More than a Biography . . . Emma Wild‐Wood on Religious Change and African Agency in the Missionary History of Uganda and Eastern Africa

THE MISSION OF APOLO KIVEBULAYA: RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTER Wild-Wood's contribution thus offers impulses for biographical historiography as well as for local, transregional, and global historiographies. Furthermore, Wild-Wood points out that African and European actors experienced themselves as equally in the service of Christ working together to the fulfillment of his Great Commission as members of a global community (277). Consistent with her own preliminary work (Wild-Wood 2017, 492), in the case of Kivebulaya's relationships with Church Mission Society (CMS) missionaries, Emma Wild-Wood even speaks of "friendship" (162). Moreover, resulting from the analysis of that specific historical context, she thus provides a counter-narrative to a general assumption of "the racial superiority and distance" (161) on the part of the missionaries. What makes the book unique is its detailed description of the historical entanglements and the high quality with which Wild-Wood pursues her goal of constructively and verifiably elaborating "African identity" with regard to Kivebulaya's role. In this way, it also contributes to the current debates about growing Christianities on the African continent. The immanent social significance of Christian congregations and institutions will have to be further localized in the future through historicizations and contextualizations as implemented in this work. However, the elements that characterize Wild-Wood's concept of agency require further clarification. These elements include the fact that Kivebulaya made use of strategic opportunities and novelties—above all, to appropriate the message of the CMS's missionaries. As an "African Anglican missionary" (Wild-Wood 2016) he became a Bible translator and spread "his own Christianity." Emma Wild-Wood calls this kind of spreading "African comprehensions of transregional networks as signs of a wider community . . . a local engagement with a particular kind of cosmopolitan influence" (7). Here one might ask whether Kivebulaya's mission was not ultimately promoting the spread of a certain European Christianity including African elements? Or should one rather describe the development as negotiations regarding an African religion including Christian elements? What conceptualization of Christianity/Christian but also African does the author presuppose? Did the encounters and collaborations not produce something "new" resulting from the worldviews of the African actors? Precisely because Kivebulaya never left the continent, whereas the Europeans were active on both the European and the African continents, questions arise about "African" cosmologies and Africanness, and about Europeanness as well. Wild-Wood's descriptions of socio-political realities provide an important impetus to reflect further on the scope and relevance of categorizations such as African and Christian. Another important element in the consideration of "African agency" is the conversion of Kivebulaya, through which he, according to Wild-Wood, "gained access to Protestant leaders of Uganda who saw in their alliance with the British imperial project an opportunity to extend their influence. Kivebulaya shed many "customary" expectations of Baganda men—marriage, land acquisition and warrior status—and made himself into a modern, Protestant man" (125). But what made him a missionary was his "meeting with Jesus Christ (who suffered death) and the reassurance of God's chiefly protection, despite all the material signs to the contrary" (153). The anchoring of Kivebulaya's theological productivity in the socio-political environment is appropriately accomplished by Wild-Wood's historiographical location. In his "own vision of Christianity," Kivebulaya felt committed to "a universal membership that traversed ethnic units" (94). While the historicization in terms of Kivebulaya's productive way of collaborating with Christian leaders and benefiting from specific Christian traditions to transform local African societies and regions is excellently described, one wonders about the role played by the destructive changes that collaborations in the context of the British mission experience brought to these societies. In this respect, the historian often leaves it at brief mentions and hints of the destabilizing effects of CMS's imperial enterprise, as in the case of gender. On the one hand, it has been recognized that: "Monogamy, for example, made second and subsequent wives vulnerable" (148). Christianity "provided new norms of behavior for men and women that challenged the gender fluidity apparent in the understanding of bakopi men as female-men" (94). On the other hand, Wild-Wood's reading of sources shows an explicit interest in "liberating" Christian narratives and the opportunity to acquire "new skills" for the women in their situation more widely (149). In Wild-Wood's words, Kivebulaya's "fidelity to the Anglican missionary tradition was based on a desire for racial and gender harmony and a conviction that the British had 'progressed' because of their Christian respect for women" (268). As for the specific gender roles that arrived with Protestant Christian missionaries and that the locals had to negotiate and deal with, similar ambivalent influences under consideration can also be traced to western African contexts. In Cameroon, for example, the gender policy of the Basel Mission excluded women from "the power structure of the missionary church" (Lang 2016, 21), although we may assume a regular interest in the new opportunities to pray and gather around the Christian message (Johnson 2004, 234). The situation for women in Toro, offered the opportunity to become a teacher in the CMS mission schools, according to Wild-Wood. Consequently, social advancement implied that women should fit into the "western" concept of education and influential leadership. Scholars engaged in postcolonial and decolonial studies and far beyond would certainly be interested if subsequent studies further elaborated this historical fact in a power-critical manner. Wild-Wood does not fundamentally question the motivation of mission activities as part of the British Empire. Rather, Wild-Wood criticizes generalizations and macro narratives resulting from her detailed analysis of archival material. Nevertheless, one might add to the contextualization and investigation of the genesis of archival material (cf. Wild-Wood 2019)—archives and their historiographies of establishments are no ideology-free spaces. Derek R. Peterson (who has worked extensively on this topic) summarizes in his review of the source volume: "Protestant elites were constantly solidifying their place in the historical record. It was a way of cementing their social position, of creating credentials and of establishing a new form of political hierarchy, distinct from older forms of prestige and status" (Peterson 2023, 221). Acts of different kinds of violence and hegemony easily could not have been documented in writing, which is why historians (belonging to former colonizing countries) working with social anthropological approaches have to ask specific questions about power structures in interviews. Imperial systems were unjustly constructed spaces with asymmetries that needed to be named as a priority. Wild-Wood is certainly aware of these facts. Readers are reminded that the British Empire did not act everywhere and equally as a static imagined power. There was a multiplicity of narratives and complex possibilities of action for the various actors during this period. Nevertheless, the main line of investigation, which focuses on the still too often underrepresented field of African actors and the discontinuities and dynamics in the actions of the CMS missionaries, could take up further critical analyses of power. Wild-Wood's study decenters one-sided positions in intercultural-theological and postcolonial studies, which often remain in the narrative of simplistic dichotomies. Multivalent power dynamics and discontinuities could also be addressed more broadly concerning the positionality in the aforementioned processes of encounters, collaborations (Bible translation), and entanglements. For example, about the categorical term "cosmopolitanism," which originates from ancient Greek philosophy and is widely used in the debate (Wild-Wood 2017, 491): Does this term, used to describe the Christian cosmopolitanism invented by Kivebulaya (201), not imply an attribution of certain concepts of globality? By using the name of cosmopolitanism, the debate could, in turn, favor the concept of a triumphalist Christianity. African actors would then once again be subordinated to a Eurocentric, allegedly unidirectional Christianity. As researchers from European and Anglophone perspectives, we must be attentive here and bear in mind that Christianities came to "Europe" (a politicized imagination of space) from African and other contexts. Despite and at the same time including all the above-mentioned minor suggestions, Wild-Wood's study already presents a stimulating contribution to discussions about the historiography of religions in Africa and World Christianity. The next generations will approach topics and methodological questions in the field of study on the basis of such excellent studies as this one. One can clearly see in Wild-Wood's study how the self-commitment from the first initiatives of Terence Ranger and Isaria N. Kimambo (cf. Ranger/Kimambo 1972) was taken up and how current issues in the field are addressed through historicizations because: "The appreciation of the worldwide trans-temporal nature of Christian community and, therefore, Christianity's transnational connections took root in particular locations by responding to the society of the time" (279). Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.