This deeply researched book is built around an interesting question: how did Pentecostal missionaries—full of iconoclastic enthusiasm, resentful of traditional authority—come to be leading authorities in the ethnographic study of central African culture? Historian David Maxwell focuses on William Burton, a defining figure among Britain's “primitive” Pentecostals and a founder of the Congo Evangelistic Mission (CEM). Over the course of his 45 years in the Belgian Congo, Burton authored works of great consequence: a beautiful collection of photos, dozens of paintings, a foundational book on Luba cultural life. Maxwell argues that Burton and his colleagues were “captured by the genres of Anglo-Saxon anthropology” (6). Their profuse artistic and scholarly work grew out of the abiding and substantial relationships they cultivated with African cultural brokers. David Maxwell's accomplishment in this book is to show that “missionary knowledge about Africa was produced by a larger group of people than just missionaries” (13). In this book, the lives and interests of a remarkably wide cast of characters come vividly into focus.
Born in 1886 to a middling British family, William Burton disavowed his father's Anglicanism and became a Pentecostal at an early age. His “primitive” Pentecostalism inclined him toward a suspicion of established authority: he regarded the New Testament as the only authentic model for a Christian church. Arriving in central Africa in 1915, Burton and his colleagues established a mission at Kayembe Hill in Mwanza, in the south-eastern part of what was then the Belgian Congo. Luba social order was coming unglued in those years, as the long-established kingdoms of the savannah disintegrated in the face of widespread violence. The earliest converts to Christianity were marginal to political society: young men looking to overturn their elders’ authority and formerly enslaved people who settled in the vicinity of mission stations. These early converts were iconoclasts, rebels against the routine power of their social betters. They assailed the old religion, destroying the instruments of diviners and upending shrines. And Burton himself sometimes wielded the instruments of ethnography in the service of religious disruption: Maxwell remarks that he saw ethnography as a device by which to demystify, and also overturn, the certainties of inherited faith (125).
But at the same time, Burton and other missionaries were drawn into a sympathetic and creative relationship with the arbiters of the old religion. There is a lovely section in the book about a village called Kabishi, where expert artists crafted beautiful and effective figures for the use of their chiefs. Burton appreciated the artistry of Kabishi's people, and over the course of decades he commissioned several works and sent them off to museums in Europe and South Africa. He also sponsored children from Kabishi to study art at Elizabethville, and employed others at the mission station (160). In this and in other instances, Burton's appreciation of beauty and creativity led him to cultivate empathetic connections with Luba cultural brokers.
In exploring Burton's entanglements with African interlocutors, Maxwell has a great deal of archival material to work with. He is at his best in his creative reading of missionary photography. In this book the pictures are not merely adornments to the narrative storyline. In one fascinating photo, for example, the evangelist Abraham holds a witch's snare in his hand, his expression full of disdain (79). In another picture Princess Mahanga, widow of the war leader Msiri, poses in the guise of traditional womanhood, bedecked in the accoutrements of status (163). Maxwell uses these and other photos to reconstruct—conjecturally—the dispositions of the Africans who are in the pictures. It is the most creative and most interesting part of the book.
Missionary archives furnish Maxwell with rich material to work with in reconstructing the sources of missionaries’ knowledge. About political history, though, the author is on less secure footing. Chapter Seven, for example, is about language work, showing how Pentecostals’ translations of the Bible and collections of folk stories imparted a solidity and definition to Luba grammar and idiom. But when he gets round to discussing the work that Luba patriots did with their newly defined language, Maxwell grows wary. Chapter Seven ends with a spare paragraph about the Confederation of Tribal Associations of Katanga (CONAKAT), a political organization that sought to make the ethnic communities of south-eastern Congo into a platform for political action (201). In 1960 CONAKAT's leader, Moïse Tshombe, was to take Katanga out of the newly independent Republic of the Congo. A great many people died in the ensuing civil war. Among the casualties was Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of Congo, who was murdered in Tshombe's hands in January 1961.
Tshombe was not a Pentecostal—he was educated in an American Methodist school—and neither was he a Luba person. But the movement he led grew out of and responded to the politicized formulations of ethnicity that CEM missionaries’ work made possible. Katanga's secession is in many ways the denouement of the story that David Maxwell tells. But the author shies away from Katanga's history, describing the secessionist crisis in a few sentences (223).
Professor Maxwell's reluctance to engage substantively with Katanga's secession campaign reveals the limits of the archive with which he works. It also reflects the limits of the book's analytic framework. The book's central theme, “entanglement,” allows us to see missionaries’ multifaceted connections with African knowledge brokers. But entanglement is also a snare. It focuses attention on the threads that bound missionaries to their African contemporaries but makes it hard to see where their ideas went, how they fertilized and shaped fields of activism that were outside missionaries’ knowledge or control, how they became political.
Religious Entanglements is a worthy honor to the late historian Patrick Harries, in whose memory the book is dedicated. In its wealth of insight and through its narrative limits, the book powerfully illuminates the architecture of missionaries’ knowledge.
