At the time of his death in 2005, Richard Gray had been retired for 16 years from his post in African history at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, an appointment which commenced in 1961. According to Lamin Sanneh's admiring introduction, Gray died while preparing a work on ‘the history of Christianity and papal initiative in Africa beginning in the early fifteenth century’ (p. 1). Sanneh has assembled 11 of his late friend's essays originally published between 1967 and 2001, many of which address that theme.
Gray's early works looked at race relations in colonial Africa and the history of southern Sudan. He later collaborated on the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa. Sanneh's introduction to this essay collection extols their author's integrity, insight, and imagination, placing Gray's work on African Christianity, best exemplified in his well-known 1990 work Black Christians and White Missionaries, amidst many contemporary scholarly trajectories.
The essays here are a motley collection, some quite distant from the putative organizing principle of the volume, a few previously appearing in Black Christians and White Missionaries. Their contents offer little that is new, since all are published elsewhere and their findings form part of the scholarly understanding of African Christianity in works by scholars like Andrew Walls, Elizabeth Isichei, Sanneh himself, and the late Adrian Hastings and Bengt Sundkler. But since these pieces were originally published in different places, some hard to find, there is value in assembling them in a single volume. Besides being interesting of themselves, they are a reminder of the hard historical work in long-forgotten sources in many languages that lay behind much of the now taken-for-granted understanding of African Christianity catalyzed by Gray's work.
Gray, a convert to Catholicism, took special interest in combing Vatican archives for insights into the Holy See's early modern engagement with Africa. The most intriguing essays in this volume stress the agency of Ethiopian and Kongolese Christians starting in the seventeenth century, fulfilling Gray's (and Sanneh's) hopes of offering a ‘fresh perspective’ on the history of the Catholic Church. They do so by underscoring how often papal engagement with Africa derived not from Europe; instead, regularly ‘the initiatives came from African Christians’ (p. 4). Gray's painstaking efforts to trace the origins of European efforts to prior African protest or plea can be rather torturous. Given the twists and turns, one naturally imagines the immense archival research efforts behind those reconstructions.
Important insights documented by such hard-won historical work emerge; notably, Gray documents in several essays how papal centralization, though often attributed to nineteenth-century changes declared at the first Vatican Council, could be argued from an African perspective to have begun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At that time Iberian powers blocked missionary attempts to evangelize in Africa. In response, African Christians and missionaries sought to stimulate Rome to act on its own. As a result earlier centralizing episodes included some of the most important early modern Catholic missionary initiatives to sub-Saharan Africa, early Vatican formal (and, sadly, inconsequential) condemnations of the slave trade, and the 1622 foundation of Propaganda Fide, the Vatican's missionary office. As Gray puts it, ‘already in the seventeenth century African Christians had begun to summon the papacy to a new vision of its role in the world’ (p. 92). Such a perspective casts new light on accusations that missionaries colluded with the European colonial enterprise, since Gray emphasizes how the Vatican often tried to undermine the stranglehold that Iberian monarchs kept on the church. This dovetails with Sanneh's celebrated assertions about the empowering role of Christian-inspired vernacularization in Africa.
There are smaller pieces in this collection whose connections to the theme are less obvious and whose value depends on a reader's particular interest. These include a portrait of southern Sudan from the early 1970s, at once prescient and anachronistic given the current state of affairs in the new nation; a brief appreciation of the late Swedish scholar Bengt Sundkler; a careful account of the recoverable historical evidence of early eighteenth-century missionary attempts to contact a supposed Christian kingdom in what was then known as ‘Central Sudan’; and a report on small Christian communities in Africa from the mid-1980s.
This is a volume with important material for African historians even though what it describes often takes place elsewhere. Its main value lies in the essays' cumulative witness to African Christian initiatives prior to the nineteenth century.
