African public spheres are not bounded entities but rather evolving spaces subjected to continuous reconstruction and contestation; for this reason it is important to understand these dynamics and to develop a careful understanding of what the public sphere is in the African context and who key actors are. While a few publications have appeared addressing this issue, further investigation is needed. Christianity and public culture in Africa adds to this literature, offering an understanding of the public role of Christianity in several African countries. The starting point is Englund's observation that religion, in this case Christianity, is not a separate entity but rather something that shapes the way in which people perceive, represent and discuss morality, politics and everyday life. Many contemporary publications still present secularisation as a dominant or inevitable process and countries in which religion occupies public spaces as exceptions. This volume uses history to counteract this view. Offering an explanation of why Christianity became a public force in African societies, it reveals how religion always played a role in mediating social and political events and it unpacks and presents how the public role of Christianity changed through many decades, eventually becoming a powerful contemporary presence especially through Pentecostalism. In this volume public culture is presented as a space that transcends old western contrapositions such as ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, offering a venue where African and western ideas encounter and dialogue in order to produce new public expressions, attitudes and understandings.

The book is divided into ten chapters and is framed by an introduction. Chapters are grouped thematically into three different parts, one on missionaries and public encounters, one on patriarchy and public cultures and one on Pentecostalism and public representations. While the typical volume of conference proceedings tends to offer a pool of contributions that struggle to cohere, this edited volume succeeds in remaining tightly focused by using a clear analytical framework. The strength of this volume lies in the richness of the chapters that are able to provide thorough accounts of several African contexts and their ability to engage with the main thread of the book: what constitutes the public space in Africa and how this has evolved and interacted with religion through time? Not unusually, certain chapters are more successful than others, but none the less they all provide strong empirical investigations and they are substantially researched. However a shortcoming worth mentioning is the absence of a final overall reflection on the contributions. The book would have benefitted from the inclusion of a coda or conclusive chapter that drew together the major points raised in the chapters. Nevertheless, this is important and relevant reading for academics and students who intend to reflect on the complexity and dynamism of Christianity in African public spaces.