Music in Kenyan Christianity: Logooli Religious Song is an important contribution to the study of music in Kenyan Christianity. The book explores contemporary African music through the prism of ethnographies through the people's engagement of Christianity as a unifying ideology in the context of history, modernity, nationalisms and globalisation. Kidula's book, which contains a total of eight chapters, mainly focuses on the Avalogooli, also known as Logooli. Kidula notes that Christian missionaries evangelised the Logooli people at the beginning of the 20th century, a factor that leads her to expand two fundamentally overarching, but specific factors that drive all her arguments: the Logooli's Eurogenic music in which they express their adoption to Christianity as religion, and the European hermeneutic as the process used to achieve these ends.

On the accommodation front, in Chapter 5, Kidula observes that early missionaries may have had a partial command of idiomatic Logooli expressions or that the Logooli translators had a command of the English language. Whichever of these took precedent, it is obvious that some negotiations took place across the cultural, religious and linguistic spheres between the Christian missionaries and the indigenous Logooli. To understand how Christianity and its accompanying music and cultures from Europe and the Americas were introduced to the Logooli, Kidula uses established principles in musicology, ethnomusicology and anthropology where she includes a broad array of ethnographies by examining the compositions and arrangements of Dr Arthur Kemoli, but the book stops short of where it should ideally begin. Kidula's selection of Dr Kemoli as a prototype is due partly to the fact that Dr Kemoli is a leading composer, and in spite of being Kenya's most significant musical arranger of the 20th century, he still borrowed his musical structures from ‘Western academic music parameters’ (p. 11).

In the penultimate and the final chapters, Kidula examines Logooli Christian songs and contemporary education, in particular the adaptation and arrangement of African tunes. She argues that the practice of adaptation and arrangement of indigenous African music for religious use officially began in the Anglican Church with the main purpose being ‘to legitimize the use of African songs in Christian worship’ (p. 185). Kidula describes the fusion between the African worship and the Anglican Church as the de facto state church imposed on colonial Kenya by the British administration. She refers here to Graham Hyslop, an Anglican Church layman of British origins who was versed in musicological landscapes of both Europe and Kenya. By making a poignant comparison between Hyslop and Dr Kemoli, whereby she observes that both Hyslop and Dr Kemoli encouraged African participation in Kenya Music Festivals, Kidula posits that Hyslop in particular promoted the ‘setting of English and Kiswahili Christian text to Kenya tunes and arranging them in four-part harmony as British church anthems’ (p. 187).

In describing both Logooli and Eurocentric cultures, Kidula stresses the idea of spiritual and artistic syncretism, rooted in the musical-cultural ethos of the peoples and denominations that embraced the revival movements of the 20th century ‘Pentecostal and Holiness phenomena’ (p. 153). In the conclusion Kidula adds that ‘Logooli music has moved beyond the purely congregational to the specialized community of the choir, gospel groups, and individual composers and arrangers’ (p. 227). This conclusion reveals a theme that contemporary Logooli Christian music has become a commercial product encompassing music celebrities as composers, performers, producers and marketers as evidenced by recording companies such as Ilavadza. This book shows us the history of not only the Logooli's Christian music, but of the role of syncretism of musical cultures and religion in the development of new philosophies of musical creation and transmission, the transformation from communalism to ownership, group performance to modified solo performance, and open-stage performance to studio recording as means of mass production intended for the market economy against a backdrop of globalisation.