Festo Mkenda does not mince words: the Jesuit-Protestant historical encounter in Africa can be best described in terms of ‘a shared missionary field, mutual surveillance, a combination of bitterness and jealousy that was sometimes tempered with the necessity of collaborating in a foreign milieu viewed as a common enemy’ (p. 14). This is not the story that Jesuit advocates of inculturation and ecumenism would like to tell here in the twenty-first century. But it is to the credit of Mkenda, his co-editor Robert Maryks and the Jesuit Studies series that they resist the temptation to substitute ideological myth for historical reality. The result is a probing, illuminating and often disturbing analysis of an overlooked encounter in global Christian history.

Seven of the ten contributors to Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa focus their essays on nineteenth-century Africa. This lends a thematic coherence to the book, and not surprisingly this coherence revolves around themes of missionary hostility and competition. At times, the hostility unfolds between missionaries, as when crusading anglophone Protestant missionaries critiqued Catholic missionaries for being in bed with King Leopold of Belgium's Congo Free State. At times the hostility is a shared Jesuit-Protestant antipathy toward indigenous actors, most brazenly captured in the description by the Belgian Jesuit Charles Croonenbergh of the Matabele (located in modern-day Zimbabwe) as ‘a people given over completely to idleness, drowned in laziness and in all its allied disorders, having practically no conception of divinity, no notion of justice or injustice, and all of whose institutions and customs are diametrically opposed to the teachings of the Gospel’ (pp. 158–9). Hostility was also fomented by theological beliefs: both religious competitors feared for the eternal salvation of the souls of their denominational rivals. Both Protestants and Jesuits also critiqued each other's evangelising methods. For Protestant missionaries such as David Livingstone, Jesuits were effective builders, educators and civilisers, but their overall legacy had been marred by their complicity in slavery, their overall laxity and the nominal commitment of most of their converts. For their part, Jesuits suspected Protestants of drawing on limitless financial resources to proselytise converts into their missions. Yet for all the conflicts, there are moments of conviviality. What Wilfred Sumani describes as the ‘dialogue of life’ (p. 163) produced inter-religious missionary friendships in which interpersonal hospitality overcame ideological polemics.

Another central theme of this volume is the enmeshing of Jesuit and Protestant missionaries in the European state's colonial project in Africa. Christian missionaries were all too eager to make a Faustian bargain in which they accepted state privileges (for example, land grants, military support, education monopolies and the freedom to evangelise) in exchange for silent acquiescence in the face of massive humanitarian abuses in places like Congo, Zimbabwe and South Africa. This was especially the case when missionaries shared the same nationality as the colonisers, such as Belgian Jesuits in Congo or British Protestant and Jesuit missionaries in southern Africa. (For example, if there is one thing on which Protestants and Jesuits agreed, it was the beneficial role of Cecil Rhodes.) In turn, missionaries generally shared a broadly colonialist worldview. As the English Jesuit Richard Sykes put it, ‘there is at all events one realm in which Imperialism well befits, and one people who ought to be Imperialistic – the realm of Christ upon earth and the people who constitute the kingdom, the members of the Catholic Church’ (p. 93). Overall, one sees in this book the danger of missionaries dwelling on numerical growth to the neglect of proclaiming the reign of God.

Encounters between Jesuits and Protestants in Africa has several lacunae. First, the overwhelming focus on the nineteenth century limits the potential scope of the book. One would wish for more essays like that of Anthony Egan, who offers a longue durée perspective on Jesuit-Protestant encounters in South Africa from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries, including the rise of the ecumenical social apostolate in the late twentieth century. In this vein, more studies of Jesuit-Protestant history in the post-1950 period would be very welcome. The essays on Ethiopia, Madagascar, Fernando Poo (modern-day Equatorial Guinea) and Congo (modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo) help to broaden the volume's geographic scope beyond its focus in southern Africa, but additional case studies from West Africa and East Africa would be beneficial. Finally, the book inexplicably lacks background information or biographical summaries on the editors, the contributors or the (presumed) scholarly conference that made the book possible.

For scholars, one of the exciting dimensions of this book is the uncovering of a wide range of new archival sources across the continent of Africa. The Nairobi-based Jesuit Historical Institute of Africa, led by Festo Mkenda, stands at the forefront of scholarly efforts to locate, organise and preserve these sources. One hopes that this excellent volume will inspire historians and theologians alike to delve more deeply into the emerging Jesuit archives of Africa. The stories are not always edifying, but they are stories that need to be known.