Description
Book SynopsisAfrican Teachers on the Colonial Frontier is an exploration of the profound social and personal changes that accompanied the expansion of European influence in the interior of southern Africa during the nineteenth century, focusing on the role played by Tswana Christian evangelists. Drawing on a wide range of sources and locating African converts rather than European missionaries at the center of the story, this book provides new insights into the development of African-European relations and the impact of colonization. Although Christian missions played an important role in European expansion, this book reveals that during much of the nineteenth century, Europeans had little control over the various ways that Africans interpreted, assimilated, and propagated Christianity, and how Christianity acquired meanings contrary to its presumed role as a vehicle for European imperialism. Africans associated Christianity with Europeans, but the implications of that association changed as
Trade Review«This is an excellent study. Few young scholars have done so much work in so many languages, presented their findings in such fluent, engaging prose, and done so in such a way as to greatly enrich our understanding of one of the most dramatic events in modern cultural history: the Christianization of sub-Saharan Africa.»
(Richard Elphick, IJAHS Vol.49, No.3 2016)
