Missions as institutions, their people as actors, and their archives as sources have long been important in Africa’s historiography.1 Studying “the missionary factor,” historians have examined and argued about missions’ political economy and hegemonic ideologies, challenging rigid structural interpretations by pointing to the diversity of meanings that missions and Christianity assumed in local contexts. Urban-Mead’s examination of the marginal Brethren in Christ mission nevertheless offers something new in its thoughtful biographies of six Ndebele Christians, each illuminating nuances of faith, social change, and personal identity.
This biographical approach examines practices, not theology or regulations, and adds subjective experiences of piety, and complicated variables of gender and lifecycle, to our understanding of colonial change. In Urban-Mead’s approach, male and female believers felt the call and sang songs of faith even as the men practiced polygyny, and the women had babies outside marriage. The piety at the center of the Brethren’s...