When most of Africa attained independence in the 1960s, it was widely expected that Christianity, which had been introduced by Western missionaries in a colonial context, would slowly wither and die. Instead, it has exploded in numbers and dynamism; today sub-Saharan Africa is more substantially Christian than most of Europe.

To understand this phenomenon, historians at first focused largely on the numerous churches founded by Africans wholly independent of Western missions. Some were interested in these “African Independent Churches” as anti-colonial movements, while others discerned in them fascinating deviations from Western Christianity. Less attention was paid to the mission-founded churches, apart from their role in nurturing African nationalism. As for the missionaries, they were energetically injected into the mainstream of African studies by Jean and John Comaroff's Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; repr. 1997), which portrayed the “conversation” between missionaries and the Tswana of southern Africa as an aspect of the “colonization of consciousness.” But this viewpoint has been increasingly criticized for downplaying the theological and spiritual aspects of the mission encounter, and for underestimating the role of Africans, rather than missionaries, in the spread of Christianity.

Robert J. Houle's splendid study of Zulu Christianity under the aegis of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) contributes substantially to the newer historiography of African Christianity. ABCFM missionaries were among the most highly educated in South Africa, and their letters and reports—lucid, detailed, and remarkably revealing—have been expertly exploited by Houle to tell a story in which Zulu rather than missionaries are the principal actors. He recounts how Africans, while remaining true to “orthodox” doctrines, remade missionary teaching and practice into a profoundly Zulu Christianity.

In a finely wrought narrative, Houle undermines or nuances several long-held stereotypes about the initial Christianization of Africa. In opposition to earlier studies, he shows that Zulu converts were motivated by spiritual as well as utilitarian concerns, that not all of them were landless outcastes, and that among them were many men as well as women. Once converted, the new Christians did not, as is often asserted, wall themselves off hermetically from their traditionalist neighbors.

Houle traces the erosion of missionary control of the Zulu church, caused in large part by the emergence of effective Zulu evangelists and church leaders. Pivotal to his analysis were the revivals that, in the 1890s, swept over the Zulu churches of the ABCFM. Houle carefully explores the preconditions for religious revival to be found in several communities; among them were plagues and economic distress, debilitating disputes among Christian leaders, intergenerational tensions, and hostility between Zulu Christians and the government and the missionaries. But he also shows that many of these preconditions were lacking in some communities, yet revival exploded nonetheless.

The principal catalyst of the revivals was George Weavers, the founder of the Hephzibah Faith Missionary Association in Tabor, Iowa. Weavers was a product of the late-nineteenth-century Holiness movement, a believer in John Wesley's contention that sanctification was possible as a second blessing after justification. Unlike most ABCFM missionaries, Weavers was also premillennialist and a believer in faith healing. Houle recounts the dramatic response of Zulu Christians to Weavers's ministry—all-night prayer meetings, anguished wailing over sin, exultant experiences of the Holy Sprit, public confession of sin, and reconciliation among former enemies. Most important, the revivals ignited an unprecedented passion among Zulu Christians to spread the gospel to their traditionalist neighbors; among the evangelists were young girls, who preached to male elders in defiance of Zulu custom.

Houle shows that the revivals transformed the established Zulu churches, some of them founded decades earlier. By emphasizing the power of the Holy Spirit in sanctification, the revivals addressed a deep-seated African preoccupation with the world of the spirits, as well as a desire for physical healing—topics that missionary preaching, shaped by Western science, had tended to ignore or denigrate. Revivalism gave birth to a popular Zulu Christianity that was no longer wholly reliant on Christianity's associations with Western education, “respectability,” economic progress, and the hope for political rights in a white-dominated colony. (However, many Zulu Christians continued to treasure these associations.) Above all, rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit and confident of their sanctification, Zulu Christians now regarded themselves as “the spiritual equals of the American missionaries, the white settlers, and Christians all over the globe” (211).

By deftly imparting theological and spiritual insights into a narrative of important events in South African history, Houle's work should attract careful attention, not only from experts on Zulu and general South African history, but from those interested in the extraordinary globalization of Christianity. Houle claims that his study will serve as a “model for understanding the larger process of Christianization that has occurred across the continent [of Africa] over the last two centuries” (xxxvii). Sadly, however, he makes little attempt to support this claim. Because of its emphasis on American Holiness, his narrative should be compared to the near-contemporary influence of other pre-Pentecostal movements, also based in the U.S. Midwest, on the origins and early development of the “Zionist” African Independent churches, now the largest block of black South African Christians. Houle's findings should also be compared with Wallace Mills's analysis of revivals among the Xhosa, another major South African ethnic group, which were catalyzed in the 1860s by yet another American preacher in the Wesleyan tradition, the Methodist William Taylor. Did the Xhosa revivals have consequences similar to those of the Zulu revivals? And did revivals play a similarly pivotal role in the Christianization of other southern African peoples, or Africans more generally? Houle has given us barely a clue. It is to be hoped that he intends to draw broader conclusions in a subsequent work. But in any event, this book is so persuasive and suggestive that it is bound to stimulate new research on regions far beyond Zululand.