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The role of rituals as forces for social change in Christian mission history can be over looked particularly where the rituals are adopted from a Protestant church. Through the examination of the performance – setting, characters, script and sounds – of an early Anglican baptism in Toro, Western Uganda, this article illustrates how this ritual was used to enact and affect the values and objectives of a new society in its immediate context and in transnational frame of reference. The article argues for renewed historical attention to rituals as embodiments of change.

Using examples from Anglican missions in the Great Lakes region of Africa this article explores the roles of African Protestant missionaries in the modern era. It argues that many committed African Christians understood themselves to be missionaries and examines the nature of their missionary activity. Those who called themselves missionaries evangelised outside their own ethnic group. They were engaged in regional and transnational developments. The article attends to local and regional historical processes to show how African missionary activities were infused with transnational notions of belonging to a world religion.

The public role of Christianity in Africa has gained increased attention from scholars. This article gives four snapshots of the responses of churches to COVID-19 in Africa in the early weeks of disease spread on the continent. In many countries, churches are at the forefront of formal and informal health delivery and disease control, through medical services and faith healing. An examination of different approaches of Christian communities to the pandemic shows the influence and the limits of Christian action as governments acted quickly to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Using research methods (remote interviews and surveys, and analysis of authors' own denominations or congregations) consonant with physical distancing measures, the authors observed Churches attempting to carry out their mission as measures were put in place to arrest disease. They maintained worship services, moving them online. They helped Christians make sense of the pandemic and offered themselves as repositories of public trust. In some cases, however, they were less successful than they wished in carrying out their social responsibility because many of their institutions were closed as part of the measures to restrict the spread of disease.

Background: understanding and improving access to essential services in (post)-conflict settings requires paying particular attention to the actors who occupy the space left ‘empty’ by weak or deficient State institutions. Religious institutions often play a fundamental role among these actors and typically benefit from high trust capital, a rare resource in so-called ‘fragile’ States. While part of the literature has looked at the role faith organisations can play to mobilise and sensitise communities during emergencies, our focus is on a different, essential dimension: the reconfiguration of the relationship between religion and health authorities impelled by health crises.Methods: we analyse observations, interviews, and focus group discussions with 21 leaders from eight different religious categories in Ituri province in 2020-2021.Results: we show how faith institutions handled the Covid-19 lockdown period, notably by using and redeploying structures at the grassroots level but also by responding to health authorities’ call for support. New actors usually not associated with the health system, such as revivalist churches, got involved. The closure of worship places during the lockdown shocked all faith leaders; some saw it as a test of faith while others criticised inconsistent State measures, but, ultimately, most were inclined to follow and support health authorities. Such experience was, however, often one of frustration and feeling unheard. The interviewed religious leaders, especially those whose congregations were not previously involved in healthcare provision, felt that they were doing a favour to the State and the health authorities. Such service is at the level of community-level awareness-raising, but also, crucially, leaders were aware that by publicly committing themselves against Covid-19, they were participating in an effort to depoliticise Covid-19 in a context where the response to past epidemics, especially Ebola, is highly contentious. Conclusions: in the short run, depoliticization may help address health emergencies, but in the longer run and in the absence of a credible space for discussion, it may affect the constructive criticism of health system responses and health system strengthening. The faith leaders’ frustration with the ‘collaboration’ with health authorities (especially for the new actors) also limits its long-term potential.

This collection of sources offer a rare insight into the everyday concerns of African Christian converts. They centre on a well-documented figure, the Revd Apolo Kivebulaya (c.1865 -1933). Kivebulaya was a teacher and clergyman in the Native Anglican Church of Uganda. His writing offers insight into a literate Christian identity formed away from centres of power. Oral and written accounts about Kivebulaya illustrate how African admirers responded to him and how their societies were influenced by Christianity. Kivebulaya’s diaries, notebooks, correspondence, reports and autobiography show his missionary work in western Uganda and eastern Congo. Kivebulaya was not a man of letters. He was a clerk in holy orders, keeping the books, noting life’s activities, listing his journeys, acquaintances and biblical texts for sermons. His diaries show him making a path for Christian advancement beyond the metropole. The value of his writings is recognized by scholars examining early Islam in Buganda, politics and witchcraft in Toro and dissent in East Africa. This collection includes short biographies of Kivebulaya originally written in Luganda and Runyoro-Rutoro and texts of interviews conducted in the 1950s with his followers in Congo. The interviews contrast with published biographies by portraying Kivebulaya as a spiritual expert able to slay kings, bring rain and heal the sick. The sources are supported by essays on their context, a comprehensive introduction to each section and thorough annotation.

