Jean-Luc Enyegue's new book is a welcome addition to the burgeoning historiography on African Catholicism and a notable new contribution to Jesuit historiography that has largely ignored Africa. Whatever the lofty scope of the title, this is a more circumscribed study focusing on Jesuit missions in Chad and Cameroon. Ultimately, Enyegue argues that conservative French Jesuit missionaries thwarted the Vatican's ambitions for ‘ecclesiastical Africanisation’ in Chad (namely the appointment of African bishops and African Jesuits). In turn, revanchist French Jesuits resisted Cameroonian Jesuits’ efforts to Africanise the Society of Jesus, which Enyegue explores through the contested establishment of the Jesuit Vice-Province of West Africa (VPAO) between 1968 and 1973. In narrating this story, Enyegue underscores how missionary appeals to ‘Christian universalism’ (p. 6) could easily obscure the continuation of neo-colonial, missionary-dominated power structures.
Enyegue uncovers a story that many modern Jesuits would rather ignore – namely that the conservative, reactionary spirit that dominated the Society between its restoration in 1814 and World War II found a late breeding ground in Chad. Here the French Jesuit Frédéric de Bélinay established a ‘redeeming mission’ (p. 28) that would restore glory to a France humiliated by World War II, all the while battling rival forces of Communism, liberal American Protestantism and Islam (especially in its supra-national, Arabising form). Chad thus became a ‘refuge for traditionalism’ (p. 37) in a West African missionary context populated by the likes of Marcel Levèbvre, later to lead a traditionalist schism after Vatican II.
If de Bélinay exemplified Catholic evangelisation as the ‘mission civilisatrice’ (p. 42), his successors modified but by no means gave up this civilising mission. After becoming apostolic prefect in 1947, Joseph du Bouchet pushed the Jesuits to work more among the local people rather than just French settlers. In southern Chad, Jesuit missionaries embraced Sara art, translated the Bible into the local vernacular, and launched catechetical schools that sought to ‘bring the gospel to the poor’ (p. 138). In Muslim-dominated northern Chad, Jesuits schools welcomed Muslims, and missionaries worked not so much to recruit Christian converts as to ‘isolate Chadian Muslims from the global pan-Islamic movement’ (p. 121). Yet in both regions, French Jesuit missionaries resisted calls to ordain Chadian Jesuits, and the clergy and hierarchy remained firmly in European hands.
For Enyegue, the irony is that this popularisation of the faith, combined with the missionary refusal to Africanise leadership, helped preserve Catholic missions after independence. The new president, François Tombalbaye, a former Baptist catechist, turned on his Protestant coreligionists, largely due to their resistance to his ‘Tchaditude’ (Chadianisation) campaign which included requiring the traditional yondo initiation rite. In contrast, Jesuits in Chad were guardedly open to such cultural adaptations in the years following Vatican II (1962–5). More controversial was the refusal of the Jesuit bishop Paul Dalmais to speak publicly on the increasingly brutal government repression of Protestants in Chad, in part due to Catholic catechists’ fears that this would lead to further persecution of them.
If most of Enyegue's book analyses Jesuit history in Chad, his final two chapters engage 1960s–’70s Cameroon. Here the Jesuits moved much more quickly to Africanise leadership and encourage an ‘elitist intellectual apostolate’ (p. 203), even rubbing shoulders with anti-colonial nationalists. Yet the promising 1968 appointment of the Cameroonian Jesuit Jean-Paul Hebga as superior of the new VPAO was squandered by the Jesuits’ simultaneous decision to place him under the supervision of a French missionary. Hebga lasted only five years in the position. Upon stepping down in 1973, he founded the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Cameroon and became widely known as an exorcist and healer.
The most intriguing chapter in Competing Catholicisms comes at the end. Here Enyegue contextualises Cameroonian developments within the Society of Jesus's post-Vatican II turn to social justice and anti-racism under the leadership of Pedro Arrupe. He also narrates the fascinating stories of two of Africa's most well-known Jesuits, Engelbert Mveng and Eboussi Boulagi, as well as the efforts of the French Jesuit Eric de Rosny to adapt himself to Cameroonian culture through becoming a Douala nganga healer. For Enyegue, De Rosny represented a safe form of inculturation, if only because actual institutional power remained firmly in the hands of white Jesuits.
Enyegue has made exceptional usage of archival sources in France, Cameroon, Chad and Kenya, as well as a wide array of Anglophone and Francophone secondary literature. His book adds to scholarship on African inculturation by focusing on the question of institutional power, showing how missionaries could ‘indigenise’ without actually give up authority. In light of the book's title, more attention to Cameroon and other parts of west Africa would be welcome, as would more attention to the voices of the women and lay catechists who worked with the Jesuits. Finally, at the end of the introduction, Enyegue makes an intriguing appeal to a ‘new religious internationalism on African soil’ (p. 21) that would move beyond both nationalist and neo-colonial power structures. But this claim remains unexplored. Given the quality of his first book, let us hope that Enyegue will have several more chances to develop this and other threads.
