Pentecostalism in Africa continues to attract some very important and critical studies across the humanities and social sciences. The reasons for this interest are not too hard to find. Since the middle of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism has become a major stream of world Christianity with Africa as one of its major hubs. In fact, it is impossible now to talk about the development of the non-Western worlds of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the new heartlands of world Christianity without addressing the significance of Pentecostalism and its other variants—the types of charismatic churches, movements, and ministries.

This is a book of six chapters that is divided into three sections of two chapters each. The Pentecostal spirituality that Premawardhana discovered among the Makhuwa was not different from any found across the continent: an emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit, mystical causality in which evil spirits may be blamed for misfortune and calamity, and an ardent belief in such interventionist ministries as healing, exorcism, and deliverance, among others (2, 38, 40). Premawardhana takes a methodologically novel approach by focusing on the “recipients” rather than the “transmitters” of Pentecostal spirituality, with the implication that we have a study which focuses on that from which people convert rather than that to which they convert (19).

Devaka Premawardhana takes an anthropological approach to the study of Pentecostalism in Africa, using ethnographic data from the Makhuwa, an indigenous and historically mobile community in northern Mozambique. The study represents a negative instance of the general assertion that Pentecostalism, as a new religious movement within Christianity, is growing phenomenally across Africa. Among the Makhuwa, Premawardhana found that this was not the case—which then makes the broad title of the book, Faith in Flux, a very apt one indeed. The author notes: “I . . . critique the narrative of Pentecostal explosion not because I find the statistics behind them to be wrong, but because there is more to the story than statistics can convey” (10). Here among the Makhuwa, Premawardhana looks at Pentecostalism not from the perspective of its dominant urban cultures and centers but from the fringes of rural Mozambique where, as the book states, “Pentecostals are present but not prominent” (10). It is my judgement that Devaka Premawardhana's study must awaken us to the fact that Pentecostalism has been studied mostly as an urban phenomenon. At least, that is the case in studies that focus on Africa. When looked at from the viewpoint of the contemporary Pentecostal movement, the reasons why the movement has not done well in rural Africa are not hard to find. The rural economy cannot sustain the sort of materialistic gospel and extravagant lifestyles in which the so-called prosperity gospel is clothed.

Mobility and conversion are the hermeneutical keys with which Premawardhana interprets the anthropological role of Pentecostalism in rural Mozambique. There was the geographic nomadism associated with peasant communities such as the Makhuwa of northern Mozambique, but there was also religious nomadism. Rooted in traditional religious beliefs and practices, the Makhuwa Christians hold on to these indigenous ways of being religious and, at the same time, move in and out of the churches according to their existential needs (67). Thus, Premawardhana describes religious conversion among the Makhuwa as “a spatial phenomenon” that is “a matter less of the heart's transformation than of the body's transportation” (73). Premawardhana explains that the mobility that defines the religious itinerary of the Makhuwa is not so much about movement but, rather, “the oscillations one makes between periods of movement and periods of stasis, between motion and rest, between crossing and dwelling” (76). This mobility is, for example, illustrated with the performance of rites of passage in which men and women move into the bush and back (79–92).

The Makhuwa disposition toward mobility is questioned by Pentecostal leaders who detest what may be loosely described as a syncretic attitude toward faith, bringing to the fore the age-old tensions that exist between primal religions and Christianity in Africa. In spite of this radical opposition, Premawardhana concludes that Pentecostalism, as has been discovered in other African contexts, shares many continuities with traditional religions in that they both see religion as something that is integral to life. Pentecostalism, on account of its emphasis on the experience of the Holy Spirit, which is not gender sensitive, also shares with indigenous traditions their affirmation of women (127). In the words of the author: “The Pentecostal stress on equal access to authority and, indeed, to salvation has opened for women a space to negotiate and reinterpret gender values,” and by that, it has opened up an empowering alternative to non-Pentecostal religions and cultures that are patriarchal in nature (127, 128).

We have in this volume a very useful study that teaches us something about Pentecostalism to which we may have been blinded as a result of generalizations based on the scholarly obsession with urban Pentecostalism. In spite of the insistence that converts break with the traditional past, we are told that the Makhuwa oscillate between Pentecostal churches and ancestral traditions by converting, reverting, and converting again (167). This is a book that would greatly assist those interested in the anthropology of new religious movements in Africa to appreciate the fact that we cannot take a monolithic approach to the study of such movements, including Pentecostalism, which for all intents and purposes, have transformed the religious landscape on a continent that has been described as incurably religious!