Long overshadowed by studies on Pentecostalism, scholarship around the Catholic Church in Africa is experiencing a renaissance with a range of new monographs engaging a variety of methodological and regional perspectives. In offering analytically rich microhistories of Catholic institutional politics in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, respectively, Eric Morier-Genoud and Reuben Loffman's new books offer significant contributions to deepening and thickening our understanding of the Catholic Church as a distinct political actor in twentieth-century Africa. In particular, these monographs demonstrate that the Catholic Church was never a monolithic, strictly hierarchical, nor hegemonic historical actor in colonial Africa. Rather, European missionaries, colonial officials and African Catholic elites existed in a relationship of ‘competitive collaboration’ to advance their various political and institutional agendas, often shaping the Church's policies and attitudes horizontally or from the bottom-up.

Focusing on the Kongolo region in south-eastern Congo, Loffman aims to problematise the widely-held assumption that ‘the Catholic Church had an exceptionally close and collaborative relationship with the colonial administration of the Belgian Congo’ (p. 1). For Loffman, this stereotype held some truth in the area of education, but it overlooks the deeply competitive relationship between two institutions that had their own distinct aims and methods. In turn, Loffman demonstrates that in this peripheral region of Belgian Congo, the Catholic Church was in fact much more influential than the supposed ‘bula mutari’ colonial state; Lavigerie's dreams of founding a ‘Christian kingdom in the heart of Africa’ were not far from realisation, at least during the early decades of the twentieth century. And yet whatever missionaries’ hopes to institute a ‘universalizing Catholic culture’ (p. 6) in south-eastern Congo, local traditions remained resilient. Conversions happened, but rarely on the lines imagined by missionaries.

Several contributions stand out in Loffman's work. First, he highlights the ways in which White Father and Spiritan missionaries defined themselves against the three pillars of Zanzibari influence that had dominated the region in the late nineteenth century: slaving, Islam and polygamy. Second, he notes how Catholic missions in the region developed a deeply authoritarian and even militaristic dimension in the early twentieth century in a context of epidemiological crisis and Zanzibari and Belgian forced labour practices. In turn, the credibility of the Church was damaged by its inability to protect locals from these threats. Third, the post-World War II period saw the Catholic Church's political ecclesiology shift from one of ‘independent theocracy’ to an ‘ideologically distinct institution within the framework of colonial rule’ (p. 190). This resulted in a closer Church-State relationship that ultimately exposed Catholic missionaries to some of the worst currents of anticolonial violence, such as the killing of twenty Spiritan missionaries at a Kongolo seminary in January 1962. Finally, Loffman problematises an overly simplistic view of nationalist politics at the time of independence, showing how a majority of local Catholics in Katanga region made a pragmatic option for ‘Eurocentric capitalism’ over its Lumumbist socialist rival (p. 221).

If Loffman focuses primarily on the complexities of Church-State relations in colonial Congo, Morier-Genoud emphasises the nature of the Catholic Church as a distinct and variegated political actor in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique between 1940 and 1986. In particular, Morier-Genoud examines the autonomous and competitive nature of Catholic religious orders such as the Jesuits, the Franciscans and the White Fathers in the diocese of Beira.

Several important insights emerge in Morier-Genoud's monograph. First, he recognises the multifarious political and theological influences on Catholic leaders in Mozambique. For example, Dom Sebastião Soares de Resende, the dominant missionary bishop of the colonial period, emerges as a complex ideological hybrid of ultramontanism, neo-Thomism and Portuguese nationalism. Loyal to Rome and committed to a multi-national clergy, Resende also supported Portugal's project of ‘Christianization and civilization through colonization’ (p. 92). Yet even as he publicly vouched for a neo-Thomistic vision in which the Church would be a moral and spiritual arbiter hovering above partisan political disputes, he also drew on Catholic social doctrine to critique Portugal's exploitative labour practices. Second, Morier-Genoud offers a sophisticated sociological analysis of the varied ethnic, economic, geographical and catechetical factors that shaped the dynamics of Mozambican Catholic conversion. This reveals some surprises. For example, despite their unmatched commitment to inculturation and local languages, the White Fathers made far fewer converts than their more conservative Franciscan rivals, in part due to an elitist understanding of conversion. Third, Morier-Genoud demonstrates how internal Catholic diversity – especially in terms of missionaries’ contrasting attitudes toward both Portuguese settlers and the Frelimo independence movement – ultimately led to deep fissures within the Church in the early 1970s. Most missionaries withdrew or were expelled from the country, and the Church struggled with both intransigent Portuguese nationalism and post-colonial Frelimo anti-clericalism before again finding its prophetic voice as a sociopolitical mediator in the 1980s.

My critiques would be two-fold. First, both authors’ theological analysis could use nuancing or development. Morier-Genoud's close association of ‘neo-Thomist’ with ‘prophetic’ seems jarring. Does ‘prophetic’ mean that the Church rises above political partisanship, as the author implies, or does it rather mean standing with the people over and against state authoritarianism (à la liberation theology)? For his part, Loffman could do more to explore the political theologies of Kongolo's White Father and Spiritan missionaries as well as their theological reasons for staying in the region during the anti-colonial violence of 1961–2. My sense is that this latter decision reflected in part an incarnational theology prioritising the pastor's need to stay with his flock, and perhaps echoed the historic Catholic idealisation of martyrdom. Second, both monographs raise the question of the degree to which scholars can extrapolate from the local. In essence, are Beira and Kongolo exceptional cases, or do they reveal broader and wider patterns within colonial Mozambique and Belgian Congo, respectively?

Both authors make outstanding usage of a wide range of missionary and colonial archives as well as oral interviews; scholars will discover many new sources here on which to build future research. Overall, Loffman's and Morier-Genoud's monographs offer impressive and much-needed contributions to historiography on the Catholic Church and religious politics in twentieth-century Africa, moving us beyond simplistic tropes of Church-State collaboration or resistance. They remind us that just as all politics is local, so is the African Church.