Kimberly Hill's history of two African American missionaries is a welcome addition to scholarship on the history of the modern missionary movement. For too long the role of black missionaries from the Americas has been understudied, or assumed to be similar to that of white missionaries working for the same organisation. Hill's study joins a growing corpus of work on important black actors in mission history. Hill's examination of the married couple, Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston, identifies the ways in which their experience of the missionary role in Congo and in the USA was influenced by racialised policies and assumptions both in the Belgian colonial regime and, most particularly, in the American Presbyterian Congo Mission (APCM) and the southern states which supported the mission. The subtitle is a little misleading in this respect. The book addresses the segregated home and educational background of the Edmistons in the USA and the decisions of the APCM which retarded the Edmistons’ mission work as much as it examines their missionary work in the Congo. The two aspects cannot be separated as they are both part of the history of the black Atlantic. A significant theme in this volume is the way in which the Edmistons illuminate the transnational debates around education for black people in currency in the early twentieth century. The book also shows how discussions about race were changing. Certainly, the mid nineteenth-century assumption that people from the Americas with African heritage were particularly suitable to be missionaries to Africa had long disappeared and the Edmistons were viewed with considerable distrust by the APCM board.

Alonzo Edmiston was educated at Stillman College and – like the co-founder of APCM the Revd William Henry Sheppard (aka ‘the Black Livingstone’) – at Tuskegee Institute. Alonzo first went to the Congo Free State in 1904 and was director of the APCM's first industrial school at the Ibanche mission station from 1905 to 1908. Althea Brown started her missionary career in 1902 having received a classics degree at Fisk University. Fisk had a divergent ideology of black leadership from Tuskegee, embedded in its liberal arts education. Althea became a good nurse and proficient linguist who produced a Bushoong dictionary and grammar book and was proficient in the language of Kuba of Kasai. After their marriage, they had three years back in the USA whilst their leadership and fitness to work at the mission was questioned. On their return to Congo they worked together. Alonzo established the Luebo Agricultural College in 1918 where he engaged in agricultural experimentation and subsistence farming, before the family were moved by the APCM to the Mutoto mission station in 1920. In 1937 Althea died of malaria and sleeping sickness. Alonzo retired in 1939 and died in Selma, Alabama in 1941.

Missionary organisations had been discussing industrial education for some decades. Proponents considered that it provided the African population with new ways of economic advancement, whilst opponents worried that it simply created labourers for a colonial enterprise that wanted to restrict the opportunities of Africans to reflect and enquire about their circumstances. The Phelps Stokes Fund that supported the improvement of black education was significant in the segregation of industrial education in the southern states and, in the Commission of 1922–5, of transporting this pedagogy to colonial governments in Africa. Alonzo and Althea brought together their divergent educational paths in ways which challenged wider racial assumptions that only one pedagogy was suitable for Africans, whilst also sufficiently collaborating with missionary policy to be given limited autonomy in their area. Between 1902 and 1941, Alonzo and Althea Brown Edmiston maintained their commitment to the APCM whilst also attempting to provide education and services which would be of use to Congolese people. Alonzo was aware that in providing skills for cash crops he was providing trainees with opportunities for employment within the colonial state. His students were often recruited to monitor cotton growing for Belgian companies. He therefore tried to focus on improving the cultivation of nutritious, staple crops for subsistence farmers, and experimented with the harvesting of white ants that he ate on his visits to African evangelists. Althea, meanwhile, used her musical training to translate hymns, organise choirs and support story-telling events using Kuba performative story forms.

The book is part of a University Press of Kentucky series, New Directions in Southern History, and Hill understands the history of education and segregation in the southern US well. She makes extensive use of personal papers of the Edmistons and the archives of the APCM to bring nuance to the lives of two tenacious missionaries who remained committed to ‘a higher mission’ through the segregated and imperial era in which they lived. She is less assured on the historical background of the Congo Free State and the Belgian Congo and does not appear to draw upon the extensive archive of the Congo state. It would have developed her thesis to understand how the Belgian colonial regime understood the peoples with whom the Edmistons worked. It would also have been instructive to examine the files in which the Congo Protestant Council vigorously protest the racialised policies of the Belgian Congo in 1920s and to place the APCM within these wider debates. The colonial regime impeded the employment of African Americans out of fear of pan-Africanist dissent against colonial rule. The Kuba people remain shadowy objects of mission, even though there is an attempt in chapter iv to identify ways in which converts influenced the Edmistons’ work. A time-line would have also aided readers to identify where personal or mission events connected to relevant events in Congo and the USA and so bring into relief the intersection of these histories. Nevertheless, this study is a timely addition to mission history which ably complicates simplistic narratives about race, imperialism and Christianity.