In this deeply absorbing book, Paul Glen Grant explores the Basel Missionary presence and activities in Akuapem in south-eastern Ghana from the late pre-colonial to the early post-independence periods. He shows that by the time the German Presbyterian missionaries arrived in 1825 to start their evangelistic ministry, there had been over three centuries of Christian presence along the coast of present-day Ghana. However, the various coastal Christian denominations were essentially in-house religions that catered to European sailors and to their children born out of liaisons with local women. Moreover, because the fort- and castle- based Christianity especially served a disciplinary purpose for wayward Europeans, little interest was shown in evangelising the indigenous people. This book is an in-depth historical ethnographic study that draws largely on a varied wealth of primary data from the German-speaking archive: mission field reports, newsletters and major journals published by the Basel mission headquarters. This copious primary material is mined together with oral interviews, supplemented by participant observation, allowing the author to examine how local responses to Christianity served to meet the practical survival needs, healing and protection of the Africans. In pre-colonial times, Akuapem's proximity to the coast positioned the mountain ridge as the breadbasket of the coastal plains; it therefore attracted slaves, ex-slaves and numerous refugees from the Asante wars, including the Akyem who became rulers of the mountain kingdom. The heterogenous demographic and social organisation (matrilineal Akan and patrilineal Guan) of the kingdom made it not only open to incorporating strangers and very receptive to new ideas, but that also determined how the various inhabitants responded to the Basel Christian message. For instance, immigrants and the marginalised largely embraced Christianity, but the indigenous patrilineal Guan maintained their own religious institutions and shrines.

The first three chapters of the book situate the Basel mission enterprise within a very dynamic political economy and regional history that was shaped by intense rivalries among the various Europeans over control of the coastal slave trade. In the nineteenth century, as legitimate trade took over following the abolition of the slave trade, the new reality, combined with the European wars of conquest on the one hand, and armed conflicts among the various Akan states on the other hand, unleashed different waves of migrations in the region. Akuapem became home to the resultant refugees. Andrew Riis, the sole survivor of a cohort of missionaries at Christianborg castle, led a group of missionaries to establish a mission station in Akuapem. And, unlike the coastal denominations, the Basel Missionaries adopted a more evangelistic orientation partly as a result of their marginalised and pietist background in the German-speaking world. Their unique approach entailed intense engagement with the local people through the provision of vocational training and western-style school education, and included translating the Bible into the local vernacular languages.

The Akuapem king, Addo Danquah, who invited Andrew Riis to his kingdom did so not much in search of spiritual transformation but for strategic political reasons as he sought to consolidate his own power over the new kingdom, forged as it was out of a fragile treaty. Like him, the mass of the indigenous people did not just accept the type of Christian religion that the missionaries brought to them but reformulated it to meet their own needs and challenges. The Africans were, for instance, far less concerned with doctrine, and ‘the missionaries’ insistence on faith and teaching’, but rather saw themselves ‘as a community in which belonging outweighed orthodoxy of belief as a motivation’ (p. 175). The remainder of the book's seven chapters contain numerous anecdotes suggesting that conversion was ‘a cross-culturally dialectic process by which Africans were also actively imposing a social category upon the church’. A major strength of this book is the extensive forays into southern Ghana regional history, interspersed with lively ethnographic accounts. At times, for the reader unfamiliar with the history of the Akan States and southern Ghana more generally, the dense historical analysis can seem to distract from the main argument. One of its outstanding contributions, however, is how the history of the Basel mission is analysed in the context of both European and African geopolitics while paying close attention to the experiences of local people and their understanding of Christianity from within their own cultural frames of reference. As an example, the indigenous practice of seeking sanctuary at local shrines was soon imposed on the missionaries and morphed into the Salem (Christian quarters). Several other aspects of indigenous life are discussed in broad theological themes but interwoven in debates over church historiography. It is especially fascinating to read about the major actors within the Basel mission, and local leaders, and how they related with one another. By looking at how the people of Akuapem encountered Christianity on their own terms, reformulating the religion to suit their own local needs, Paul Glen Grant succeeds in bringing alive his central argument with rich ethnographic insights. The overall narrative of the book is presented from a cross-historical lens which proves a clearer prism through which to see early indigenous religious expression as a precursor of present-day Ghanaian Pentecostalism. This book will appeal to students of comparative religions and African church historiography.