If all history is biography, then African Christian history has been poorly served. A few key figures are reasonably well known – men like Samuel Ajayi Crowther, William Wade Harris, Simon Kimbangu, Apolo Kivebulya or Desmond Tutu – but the story of African Christianity is often told as the story of how broader social, political or economic changes influence religious expression. Even for those African figures who are well known, there are few critical biographies akin to the definitive treatments that western figures as diverse as Thomas Cranmer and Billy Graham have received. African Christian biography is one attempt to remedy this. The book emerges from a broader project, the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB), a mostly online resource comprised of articles on African Christians.

The history of African Christianity is often studied through the activities and lives of western missionaries. But for many Africans the path to conversion was opened by one of the local catechists or evangelists who, in countless communities across the continent, served as the embodiment of colonial modernity. As Jonathan Bonk, the long-time editor of the DACB, writes in an opening chapter of this book, scarcely anything is known about these individuals and their significant role in developing Christianity in the continent. African Christian biography is a collection of papers first presented at an October 2015 conference marking the twentieth anniversary of the DACB. The scholars represented here are not all scholars of Christianity but each has made a study of a significant African Christian. The resulting collection of papers is fascinating.

One of the recurring themes is the way in which African Christians have used Christianity as a new resource to address ongoing issues in their local contexts. King Afonso of Kongo, for instance, ruled in a complicated political landscape in sixteenth-century central Africa. John Thornton's study of his life shows that he was not the ‘pious dupe’ of later historical texts. Instead, Thornton demonstrated how Afonso used his own writings to depict his succession as a ‘stark conflict between a Christian monarch … facing a pagan revival in his rival brother’. For Afonso, Christianity had important political implications that European missionaries may not have grasped. Similarly, Linda Heywood's study of Queen Njinga in seventeenth-century Angola is a dizzying and entertaining look at the relationship between politics, Christianity, indigenous African beliefs and Portuguese colonialsts at a time of significant upheaval. Njinga played many competing forces against each other to sustain her rule, at times including Christianity. When Njinga died, European colonialists held a church funeral for her while local Africans held a separate ceremony incorporating indigenous religious customs. Even in death, her faith was contested.

From central Africa of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book ranges into the twentieth century as well. Wendy Urban-Mead looks at the life of Nellie Mlotshwa as an educator, peacebuilder and leader in the Brethren in Christ Church of Zimbabwe. It is an example of the kind of work at which the DACB excels: a close portrait of a figure who has had a significant impact on her local church but of whom many outside Zimbabwe will never have heard. One of the critiques of the history-as-biography method is that it has resulted in a male-focused historiography. As these examples indicate, this book does an excellent job in offering biographies of women in a range of historical periods and positions in society.

There is a tension in these papers. Is the African Christian biography that needs to be written that of societal elites, like Afonso or Njinga? Or is it that of people at the grassroots level of the Church, like Mlotshwa, buffeted by change and emerging as leaders of local communities? The answer, no doubt, is both, but a fuller discussion of this historiographic challenge would have been illuminating.

In ecclesial settings, biography can too quickly tend towards hagiography. It is an issue that is addressed directly by the editor, Dana Robert, in her introduction. She distinguishes between an ‘in-house’ use of biography in which a Church uses stories to strengthen the faithful and build the Church, and a ‘scholarly’ approach that uses biography as one lens toward a broader understanding of ‘African history, lifeways, and culture’. Robert argues that neither can ignore the other. Church members cannot expect to rewrite their histories without scholarly scrutiny. But neither can scholars ignore the collected memories of ordinary Christians across the continent. Each of these essays straddles that boundary in its own way.

All history is not biography. Social, economic and political histories will continue to be important in shaping our understanding of African Christianity. But biography exercises a particular hold on the imagination and provides new ways for people to learn about Christian history. These essays provide a good introduction to a range of significant African Christians and in so doing they shed new light on African Christianity more generally.