The study of African Christianity by social historians and social scientists currently flourishes after a period in which it excited relatively little interest.For useful recent surveys see: Terence Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion”, Journal of Southern African Studies 25th Anniversary Conference, “Paradigms Lost, Paradigms Regained,” York University (1994); Norman Etherington, “Recent Trends in the Historiography of Christianity in Southern Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, 2 (1996), 201–19; Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar, “Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 36, 2 (1998), 175–201; Adrian Hastings, “African Christian Studies, 1967–1999: Reflections of an Editor,” Journal of Religion in Africa 30, 1 (2000), 30–44. Its revival lies, first, in the re-emergence of what can broadly be defined as intellectual history after a period of materialist dominance which focused research on issues of underdevelopment, dependency and political economy. Since the late 1980s Africanist scholars have been exploring the missionary contribution to ideas about ethnicity, environment, and gender. Secondly, at the same time, partly as a result of the closure of classical research fields, and partly through the belated recognition that the interaction of African cultures and mission Christianities was the supreme anthropological topic, social anthropologists began to turn to work on mission archives. Here the publication initially of a provocative series of articles by Jean and John Comaroff, and then the first of their two-volume study of the London Missionary Society among the Southern Tswana, led the way.Ranger, “JSAS and the Study of Religion,” 3. Jean and John Comaroff, “Christianity and Colonialism in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 13 (1986), 1–20; “Through the Looking Glass: Colonial Encounters of the First Kind,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1 (1988), 6–32; The Colonization of Consciousness in South Africa, Economy and Society 18 (1989), 267–95; Of Revelation and Revolution Vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Vol. 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1997). This revived scholarly interest in African Christianity has evolved in two interrelated ways: there is a growing interest in studying the construction of specifically religious identities, and greater attention is paid to texts produced by African Christians themselves which, with a few notable exceptions, have been hitherto ignored by scholars.An important exception was Wyatt Macgaffey's use of the official catechism of the Kimbanguist Church, in Modern Kongo Prophets. Religion in a Plural Society (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1983).