David Maxwell’s Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga is a seminal work that offers a unique and groundbreaking perspective on Pentecostal missionaries in Central Africa. It uncovers a previously unexplored aspect of the history of science and showcases how Pentecostal Christianity in Central Africa transformed into a global knowledge-producing endeavor. Maxwell's work challenges the conventional understanding of Western missionaries, highlighting their collaboration with the colonial administration in specific central African countries and the shared contributions of African people and white missionaries to knowledge and cultural enrichment. The book's innovative historiography of mission in Africa goes beyond the traditional “sacred vs secular” dichotomy, challenging preconceptions about Pentecostalism and modernity and the relationship between mission and empire. Structured into eight detailed chapters, the book comprehensively explains missionary work and cultural entanglements in Central Africa.
Chapter 1 delves into the unique role of William Burton and the Pentecostal ecclesiology that influenced the parameters of Congo Evangelistic Mission’s (CEM) interaction with the local society of Katanga, the context of Maxwell’s study. Burton started CEM, a Pentecostal faith movement, in 1915 in Mwanza. Burton, with his longstanding (forty-five years) relations with the Katanga People, emerges as a fascinating character in Maxwell's narrative. He was the primary driving force behind CEM’s transnational connections and its firm stance against criticism of the then-preexisting establishments. CEM’s passion for reaching out to the lost people came with its rejection of worldly status and renunciation of public recognition, which led to religious and political ruptures with the establishments.
In chapter 2, Maxwell takes a distinct approach to reconstructing knowledge about Africa, focusing specifically on the Luba-speaking people of Katanga. He utilizes Burton's works to bring forth the most neglected aspect of the global history of missions—the role of Pentecostalism in the 20th century. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the formation of the Luba polity and the nature of its identity, including socioeconomic dynamics, the cultural change brought by the Protestant missionaries, and the resulting entanglement that undermined Luba polity and fashioned new identities using Christian resources. This context is crucial for understanding the dynamics of the Pentecostal missionaries' interactions with the Luba people.
Chapter 3 discusses the encounter between the Luba-speaking people of Katanga and the missionaries, especially from the CEM and the Open Brethren. The relationship was cordial and spontaneous, as the missionaries relied on the locals to form close-knit communities. The strength of the CEM and the Open Brethren was the lack of a complex infrastructure that marked other mission organizations, such as those led by the Roman Catholics and the Baptists. Formerly enslaved people who converted to Christianity became mission agencies in the Luba Christian movement. The chapter points out the triumph of Protestant Christianity as it advanced continuity with the local community; its traditions easily fit with those of the local people. The role of indigenous people in this is particularly revealing, “These African agents acted as cultural brokers, encouraging their followers to adopt strands of Western modernity, such as literacy, while simultaneously affirming aspects of African culture (91).
Chapter 4 reconstructs the colonial and scientific contexts in which missionaries worked. The relationship between the church and the colonial administration illuminates how colonial rule was a religious construct to some extent. Both the Catholic and Protestant missions, in Maxwell’s view, occupied territories with systematized colonialism, allowing them to gain an appearance of legitimacy but not actual legitimacy and thus create “disciplined workers for the colonial capitalism” (93). Though they had discordant relational struggles, the Catholic and Protestant missions were instrumental in producing colonial knowledge. Burton’s scientific research is the focus of Chapter 5. Burton conducted scientific research partly as a mission strategy and also to show that Protestants could be like Catholics and prove their loyalty to the colonial state.
Chapter 6 explores the shift from the missionaries' perception of the Luba people to scientific research on their native culture. The interactive relations between African culture, Pentecostalism and colonialism are intricate and captivating. These unique relationships signify a mutual compromise between the Congo Evangelistic Mission, the Western missionaries, and the Luba civilization, distinct from their Western counterparts. The chapter successfully explores how the Katanga influenced research processes and utilized the same knowledge “in the construction and critique of custom and the making of ethnic identity and ethno-philosophy” (13), contributing significantly to understanding these complex relationships.
Chapter 7 uses entanglement as its central frame of analysis to reveal the intricate connections between missions and empires that ensnared missionary scientists. Unlike other missionary entanglements, the chapter describes the interaction of missionary science (linguistic work, photography, and ethnography) with the study of the history of missions, which, in the author's view constitutes the “nature of discourse identity in colonial Africa and reveals not only how Luba shaped missionary research but also how these coproducers of knowledge constructed and critiqued custom and convened new ethnic communities” (3). This is evidence that missionaries were more grounded in the local societies than previously assumed. The chapter also outlines the results of Christian literacy entanglement with missionary science in making Luba Katanga ethnicity.
Chapter 8 focuses on missionary thinking and practice and the role both played in knowledge creation. It is a brief synopsis of how religious entanglement becomes a space of transformational encounters, especially between the locals and the missionaries. Maxwell compares the trajectories of Flemish Franciscan missionary Placide Temples, who worked in Katanga from 1930 through the 1960s, to that of Burton. Despite their diverse backgrounds, both did field work and published in innumerable journals, with findings revealing that Christianity can be grafted upon indigenous religious ideas. The book concludes with a discussion on how missionary-generated discourse can be utilized in writing African history, particularly the history of cultural engagement, underscoring the book's potential impact on the field.
Maxwell’s book is a significant contribution to Pentecostal historiography in Africa. The book addresses the politics of knowledge production about Africa. Religious and cultural entanglement is shown in this work to be capable of teaching about Africa. Though a scholar from the West, Maxwell allowed indigenous African voices to be centered, especially in the complex symbiotic relationships between colonialism and Christianity in Africa. I highly recommend the book for undergraduate and graduate studies on the history of missions and Christianity in Africa. It will also interest those who seek to understand knowledge production and colonialism in Africa.
Elias Ng'etich is a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Moi University, Kenya.
Elias Ng'etich
Date Of Review:
June 28, 2024