Ethnic Patriotism And The East African Revival

The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of East Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom.

Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival shows how, in the era of African political independence, cosmopolitan Christian converts struggled with East Africa's patriots over the definition of culture and community. The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of East Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition. Review: 'In this superb book, Peterson pulls off the rare feat of combining a compelling, comprehensive argument about a huge regional movement with sharply drawn, detailed documentation of the local singularity of the forms it took in seven different areas in Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya. The big picture positions the East African Revival as a form of critical practice, engaged in contestation with alternative, more conservative visions of society based on ethnic consolidation and the re-invention of tradition. In the documentation of local trajectories, what comes through most vividly is the converts themselves, in all their idiosyncrasy and humanity ... individual voices and vignettes reveal the energy, initiative, and creativity these people brought to the radical project of convening a new kind of community. This book is a major achievement by any standards - original, convincing, deeply and broadly researched, and beautifully written.' Karin Barber, University of Birmingham 'This is a remarkable book, admirably researched and deeply thoughtful ... Few historians of Africa have equalled Peterson's capacity to hear the people of the past talking to one another.' African Studies