Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival

by Peterson, Derek R.

• ISBN13: 9781107021167
• ISBN10: 1107021162
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-09-24
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: the pilgrims' politics

The infrastructure of cosmopolitanism

Religious movements in southern Uganda

Civil society in Buganda

Taking stock: conversion and accountancy in Bugufi

Patriotism and dissent in western Kenya

The politics of moral reform in northwestern Tanganyika

Subjects of the law: conversion and court procedure

Casting characters: autobiography and political argument in central Kenya

Confession, slander, and civic virtue in Mau Mau detention camps

Contests of time in western Uganda

Conclusion: pilgrims and patriots in contemporary East Africa

Bibliography

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