Historians often struggle to reveal the depth of human experience in turbulent and transformative eras in which the worlds of church, empire, and nation-state intersect. Andreana Prichard's Sisters in Spirit: Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860–1970 stands out in this regard as it provokes the reader with a sensitive historical analysis that explores the platonic intimacies of a particular community — the African women missionaries and teachers of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) — and uncovers a unique set of perspectives from which to interpret both broad transformations, such as religious transformation and British imperialism; and individual adaptations, such as personal behavior and perspective. Critically, this book makes an important contribution to the field of the history of emotion, which is notable because few Africanists have ventured in this realm.

While many historians of Africa have brilliantly crossed the boundaries between private and public and have investigated the historical roles of love, desire, jealousy, and devotion in African communities, Prichard investigates the emotional states of a particular community by revealing both reverential and interpersonal expressions of emotion and the trajectory of the community's relational ties as they were held together by a particular strain of religious feeling. This study also provides a fascinating and necessary corrective to previous assumptions about nineteenth-century British imperialists, who, generations of historians have argued, focused on transmitting modern rationalism and bridling the emotional and sentimental impulses they believed governed the minds and souls of those they colonized.Footnote ¹ Prichard reveals the experience of a pan-ethnic African community living in colonial Tanganyika and Zanzibar who adopted a highly emotional — even ecstatic —version of Christianity from British evangelists and used their religious training to create and maintain circuits of emotional feeling, or what Prichard refers to as an ‘affective spiritual community’ (20). In doing so, she has left tired arguments about ‘hegemony’ far behind, but she has also pushed beyond Robin Horton's innovative assertion that religious conversion could be better understood as ‘a cognitive and practical adjustment to changes in social experience’.Footnote ² While Prichard's historical agents experienced dramatic changes in their social experience, she demonstrates how UMCA-educated African Christian women in Zanzibar and across Tanganyika also intentionally created their social experiences as well as a social world. They thereby collectively sustained their lives of evangelism through a focus on personal relationships and missionary social forms to minister to profoundly disrupted human societies.

Beginning her narrative in Zanzibar at the end of the slave trade in the nineteenth century — a period of colonial conquest, considerable population movement, and economic instability — Prichard discusses the origins of the UMCA and its affiliated institution, the Mbweni Girls’ School in Zanzibar. These organizations were the result of British abolitionists’ commitment to promoting a ‘civilizing enterprise’ in East Africa. They were also the product of the enthusiasm of British Tractarians — High Church Members of the Church of England who developed a religious and evangelical philosophy that focused on ritualism, or the slow revelation of the Gospel through daily practice — and their efforts to introduce children and unbaptized adults to a new Anglo-Catholic theology and a simultaneously studious and fervent devotional repertoire.

As alluded to above, Prichard does not simply focus on how or why the African women of the Mbweni Girls’ School converted to Christianity, but rather how these women took up the specific tenets, rites, and routines of Tractarian Christianity — first in their childhoods and then later in their evangelical work after completing their education — to support each other as well as their own psychological and spiritual fortitude in their deeply challenging professional and personal lives that centered on evangelism and mission development. The early chapters examine the English women who transmitted Tractarian Christianity in Zanzibar and the East African coast. As English Tractarian women missionaries were typically unmarried, they fully invested in the Tractarian emotional and embodied approach to evangelism and imparted many of their habits and formalities to their followers. By way of historical context to this process, Prichard provides a thorough and intellectually rigorous examination of the roots of Tractarianism in England and the mid-nineteenth-century Oxford Movement that motivated it. The Tractarians were no mere spiritual revival, but rather a highly idealistic and passionate effort to mobilize and restore asceticism, ritualism, and mysticism to Protestant Christianity through monastic contemplation and devotional practice (i.e. prayer, alms-giving, fasting, poverty, repentance, and penance), as well as through emotional and ecstatic experiences such as cultivating a ‘reverence for the sublime, the mysterious, and the aweful [as in the original]’ (39).

In the later chapters, which examine the establishment of the UMCA mission and the transitions of African women and girls from students to missionaries and teachers, Prichard reveals the outcomes of this particular colonial ‘laboratory’. The African UMCA women's spiritual experiences and active social roles transformed the mission (less a laboratory of modernity and more a laboratory of an imagined spiritual utopia) into an emotional community that existed both physically on the ground in Zanzibar and Tanganyika and in the minds of its adherents. Like the communities examined by Paul Landau (1995), J.D.Y. Peel (2003), and Joel Cabrita (2014), these African Christians directed the terms of their own spiritual engagement.

However, what is particularly interesting about the UMCA community is that its African members did not share a common language, ethnicity, culture, or other form of collective identification. Rather, the UMCA mission was comprised of redeemed slaves from societies along the East African coast and regions in the east-central African interior, as well as transients, local women, and children, bound only by their common experience of upheaval and turmoil in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, these different people forged a truly unified cultural community, which remained connected through and by their sensitivities and even their consciousness (as Prichard ambitiously argues). Across the territory of Tanganyika and its nearby East African archipelagos, the UMCA women expressed sincere and ardent feelings for each other, for Christ's passion, for their evangelical work, and for their daily ministrations, all of which together constituted the ‘collective affective subjectivity’ that advanced their network (121). Together, followers of the UMCA pursued religious vocations and maintained their connections to each other across vast distances after leaving the mission school, as many became itinerant evangelists and sought to transform other African communities in Tanganyika and nearby African territories in the same way they had been transformed. These individuals left fascinating letters and reflections of their religious and evangelical experiences, providing Prichard with a rich historical archive.

These later chapters also investigate the characteristics of African women's religiosity and its significance for women's relationships with the societies in which they live. The final chapter creatively probes the dynamics of gendered vocations, community building, marriage, and the family, and their synergistic effects on the development of national culture and state making.

While each chapter carefully seeks to understand the tensions, affection, and dependencies that emerged between the evangelist and the evangelized, the argument Prichard presents in Chapter Three regarding the use of ‘unfree’ African labor could be slightly more nuanced. Prichard rightly identifies the UMCA missionary paradox in which missionaries advocated abolition while relying on slaves to build the sacred and secular spaces in which they carried out their work. Prichard does make a distinction between the ways that European missionaries treated ‘skilled hire-slaves’, such as Hindu masons, and UMCA congregants who were ‘treated as slaves’, but the reciprocities and commitments of religious devotion, community membership, and penitential obligation could have been more carefully examined (93–95). Voluntary labor is not slavery, and neither is labor performed as penance. While one must always be cognizant of the religious and racial hierarchies of missionary space, historians also must recognize that embodied religious conversion entails a full spectrum of experiences and devotional acts, including, at times, the performance of difficult, painful, and even humiliating labor. Nonetheless, those debatable points of interpretation do not detract from the highly engaging narrative.

Overall, this is a truly unique, important, and highly readable work of African religious and cultural history that stands out for its keen perceptions, deep reading into personal archives, and intuitive assessments. In so doing, it takes up Zoë Wool and Julie Livingston's call to examine social relationships and their ‘ethical entailments’ and it answers to demands that historians of Africa take up ‘matters of the heart’ as earnestly as they do matters of the nation-state.Footnote ³