The East African Revival was a renewalist movement that spread during the 1930s from Uganda and Rwanda into Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Congo , and South Sudan. It is known as the Balokole movement from the Luganda word for “saved ones” (wokovu in Swahili). Its members attempted to reform mission-initiated churches from within by emphasizing an internalized Christian faith, high ethical standards, strong bonds of corporate fellowship, and the prominence of lay leadership. Women were able to assert greater moral and spiritual authority within the Revival than had become common outside it. Its vision of a transnational community of Christians acted as a critique to ethnonationalist views current in East Africa in the mid-20th century. The same vision also influenced global evangelical movements. The Revival possessed a number of strands, although a strong mainstream element has influenced the historiography of the movement as a largely unified and cosmopolitan form of evangelical Christianity. The Revival maintained momentum into the 1990s and remains a pervasive influence on the language, morals, and spiritual practice of Protestant churches in East Africa, even as newer Pentecostal movements make an impact on the region.

World Christianity studies have often prioritised Christian pluriformity and attended to the under-represented or marginalised. Historians seeking indigenous voices, narratives and texts frequently find an overwhelming amount of European and North American missionary sources. Scholars have often been suspicious of such sources. This chapter advocates a fresh reading of missionary sources which acknowledges their variety of genre, audience and content and which triangulates their information with other sources. Using the Church Missionary Society (CMS) sources the chapter provides a sustained micro-historical example of a close and sophisticated reading to interpret the motivations of the missionaries and the relationships between missionaries and indigenous peoples. The chapter concludes that missionary sources show both unequal power relations and cultural exchange as they reveal the historical development of Christianity as connected global movements. In taking this approach, historians can see how far indigenous peoples were drawn to a cosmopolitan and universal missionary vision.

Religious observance, like almost all aspects of life, has been challenged by the spread of COVID-19. Across the globe, churches were shut for Good Friday and Easter. Muslims have observed Ramadan ...

Much historical evidence for the activities and reception of early African converts and indigenous Christian movements is found in the vast corpus of documentation produced and preserved by western missionary societies in Europe. In order to understand the evidence, historians, archivists and librarians do well to comprehend the nature of the sources that they use. In recent years there has been greater attention to archives as collections in order to appreciate the rationale behind historical events, personages and thought. This short essay gives some background to these historiographical issues before examining the outputs of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries in order to provide a case-study that may be a useful comparator for similar collections. My reflections emerge from my own research into socio-religious change in East Africa through a biography of a prominent Ugandan clergyman, Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked alongside CMS missionaries from the British Isles.

A vivid portrayal of Kivebulaya's life that interrogates the role of indigenous agents as harbingers of change under colonization, and the influence of emerging polities in the practice of Christian faiths.

This introductory article orients the reader to the topic of this volume – the religious hermeneutics of violence – and situates the individual articles within the wider discussion of the role of r...

Histories of the modern missionary movement frequently assert that converts were more successful missionaries than Europeans yet details of their work remain sparse. This article examines influential factors in the spread of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa in two ways. It explores the complex and variable processes through life sketches of the African missionaries, Bernard Mizeki, Leonard Kamungu and Apolo Kivebulaya, who worked with the Anglican mission agencies SPG, UMCA and CMS, respectively. It identifies common elements for further scrutiny including the role of travel, translation and communication, and the development of continental centres of Christianity and the trajectories between them and local hubs of mission activity. The transnational turn of contemporary history is employed and critiqued to scrutinise the relations between the local and global in order to comprehend the appeal of Christianity in the colonial era.