Translating the Christian message, Lamin Sanneh argued, was much more complicated than linguistic recoding: it also needed what he called indigenous theological inquiry to work out problems few foreigners (such as missionaries) could comprehend. It is certainly the case that most Africans who would eventually become Christians did so in conversation with others like them – and only indirectly with missionaries. Students of the cross-cultural process in Christian history thus need case studies of the process: we need to see the sausage being made.

This is the historiographical background for Michelle Gilbert and Paul Jenkins’ masterpiece, a work of greater importance than its title might indicate. Ostensibly an edited primary source, this book interprets a high context – at times bizarre – narrative of the first generation of indigenous-pastored Christianity in the interior Gold Coast (today’s Ghana) kingdom of Akuapem. The vehicle is the collected reports of one man, Theophilus Opoku, reporting (in English) on his pastoral activities to his missionary supervisors (Germans of Switzerland’s Basel Mission).

Because the latter were foreigners but stationed nearby, they understood many, but not all, of Opoku’s challenges: profound religious change at multiple social scales within Akuapem’s labyrinthine political economy, whereby a king ruled over a small but heterogenous population menaced by great powers (Asante and Britain). Opoku thus needed to explain nuance to indigenous customs the missionaries partly understood—in the process leaving an invaluable account, but one still in need of such interpretation as provided by Gilbert and Jenkins. And because Opoku served for forty years, his collected reports offer not only a snapshot of pastoral work – rare enough in African church history – but also change over time, as the indigenous church sank deeper roots into the Gold Coast’s soil.

When the story begins in 1874, Opoku is posted in Larteh, a city presided over by priests of autochthonous deities. Only months earlier, British-led forces had passed through the kingdom en route to war with Asante, and the region is in turmoil. Opoku’s first church is fewer than twenty years old and is grudgingly tolerated by the authorities. Meanwhile, the economy is undergoing rapid transformation as cash-cropping (palm oil, rubber, and cocoa are all mentioned) is reshaping both daily life and the nature of wealth. Many men are spending all their time away from home, with predictable marital problems arising as a result.

Opoku’s early letters thus read like dispatches from the frontier, as he and his congregants were routinely threatened and harassed by shrine priests and families. In 1877, for example, a woman died in childbirth and her cursed body (as was the custom for such “bad deaths”) left in the forest; her Christian son and his friends entered the forest to bury her—incurring “much remonstrances from the people” (p. 133). Five years later in another town, Opoku deals with a would-be convert who was an assistant to a shrine priestess who kept the young man in her employ by threatening him with a bad death (p. 185).

By the early twentieth century, Opoku’s congregants are increasingly drawn from the inner circles of indigenous society. In the 1906 story of “an old backslider” whose return to the congregation required both resigning a ritually significant political office and parting with two of his three wives (pp. 444–448), a convoluted situation becomes intelligible only with the editors’ explanatory footnotes.

In other words, Opoku’s reports are a window both on world history (imperialism, slavery, and capitalism) and daily life at the frontiers of global Christianity. As a pastor dealing with, for example, wayward youths, family disputes, or fundraising for a building campaign, Opoku does not have the luxury of abstract theology – but he is living it. The story concludes with Opoku’s 1908 retirement (five years before his death at the age of seventy-one). By this time, Akuapem’s indigenous Christianity is largely capable of autonomous leadership.

Prefaces by both editors are followed by a general introduction, and eight chapters roughly corresponding to Opoku’s various pastoral postings between 1868 and 1908. Although published as a primary source (in a series dedicated to such), annotations, “key references” (discursive footnotes, cross-referenced throughout the book, on apposite and recurring themes like “Traditional Healers” or “Possession”), and several appendices (cumulatively over a 100 pages) allow the book to function somewhere between a monograph and a reference work. The volume foregrounds Opoku’s own words but with extensive footnote commentary, always valuable, and at times astonishing.

No one else could have created this book. Gilbert is an anthropologist whose knowledge of Akuapem runs very deep, and Jenkins is a historian who has dedicated his career to the Basel Mission Archives. Their synergy is great, and the seasoned perspectives, as recur throughout the editorial process, are world-class.

Many will undoubtedly use this volume as a singular indigenous account of traditional society and ritual. They will need to do so against the grain, because Opoku’s reports are the words of a man wishing to see indigenous religion extirpated. The main difference from most missionary reports is one of tone: Opoku saw his rivals as intelligent and dignified. However, the book’s most obvious application is with the grain: a primary source on African Christian intellectual history.

Ultimately, attentive readers are rewarded with the thrill of the quotidian. The best drama here describes (and interprets) the commonplace, such as may feature in any church anywhere, but some of Opoku’s anecdotes constitute rare indigenous accounts of seismic social change. Theophilus Opoku was a major pioneer of the Christian faith on the Gold Coast. This book is no biography but – as is the case for any focus on an individual – Opoku inevitably becomes the point: readers come to know him as a person with his own quirks and ticks. This is the historian’s craft at its finest.