Richard Werbner's Holy hustlers is the eleventh in a series of volumes on the anthropology of Christianity published by the University of California Press. That a majority of these publications – at least eight so far – are on non-western religious traditions especially in their encounter with Christianity serves to underscore the growing interest in the study of Christianity as a non-western religion. Werbner's contribution, based on fieldwork in the southern African state of Botswana, is an important work on ritual and performance and of self and other in a modern African Christian movement. This is a book of ten chapters including the conclusion (not listed as a chapter) which is divided into two equal parts and is accompanied by a DVD that will serve as an important additional resource for those with minimal contact with African-initiated Christianity of the prophetic type.

Having been ongoing now for a little over a century, African-initiated Christianity is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that across the continent fresh initiatives continue to occur in response to changing socio-religious and political or even economic landscapes and yet, as Werbner's study aptly reveals, issues like prayer, vision-seeing, healing and prophecy inspired by Spirit-possession are present in these Churches wherever they are found. The centrality of healing and prophecy to these indigenous forms of Christian Churches is what led Harold W. Turner, an important voice in African-initiated Christianity, to refer to them as ‘prophet-healing churches’ (Religious innovation in Africa, 1979). It is these movements that reveal how, against the backdrop of centuries of historic mission Christianity, African Christians continue to make choices in religious expressions that resonate with indigenous worldviews of mystical causality. Thus the very first paragraph of Werbner's introduction comes across as a useful summary of what his book is about in terms of the prophetic phenomenon under study:

In most of Africa the services now available within an indigenous Christian context such as the Apostolic Reformation in Botswana studied by Werbner, were actually the stock-in-trade of local diviners and traditional healers called sangoma. Etiology and diagnosis in the African context is often a response to the following basic query: ‘who is the cause of my misfortune?’ Thus many of the trance experiences described by Werbner comes across as Christian reappropriations of old attitudes towards the senses – the extrasensory attitude (p. 28). The strength of African prophetic Churches such as the Apostolic Reformation is that they create alternative Christian ritual contexts that virtually rival traditional shrines which are considered the domain of the devil. It is important therefore that Werbner in various parts engaged with the ideas of the German religious anthropologist Birgit Meyer who has done extensive work on these issues in West Africa. To that end, we are not really dealing with new developments in Werbner's work, but nevertheless it stands as a powerful anthropological case study of issues that go to the heart of how Christianity has evolved as an African religion.

‘Holy hustling’ is the expression used by Richard Werbner to capture this fascinating phenomenon of prophetic movements inspired by the Spirit, a process leading to the activation of matlakase, the ‘spiritual electricity’ that empowers Apostolics (p. 5). The Spiritual Churches, as the movement studied by Werbner here is called in parts of West Africa, obviously democratised pneumatic experiences in the Church and yet, as we read in this particular study from southern Africa, the charismatic prophets are ‘specialists’ (p. 15); they function as recipients of divine communication in the process of diagnosis and because of their intense spiritual experiences have the ability to prescribe remedies to deal with misfortunes of supernatural provenance. This ability of spiritual discernment is what Werbner refers to as ‘the extrasensory attitude’. Here the gifted specialists, he explains, ‘go beyond ordinary knowledge of the world’ because they ‘have an extraordinary and powerful capacity that is extrasensory’ (p. 28). Thus dealing with witchcraft through prescribed ritual baths and the supply of sacramental substances for protection such as holy water, for example, is an important religious function of these religious specialists wherever they are found in Africa and Werbner's work underscore these facts.

Several important names feature in the theoretical parts of the book, notably Gregory Bateson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Johannes Fabian, Bengt Sundkler and Alfred Schutz. To that end, this is a work that is very much related to earlier studies in African charismatic Christianity of the indigenous kind. The history of prophetic Christianity in Africa has not always been just one of innovation, power and revivalism but also of clashes of charisma and schism, and through the nine chapters of this book, Werbner treats his readers to the importance of paying attention to the changing of indigenous Christianity within contexts of change in contemporary Africa. This is useful material that will serve an academic audience interested in both religion and the anthropology of evil on the continent.