Since the 1980s the proselytising activities of the early Catholic missionaries in northern Ghana in the early decades of the twentieth century have attracted scholarly attention. What remains largely unknown, however, is the frontline role played by their local African assistants or catechists. This slim but fascinating book by Edward Tengan attempts to fill this historical gap. In gripping narrative accounts, it details the career trajectories of six catechists whom the author interviewed during their retirement years at the prompting of his thesis supervisor, Elizabeth Tonkin. The lay religious animators were among the early generation of catechists recruited in northwestern Ghana by the White Fathers to assist them in evangelising this part of Ghana. The result is a fine historical ethnography that chronicles how the catechists were recruited from their peasant households and given intensive training in basic theology and reading skills. They were soon after dispatched to outstations of the major parishes, away from their native villages. Ideally, the book is a pastoral primer, but it raises important questions for ongoing debates on the sociology of conversion and the place of local Africans in it. The individual stories especially come alive with insights into the unequal power relations between the white missionaries and their subordinates: the complicated relations between the catechists and the local African chiefs who represented the colonial authorities on one hand, and the individual missionaries under whose parishes the catechists served on the other. The interlocutors’ narratives are deftly presented, allowing them to tell their own stories, but the reader can easily discern different and multiple layers of tensions and conflicts that characterised the catechists’ careers. At one level, the catechists were on a collision course with the colonially appointed chiefs under whose local jurisdictions they were posted to serve. As the fulcrum around which the emerging Christian community life revolved, the chiefs feared that the catechists’ activities undermined their authority. The catechists efforts were frustrated by the chiefs; some went as far as to physically torture them. In fact, one paid the ultimate price on the orders of a chief. But the catechists’ relations with the chiefs was complicated by the fact that some facilitated their activities and even protected them from harm. Another layer of tension concerns the paternalistic, if not racial undercurrents that informed and shaped individual parish priests’ treatment of their African subordinates. The relations between the older and younger generation of catechists who entered their careers with some school education were equally fraught with tension. By recording the catechists’ career trajectories in their twilight years, this book not only gives voice to the native subaltern African evangelisers but it highlights their experience while inscribing their memories which have remained a largely silent agency in the missionary enterprise. One could only have wished that the catechists’ wives, whose experiences embodied those of their husbands’ lived experiences, could have been interviewed and their experiences recorded. This book will be of great value and interest to the student of ecclesiastical history, African historiography and adult literacy.