This volume – the published version of the author's anthropology dissertation – examines the nature of kingship in the precolonial societies of north-central Namibia and south-central Angola (peoples now collectively known as ‘Ovambo’), focusing in particular on the spiritual or religious aspects of kingship. Salokoski rightly notes that this feature of kingship has been downplayed in many studies of the area's political history, perhaps in part because, by the late nineteenth century, when these societies were in contact with Europeans, external forces appear to have resulted in kings forsaking many of these religious aspects in favor of more violent and coercive expressions of power. She seeks to understand ‘how sacredness is installed in kings’ (p. 17).

While most accounts of travelers and early colonial officials focus on the violent and coercive manifestations of kingship, Salokoski is able to draw upon an alternative set of sources to explore spiritual aspects of centralized political authority: an extensive ethnographic collection created by a Finnish missionary named Emil Liljeblad in the 1930s and now housed in Helsinki. Most of the accounts were originally written in the local language, Oshiwambo, by literate converts to Christianity. Others were penned by the missionary himself in Finnish, based on interviews with nonliterate Ovambo, and the Oshiwambo accounts were themselves later translated into Finnish by the missionary's daughter.

This collection runs to thousands of pages and has not been given the attention it deserves. But neither has it been given much critical examination by those scholars who have used it. Liljeblad had a reputation among Ovambo Christians as being authoritarian and free in his use of physical punishment; how did this affect what he heard? Salokoski herself occasionally notes the background of a given informant (many of them came from elite families close to the king and so had some first- or secondhand knowledge of royal ritual) but does not delve as closely as she might have into how their age, family background or conversion to Christianity might have shaped their accounts. She notes that a few of the informants were not converts to Christianity, and in some ways these are the most intriguing accounts. But their motives for revealing this information to an outsider are unclear, as is the relationship between what these informants said about kingship and the events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when kings and other big men had fought to expand their powers at the expense of their subjects. Finally, no one, to my knowledge, has checked the accuracy of the Finnish translations, which Salokoski apparently used, against the originals. And yet, these reservations aside, the collection is a rich, perhaps almost unparalleled, ethnographic resource.

Salokoski sets this material against her own oral interviews and the accounts of missionaries and other Europeans in the region to argue that, in the past, kingship was understood as a sacred institution, and kings themselves were considered sacred, even divine, individuals. She explores this sacredness – and the consolidation of religious authority within kings – through ritual regicide, installation rituals and kings' growing involvement in rainmaking and male and female initiation.

Within her main argument are stronger and weaker sub-arguments. Salokoski is at her best when examining competing and contradictory traditions for evidence that certain features of royal history have been systematically occluded. She finds hints of female kings and of previous royal clans, perhaps linked to Bushmen, as well as of the continual necessity of propitiating Bushmen as the original owners of the land; she also persuasively argues for the continued involvement of Bushmen and older royal clans in the making of royal power. These ideas mesh well with the work of other scholars around southern Africa, who have argued for similar complexities in immigrant–autochthon relations. Salokoski also contends that encounters with European traders and European commodities in the late nineteenth century changed Ovambo kingship. While not an original proposition (the same has been argued by Patricia Hayes and myself, among others), she offers a richer account of how dramatic those changes may have been, based on how Liljeblad's informants described the strong ritual components and limitations of kingly power.

And yet the idea that kingship was consolidated in the early nineteenth century by expanding royal control over ritual life (at the expense of the many other people who had recognized ritual powers over fertility, rain and health, among other things) – but then became coercive, violent and non-ritualized in the late nineteenth century – rests uneasily with oral traditions of earlier violent kings. Clearly the process of consolidation itself involved considerable violence; this is not surprising since, as Salokoski herself notes, a king's authority over these diverse ritual domains never went unchallenged. The mechanisms by which kings were able to take ritual authority invested in others and concentrate it in themselves – with the consent of at least some people, presumably – are not entirely clear in her account (nor, indeed, in the sources).

Indeed, sometimes the multiplicity of agendas that informants surely brought to their encounters with Emil Liljeblad gets a bit lost in this study, which tends towards a king-centered view of kingship. How those more distant from the palace might have viewed kings and kingship is less obvious. But, given the violence of the late nineteenth century, is it possible that some informants offered an idealized portrayal of earlier kingship as a primarily religious institution in order to deny the legitimacy of more recent kings, corrupted, in their view, by the temptations of foreign goods and colonial alliances? Salokoski's book offers much food for thought for those interested in the history of this region or in the nature of political authority in small- and medium-scale precolonial African societies more broadly. Her attention to the comparative anthropological literature allows readers to situate this study within wider debates about African religious institutions and political systems.