Emerging out of a 2010 conference at Leuven, this edited collection offers a major contribution to literature on African mission history. Drawing on an impressive breadth and depth of research in an array of Belgian archives, the authors provide a roadmap for future researchers across the longue durée of the colonial period in Belgian Congo. Although the authors focus more on Roman Catholic and European missionary perspectives, Protestant and African voices are by no means ignored. Analytically, this wide-ranging study moves beyond Marvin Markowitz's and Crawford Young's ‘bula mutari’ and ‘colonial trinity’ stereotypes as well as Adam Hochschild's ‘heart of darkness’ polemic. For Viaene, Cleys and de Maeyer, the Belgian state and the Catholic Church were collaborators in a shared ‘civilising mission’, but they were also rivals who contested with each other in a ‘porous’ and ‘fractious’ relationship, with religion often ‘escaping the control’ of the colonial state (pp. 9–11). Finally, the collection admirably pushes beyond standard economic and political issues to consider less-discussed areas of Christianity's colonial project, such as healthcare, catechesis, music and geography.

The first part of of the volume looks at the historical relationship between missions and the colonial state. Jean-Luc Vellot's opening chapter examines how European missionaries engaged with questions of slavery and forced labour from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Vellot shows how missionaries embraced a principles-based anti-slavery approach in the late nineteenth century, while also looking the other way in the face of Belgian humanitarian abuses so as to pragmatically encourage the state's favourable relationship with the missions. Vincent Viaene's fascinating chapter explores how international humanitarian discourse and mobilisation marked the origins and early development of Leopold's Congo Free State. Viaene demonstrates how Leopold's project and the Berlin Conference of 1885 were not simply the ‘triumph of naked imperialism’, but also the ‘triumph of internationalism’ (p. 45), the latter of which ultimately undermined Leopold's project in the early 1900s. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo's contribution shows how the Portuguese continued lobbying to sustain their Congolese padroado into the 1880s, only to see their goal of creating a ‘new Brazil in Africa’ (p. 87) rebuffed by both the Holy See and other European actors. Anne-Sophie Gijs builds on Vellot's analysis by presenting the complicated case of Fr Émile Van Hencxthoven and early Jesuit missions in the 1890s. Establishing a pattern that would be followed up until the Second World War, Van Hencxthoven privately criticised the excessive abuses of the Congo Free State, while publicly supporting the colonial project, all the while praising ‘work’ as the key to the ‘regeneration’ of the black race (p. 96). Bram Cleys concludes part i with an innovative chapter exploring how missionaries’ ‘spatial reconfiguration of the territory’ of Kasai contributed to the ‘production of a colonial landscape’ (p. 115). Focusing on the Scheutist Fr Émeri Cambier in Kasai, Cleys shows how the naming of new sacred spaces helped establish both a transnational and moral geography that was ‘emptied’ of indigenous meaning (p. 123).

Part ii explores issues of music, medicine and indigenisation within the Congolese missions. Anne Cornet examines how music and hymnology mediated the Western-African encounter, this time in the Kivu districts of eastern Congo. Focusing on the École Unique of colonial Leopoldville, Marie Bryce reminds readers of the importance of medicine, hygiene and public health within the Belgian colonial project, and the tensions that emerged with Protestant and Catholic missionaries on how explicitly ‘religious’ the formation of Congolese medical auxiliaries should be. Emery Kalema continues this medical focus by looking at Jesuit work within the Fondation Médicale de l'Université de Louvain au Congo (Fomulac) in Kisantu, again demonstrating the importance of medical auxiliaries for mediating between the worlds of Western and traditional medicine and religion. This chapter includes the actual testimonies and biographies of the Congolese auxiliaries involved in the project, which adds welcome first-person perspectives on this question. And, in a fascinating and refreshingly personal chapter, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi examines her own family history in the Kasai region. In particular, Mudimbe-Boyi focuses on her own father, Bernard Kabese. ‘Berry l'Ancien’ emerges as an intriguing example of a Christian convert at home in the emerging world of Western modernity as well as traditional culture, and able to retain his deep Christian faith even as he saw missionaries as ‘humans susceptible to errors’ (p. 233).

Part iii concludes by examining the interrelated crises of Belgian colonialism and Christian mission in the late colonial period. Piet Clement's chapter on Placide Tempels humanises this famous missionary and progenitor of ‘Bantu philosophy’, revealing the evolution of his missiology from paternalism to adaptation to accompaniment, and how his intellectual thinking was shaped by his practical missionary experiences on the ground. Dominic Pistor examines the millenialist Kitawala movement in Orientale province, and how post-war Belgians embraced ‘developmental colonialism’ in an effort to undermine this popular movement. Finally, Zana Etambala and Sindani Kiangu analyse the anti-clerical violence that surrounded the Leopoldville uprisings of January 1959 as well as the Mulelist movement in the south-western diocese of Idiofa. Importantly, both chapters show how the attack on missionary institutions paved the way for further indigenisation and adaptation in the post-colonial period, laying the groundwork for a stronger Church with more popular investment.

A strength of this collection is the way in which the authors delve into distinctively local contexts and resist the temptation to make sweeping judgements. At the same time, several overarching themes stand out. First, one sees missionaries and Belgian officials integrating rural development, an ‘ideology of work’ and humanitarianism to legitimise their violent colonising projects. Second, the collection uncovers the subtle ways in which Catholic missionaries contributed to the colonial project, whether through healthcare or spatial imagination. Third, the book reveals the internal tensions between Catholic leaders and demonstrates how positive evolution and development can often emerge out of conflict and opposition. Finally, we can be grateful to Viaene, Cleys, de Maeyer and their collaborators for putting human faces on the oppressive system of Belgian colonialism. Rather than justify the project, this humanisation helps scholars to see the complexities, ambiguities and struggles that marked it at every turn.