Do not be misled by the title. This is no narrow micro-history, but a wide-ranging study of Pentecostalism on a global scale. David Maxwell deploys his formidable erudition, gained over twenty years of studying religion in Africa, to correct many misconceptions about modern Pentecostal churches. He traces the origins of Pentecostalism to late nineteenth-century North American and European religious movements, and charts its explosive expansion following the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles. Within a year it had generated a missionary movement, and by 1908 had begun to pitch its tents in South Africa.

This single fact supplies the leitmotif of the volume, which is that Pentecostalism in Southern Africa should not be treated as a North American transplant. It grew up alongside other branches of the movement, and over the subsequent century sank its roots deep into African society. Maxwell is fascinated by the way that Pentecostalism has always transgressed racial boundaries. In its first American manifestation, it brought poor whites, blacks and Mexicans together in a single church. In South Africa, its first adherents were poor white Afrikaners, but it found fertile soil among urban Africans and migrant workers. Why this should be, Maxwell is unable to say. Perhaps movements focused on the ‘End Times’ preceding Christ's return to Earth made racial boundaries seem less important. On the other hand, race consciousness was never absent from African Pentecostals, who treated their subjugation by whites as one more facet of their physical and spiritual impoverishment.

The case study featured here – the Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa (ZAOGA) – confounds every conventional expectation bar one: it was born of poverty, dispossession and uprooting. Its founding prophetic voice was Ezekiel Guti, a shy, unlettered carpenter whose life and personality were transformed by the ‘gifts of the spirit’ – direct illumination through the divine presence – that distinguish Pentecostalism from other varieties of Born Again Christianity. Guti's subsequent trajectory eerily parallels the transformation of Ian Smith's Rhodesia into Robert Mugabe's beleaguered Zimbabwe. In the beginning, he and his fellow worshippers truly ranked among the poor in spirit as well as in material goods. During the death throes of white supremacy, they eked out a precarious subsistence on the margins of the urban centres. In the first heady days of independence, they struggled against revolutionary distrust of religiosity. Later Guti initiated a purge of possible rivals, some of whom had been his closest supporters. Family members and sycophants were promoted. Gradually Guti's own displays of material wealth and ecclesiastical power were accompanied by a shift in the Pentecostal message. Gifts of the spirit would in time manifest themselves in personal achievement and prosperity. When international emissaries of Pentecostal evangelism made dramatic appearances, they were welcomed as testimonies of Guti's success on the world stage. Far from manipulating ZAOGA, they were themselves seen to be dancing to Guti's tune. For a time, Mugabe himself appeared anxious to bask in the reflected glory of Pentecostal achievement, until the faltering state became an obvious incubus. While the Zimbabwean state found itself increasingly isolated, ZAOGA internationalised itself, launching missions to other lands.

Maxwell's achievement is to relate this familiar tale of power corrupted, without ever losing sight of the material and spiritual needs that sustained the humble following. He steers relentlessly clear of easy generalisations, recognising that while Zimbabwean Pentecostalism assimilated itself to global politics, communications and technologies, it never ceased to connect to its African roots.