the cultural and religious hurdles in a predominantly Muslim community bordering on the religiously volatile northern Nigeria. Her methodology is anthropological and recovers the human realities, sounds, smell and everyday flavour of African encounter with Christian missionary presence, messages and structures. Here, missionary passion either collides with or complements the activities of other actors such as the francophone state, NGOs, cross-border traders and prostitutes, and Islamic social structures and religious sensitivity. The location is southern Niger – the Maradi and Tsibiri region whose original Hausa aristocrats did not share the passion of Usman dan Fodio jihadists and sported a liberal strain of Islam. Indigenous bori, arhna and other ‘bush spirits’ still enjoy devotion in this rich agricultural zone. Maradi itself is a nodal town with trade routes radiating in all directions.

The book starts in the present: collapsed state economy, political and legitimacy crises, and the implosion of both Islamic and Pentecostal fundamentalism, which have much in common, including demonisation and intolerance of opposition. The calabash of blood finally broke when Muslims violently burnt churches in retaliation for Pentecostal radio broadcasts. These included the facilities of the Sudan International (aka Interior) Mission, which had routinised its nineteenth-century evangelical zeal to rescue the Sudan from the illicit embrace of Islam. It adjusted from past emphases on spiritual redemption to bodily rescue or development programmes including education, vernacularisation of the Bible, medical and agro-industrial relief, and development projects. Cooper adduced the serial responses to geopolitics and deeper cultural appreciation of the host communities. More important was Muslim resistance and the dilemma of a minority status, living in an invisible Christian subculture constrained by the Muslim practices that determined doctrinal formulation, dress code, family ethics and how women walk through the streets of Maradi or function in the marketplace. The exuberant Evangelical Pentecostals appear as the antimasque that inherits the discarded dance. The liberalisation and privatisation of the media that followed the victory of democratisation ironically exacerbated collective violence. The superb methodology that is attentive to the contents and style of radio broadcasts is marred by indulgence in an uninformed theological critique of Pentecostal messages, and the celebration of the superiority of the author's liberal Catholicism that is sympathetic and protective of Islam. However, the book is rich in its coverage of Islam in West Africa, Christian encounter and enforced dialogue (both debate and living together), the interior life of a mission-leadership structure, funding and strategy (that balances development projects with showing Jesus films in rural areas), gender in a patriarchal culture, education, and responses to modernity and global cultural forces.

The reconstruction of the changing policies of various regimes in France during the World Wars, the biographies of African evangelists, the analyses of various missionary projects (especially the tree-planting project), and the efforts to domesticate Western Christian values, all combine to create a rich tapestry of historical reconstruction. The book ends with four discourses that explain the growth of Pentecostalism represented by the Vie Abondante that came from Nigeria: historically, Pentecostals built on the foundations laid by Evangelicals from the heyday of the faith movement. At the religious level, the message of prosperity, use of media technology, institution building, and reach into rural areas valorise evangelism. Culturally, Pentecostal response to indigenous culture is sensitive and yet determined to break with the past by weaving a new covenant with Jesus; the healing practices and deliverance rituals answer questions raised within the indigenous world-view. Functionally, ‘Pentecostal appeal is located in the undeniable failures of conventional narratives of progress and development’ (408). Pentecostalism provides strategies for negotiating the believer's way through economic distress and modernity, while contesting global processes with local identities. The study demonstrates the emergence of a new missiology, in which Africans are central in evangelising both the global south and the north. Nigerian missionaries have fanned out through Africa and Asia and are suffering persecution as in the Sahel.