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African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the rise of a Zimbabwean transnational religious movement (review)

Through their development work, missionaries had to engage with micro-political dynamics and structures, and unintentionally reinforced Islamic conceptions of law and landed property. Moreover, SIM activities in domains such as education and health depended largely on American financial resources mobilized among businessmen in North America. A central aspect throughout the book is the ambiguous relationship between Christianity and Islam. Islam constrained, but simultaneously helped define Christian practice and the language of belief. Cooper portrays the complex and changing relations between missionaries and Muslims, who at times demonized, yet at other times cooperated with each other. For example, Muslims played a crucial role as mediators in the translation of the Bible into Hausa, and facilitated the definition of the concepts of God and the spiritual world. SIM’s social work had successes as well as challenges. Its medical activities created a group of committed converts among the sick who adopted the new faith after spending long periods of time in SIM’s leprosarium. However, SIM’s education project, intended to train local missionaries to read and write Hausa, often clashed with converts’ aspirations. The system did not help them to acquire the language skills needed to thrive in a colonial setting. As the new church started to grow, tensions over leadership roles and the negotiation of gender norms emerged. Although women sometimes seemed to be invisible, they became the backbone of the church, especially when male disputes threatened its survival. Throughout this process, missionaries engaged in controversial disciplinary practices. In the end, Christian converts in Niger did not become the vernacular Christians that missionaries had in mind; instead, they engaged with Christianity on their own terms. Cooper argues that SIM’s work prepared the ground for the recent Pentecostal explosion in Niger. Former staff and converts from SIM have been the driving force of the new Pentecostal churches and evangelization. However, SIM regards these churches with suspicion. Pentecostal churches appear to provide converts with what they were denied from earlier missions: access to the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit and Western influence. Cooper’s analysis of the popularity of more recent types of Pentecostal churches could have been enriched by incorporating the growing literature on Pentecostalism in Africa, specifically those works that deal with notions such as ‘the break with the past’. Nonetheless, this is a very rich and interesting work, which portrays the complexities of mission work and deepens the understanding of religious dynamics in West Africa.