It has become a truism amongst those studying the modern spread of Christianity worldwide that indigenous Christians were much more effective than their western missionary counterparts in influencing Christian conversion and its accompanying social and cultural changes. Until recently, however, there has been limited sustained scholarly reflection on why this is the case. Attention has focused more often on those operating beyond missionary influence. The four authors of this volume have already examined in other work the mediating roles of indigenous evangelists to show how initial phases of Christianisation responded to the needs of societies, or were adapted by a particular group in order to effect internal change. This volume further analyses the processes of local agency and adaptation by providing comparative studies on a crucial element of colonial history, the location and the operation of authority. Its approach and method are valuable not only in re-examining authority but also in providing a method of researching a subject that is either under-documented or documented mainly by western missionaries.

The book contains fifteen case studies, each of which examines one or more evangelists, usually affiliated in some way to a European missionary society. The close attention to the particular, personal dynamics demonstrate how authority is operative beyond the institutional structures of Church, mission or colony whilst simultaneously providing accessible narrative history. The use of missionary archives to construct the stories of indigenous evangelists is thorough and profound. Some individuals, like Tiyo Soya or John Dube, are relatively well-known, but most are unfamiliar names. There is a thorough introduction to the volume as a whole and an introduction to each of the four sections into which the book is divided, all of which provide a theoretical and comparative guide to the individual studies. In part i, ‘Articulating Conflicts of Authority in Indigenous Christian Writing’, readers are introduced to prominent well-travelled individuals, educated in Britain and the USA, whose writings show the negotiation of conflicting expectations surrounding leadership and societal reform. Part ii, ‘The Limits of Patriarchal Authority’, emphasises the role of women. Often denied official roles in the Church and less able to access missionary education than men, some women gained spiritual authority as song-writers, sages and evangelists. Part iii, ‘Ethnographic Authority: Documenting Indigenous Societies’, provides case studies of early Christian writers who contributed to the anthropological understanding of their people. The motivations and opportunities for writing varied considerably. Their work included expressions of cultural pride, arguments that Christianity enhanced certain traditional structures, writings for a missionary readership, and research work for anthropologists. Through their writing indigenous agents publicised and reshaped the cultural identities that they described. ‘Indigenous Evangelists under Attack in Three Colonial Situations’, the final part, uses the rise in documentation during colonial crises to examine the way in which civil and religious authorities scrutinised the Christian character of indigenous leaders. It highlights the competing claims on evangelists and the suspicion with which they were regarded by white settlers.

The majority of the case studies come from South Africa and Australia. Jamaica, West Africa, Rarotonga, New Zealand and Canada provide the location for at least one study each. The differentials of place, denomination and time are addressed briefly in the introduction. The impressive geographical spread, however, makes more obvious the lack of attention to British imperial areas in Asia. Religiously and politically, Asia posed a distinct set of issues for missionaries and indigenous evangelists because of the presence of other religions with written Scriptures which had also developed a significant geographical spread. Furthermore, there is little discussion of the influence on almost all the localities of a significant settler community which was particularly concerned about indigenous agency and expected colony and mission to circumscribe the perceived excesses of indigenous agents. British officers and missionaries in regions with fewer settlers often worked more closely with local rulers, with arguably different outcomes for authority.

The authors temper the assumption that there was a direct link between missions and imperial power in which Christianity is viewed as an insidious intrusion into the customs and cultures of subjugated peoples. Indigenous authority is portrayed, very effectively, as dynamic and multi-faceted. It is often beyond missionary control and operating despite missionary efforts to curtail it. Sometimes it leads to societal reform, at others to the conservation of tradition. Sometimes authority is conferred through ordination; sometimes indigenous authority circumvented the formal, male, ecclesiastical paths through songs, visions and dreams. Authority is operative in writing about indigenous cultures as well as in leading a Church. Indigenous authority is shown to be responsive to situations, negotiating institutional, colonial and local expectations. A common theme in most of the case studies is the curtailing of indigenous authority by missionary authorities. It is at this point that this otherwise excellent book fails to go beyond the ‘them’ and ‘us’ binaries of colonial history that it intends to address. Missionaries are uniformly portrayed as patronising and belittling. This explains why indigenous agency is often invisible, why official church authority is bestowed reluctantly and why some indigenous evangelists form their own Churches. It does not explain how it was that missionaries and indigenous church leaders often continued to work together. Nor does it probe the nature of their relationships which, presumably, functioned beyond the perceived failings of the other. It is clear that missionaries had differentiated notions of colonialism but it is less clear that the similarly differentiated notions of indigenous evangelists meant that, in certain situations, the associations with missionaries might be understood to enhance the authority of indigenous evangelists. This is a minor point in a book that otherwise develops the methodological approach for analysing indigenous agency and extends our knowledge of the men and women who adopted and adapted the Christian message in their milieu.