Apolo Kivebulaya's papers are kept in metal boxes in the Africana collection at Makerere University, Kampala. When I first went through them – in the mid-2000s – I was bewildered. I tried to find a place to start, but it was hard to establish where the beginning might be. In the handwritten exercise books there were some notes with dates, but the dates did not follow a sequential order: some of the earliest notes were at the back of the notebooks, with newer notes toward the front. There were miniaturised autobiographical essays, sometimes written in the third person, sometimes in the first person. There were lists. There were tables of accounts. There were letters which Kivebulaya had laboriously copied. There were several different styles of handwriting. Apolo Kivebulaya did not keep his papers with historians in mind.

Kivebulaya was a saint, not an archivist. This book – read alongside Wild-Wood's excellent biography (The mission of Apolo Kivebulaya: religious encounter and social change in the Great Lakes, c. 1865–1935, London 2020) – illuminates some of the things that made him extraordinary. Born around 1865, he was baptised in 1895, after an earlier career as a soldier, and priested in 1903. From 1915 until his death in 1933 he worked as a missionary in the forests of eastern Congo, among people whom others called pygmies (many of them are now called Bambuti). People from the central part of Uganda – citizens of the proudly autonomous Buganda kingdom – regarded Bambuti culture with fascination and revulsion. For his Ganda compatriots Kivebulaya's career was a form of outreach, an index of the civilisational hierarchy that separated Buganda from its uncivil neighbours. One of his companions described his revulsion at Bambuti people's food, complaining about its ‘nasty smell’. Kivebulaya's response was to laugh. ‘Whenever we went into the forest Apolo could manage to eat but I could not’, this interlocutor remembered (p. 137). Ganda editorialists hymned how he had ‘offered himself without any fear to the new nation; a nation known for enjoying human meat during lunch and supper, just as we eat small aubergines’ (p. 233). He was a saint because he cut across the civilisational prejudices that distinguished the eastern Congo's people from their scornful neighbours. Everyone was fascinated by the severity of the trials he endured. Shortly after his arrival in the Congo forests he was falsely accused of causing the death of a chief's sister. Confronted by an angry crowd, Kivebulaya prayed in his house as his persecutors thrust spears through the walls and set the building on fire. He was unharmed, and emerged from the flames with a prayer for his persecutors on his lips.

These and other remarkable tales were central to the making of Kivebulaya's myth. They were polished and edited and expanded upon and written down by Ganda interlocutors. Some of these stories were reproduced in the English-language books that missionaries published. But most of this archive was never vacuumed up into the published hagiography, and there are a great many odd, unremarkable or inexplicable things herein. In one place, for example, Kivebulaya described, in cryptic entries, the process by which African religious specialists made a powerful drum (p. 73). This and other entries were written out of personal interest. They were not composed with an audience in view.

In The archive of a Ugandan missionary the church historian Emma Wild-Wood –working with the accomplished translator and scholar George Mpanga – imposes a careful order on the multifarious papers in Kivebulaya's archive. Here the papers are sorted into different categories, and there are separate sections where the diary entries can be read, in careful contemplation, distinguished from the autobiographies, the correspondence and the notes. Here the diary entries are re-arranged in chronological order. Here everything is typed out, and there is no convoluted handwriting to be seen. Everything has been carefully deciphered and translated into standard English. This book makes Kivebulaya's archive accessible and intelligible.

In publishing this book the editors have generously rendered a service to teachers and researchers of African church history. But what do we lose by having this competent, accessible version of Kivebulaya's archive? For Kivebulaya and his colleagues writing was itself a meaningful, socially salient activity. It was not simply a means of preserving information. The act itself was the thing. Kivebulaya made a point of writing in front of people whom he sought to evangelise. In October 1925, for example, people at Mboga asked him what he was doing. Kivebulaya ‘got out my books where I write things of every day, and they were amazed at what I do. They believed that I work and were happy about what I do. This is how they understood’ (p. 71). That is how Kivebulaya composed these papers: with people at his elbow, critically observing the technique. Is that why the diary entries are disarranged? They were not composed as a record of events. They were ephemera. The written page was incidental to the reason for writing.

Kivebulaya's contemporaries among Buganda's Protestant elite were avid assemblers of archives and committed authors of historical narrative. His godfather, Ham Mukasa, kept a voluminous archive, which he carefully organised into sections for the benefit of researchers. His mentor, Apolo Kaggwa, was the author of a great number of definitional works of Luganda-language history. Protestant elites were constantly solidifying their place in the historical record. It was a way of cementing their social position, of creating credentials and of establishing a new form of political hierarchy, distinct from older forms of prestige and status. (See Derek R. Peterson, ‘The politics of transcendence in colonial Uganda’, Past and Present ccxxx [Feb. 2016], 197–225.) Kivebulaya himself was not interested in establishing his place in history. Did he intend that these papers be preserved and published? As Wild-Wood points out in the introductory essay, the papers came to Makerere University through the mediation of interested outsiders, who gathered up Kivebulaya's writings, placed them in trunks, and latterly handed them on to missionary biographers to conserve (p. xvii). Kivebulaya did not think of himself as the founder of a genealogy. He told one of his Ganda biographers that he had no reason to wear trousers, as trousers were worn by fighters of wars, and ‘I am just a wife of Jesus’ (p. 147). He married early in life, but after his wife's death he vowed never to marry again. At one point he seriously considered castrating himself ‘for the sake of God's kingdom’ (pp. 156–7). At the end of his life he warned the people around him against mourning, and insisted that those who had come to grieve should instead go out to preach.

In making these papers accessible and legible the editors have given us, as students and historians, a valuable record. Bringing all of this material together in a single book imparts a wonderfully synoptic view of the man. But I am not sure that we were meant to learn from this archive. In reading through it we take hold over the life of a man who wanted to disappear.