Would an imperial science of religion have developed without Africa? Without its elaboration as an epistemology of race in South Africa, where Europeans considered the divide between savagery and civilization most apparent, the ‘empire of religion’ would likely not have stretched beyond colonial frontiers to twentieth century North America to become a cornerstone in the study of the African diaspora. Its universalist claims would surely not have garnered legitimacy and informed so many fields of knowledge, from evolutionary biology to literature. In these and other revelations, Chidester painstakingly and convincingly breaks new ground, well beyond his Savage Systems. Yet while the book exposes the ties that bound and still bind European and American scholars to Africa, it sometimes loses sight of and limits how Africans, who provided the ‘raw material’, fit in this web.
Chidester's method is to ‘employ theory as an instrument of surprise’ and position foundational scholarly figures like F. Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, W. E. B. DuBois in relation to characters and concerns in the colonies, mostly in South Africa but also at international conferences. Showing ‘constant renegotiation’ in the mediation of indigenous, colonial, and imperial actors, Chidester is eager to highlight the unpredictable uses of religious knowledge. Indigenous thinkers like M. K. Gandhi and John Dube, for example, relied on imperial theory but wrested it out of metropolitan control (p. 51). Scholars of lived religion, rather than theory, have long recognized the uncontrollability of religious thought. Where it originated and the directionality of influence are the more intriguing questions. Chapter Two begins with Müller's homage to the famously pluralistic Mughal Emperor Akbar, and Chidester invites the possibility that both men were founders of comparative religion. Yet he closes the door, concluding that ‘indigenous voices were not necessarily confirming assumptions of imperial theorists but they were also not speaking independently of imperial theory or colonial missions. After all, the Japanese sociologists had embraced the imperial notion of religion’ (p. 57). Non-Europeans seem only to have seized upon European ideas; the empire did not enable co-construction of them. Chidester concludes a rich presentation by reducing potential readings of it.
This problem continues in subsequent chapters, in part because they are so full and difficult to summarize without seeming reductive. Here I try to capture just some of Chidester's most striking revelations. Chapter Three shows the importance of comparative religion as an imperial science for classifying and controlling not just subject populations but knowledge divided between theory and local cases. The next chapter elaborates on theory-making from studies of difference by scholars like E. B. Tylor and Charles Darwin, who abstracted ‘savage’ behavior to transform religion from a medium of difference to one of continuity that contained the idea of an evolutionary continuum between colonized subjects and metropolitan ‘primitives’, like women. Against this theoretical abstraction, Chapter Five treats the literary imagination of imperial novelists like H. Rider Haggard who used indigenous religions to reveal the relativity of savagery.
Chapter Six focuses on missionary Henri Alexandre Junod's much-cited observations about male homosexuality. Historicization, versus literary representation, meant the ‘discovery’ of ancient commonalities between South African and Semitic pastoral religions for imperial scholars but, significantly, for Junod, it led to a presentist moral ambivalence about Africans' apparent degeneration. While scholars have noted the important connections between colonial Christian missionary and historicist impulses, Chidester adds a new dimension by juxtaposing the apparent ‘objective’ disinterest of comparative history against the moral imperative driving proto-national histories. Chapter Seven examines the political project of W. E. B. DuBois' African history that began with Yoruba religion and represented Islam, Christianity, and European conquest as disruptive and demeaning forces. The disjuncture is clear between DuBois' emancipatory politics of analysis and the conditions of African disempowerment in which his sources – notably those by Leo Frobenius – were produced. However, the discussion of Africa's necessity for diasporic ‘self-making’ and comparative religion generally seems unfinished without mention of William Blyden, an earlier figure whose writing about comparative religions (including Islam and Christianity together) was thought, in England, to have been produced by a white scholar. His story would have necessitated analysis of complex power negotiations of power beyond black and white and made a sensible segue into Chapter Eight, ‘Thinking Black’, focused on men like James Stuart and Unemo, a Roman Catholic missionary posing as an African, who sought to be Zulu. White and black South Africans like Molema engaged religion as a ‘field of strategic possibility’ (p. 255). This field, as discussed in Chapter Nine, is virtually closed to figures like Albert Thoka, an enigmatic scholar who presented at the Religions of the Empire Conference, where imperial power reasserted hierarchies between scholars and religious adherents. The concluding chapter charts the flow of knowledge from the British Empire to neo-imperial America, where the rise of Nazi Germany and perception of Islamic ‘fanaticism’ infused a sense of danger in the study of religion. Reflection on how the politics of endangerment might have shaped the study of African-initiated religions as mainstream (‘white’) Christians worried about their religiosity would have fit well here. In a few refreshingly clear final paragraphs, Chidester submits that ideas about religion have been invented and that these inventions have profoundly shaped the terms of secular modernity (p. 312). Knowing the problematic genealogy of ancestral scholars of religion, he asks, how do we live with them?
Readers will have to find the answer themselves, but Chidester has done the work of asking, albeit perhaps by creating an overly deterministic account of imperial perspective and power. Some readers will reject Chidester's casting of most African figures either as informants or dialecticians refusing to serve European knowledge-producers. For a study that rejects ‘simple social physics of cause and effect’ (p. 312), not enough illustrations of ‘circuits of knowledge’, and too many African ‘reversals of flows of knowledge’, (p. 144) appear. Silas Modiri Molema is one of few Africans to appear in Chidester's estimation as a true scholar of religion. For their part, scholars of missions may dislike depictions of opportunistic missionary-ethnographers who dismissed ‘unruly’ South Africans – the mission-educated and mine workers, for instance – and clamored to represent ‘authentic’ natives. South Africanists will surely have other critiques. Yet anyone interested in the politics of knowledge about Africa should read this book and consider for herself whether knowledge and knowledge-production have been decolonized.
Criticisms notwithstanding, this book challenges scholars of any field that relies on comparison – who do we cite and what counts as evidence and as expertise? It lays bare the incestuous acts of scholarly citation and recitation by reminding us of the materiality, multiple meanings, and power relations of cultural encounters in Africa.
