Emma Wild-Wood's new monograph is a richly detailed, thoroughly researched monograph that boldly and convincingly challenges some of the standard shibboleths in English-language scholarship on African missions. In the fascinating figure of Apolo Kivebulaya (1865–1933), Wild-Wood demonstrates the transformative appeal of what she terms ‘Christian cosmopolitanism’ in the life of one of colonial Africa's most influential missionaries. Moving beyond the Comaroffs’ ‘colonization of consciousness’ paradigm, Derek Peterson's ethnic patriotism and dissent, or modern African theology's turn to inculturation, Wild-Wood shows why Christianity could offer an appealing counter-cultural message and translocal identity to socially marginalised Africans. Kivebulaya is a fully-embodied figure, and the richness of Wild-Wood's portrait enables a deeper probing of larger themes in African religious history, such as the complexity of indigenous conversion to Christianity and the variegated sources of missionary agents’ authority.
First, this study enriches scholarly understanding of African conversion in the Ugandan context. Drawing on Kivebulaya's own autobiography, personal letters, earlier biographies, seventeen archival collections and both historical and contemporary oral interviews, Wild-Wood uncovers the depth and breadth of his conversion to Anglican Christianity. This entails moving beyond a narrow focus on religious beliefs to a more holistic understanding of conversion that takes seriously the revolutions in Kivebulaya's notions of kinship, manhood and ethnic and social bonds. Following the work of Holly Hanson among others, Wild-Wood shows how and why cosmopolitan Christianity might have appealed to a Baganda peasant living during a precarious period marked by expanded slaving, disease, ritual killings and raiding, as well as the breakdown of broader kinship relations. Christianity's novel technologies, such as literacy, biomedicine and bicycles, as well as its message of salvation, international community and pan-ethnic vision, all contributed to Kivebulaya's embracing of this new, foreign religion. Kivebulaya's experience was mirrored by thousands of Baganda women, youth and other marginalized bakopi peasants attracted by the ‘remaking of social bonds’ (p. 17) that Christianity offered.
Yet what strikes the reader in Kivebulaya's story is not simply his multifaceted conversion story, but the remarkable ways in which he became the most important colonial-era missionary in western Uganda and eastern Congo. In narrating his journey, Wild-Wood moves Kivebulaya beyond Louise Pirouet's category of ‘black evangelist’ and classifies him as a bona-fide international missionary. She shows how the power relations between Kivebulaya and British missionaries were not always as one-sided as it seems, as foreign missionaries were utterly dependent on local leaders like Kivebulaya in the field. Likewise, Kivebulaya's remarkable evangelical success stemmed from many factors, some of which stood in paradoxical tension with each other. He rejected traditional healing methods, yet also gained renown as a spiritual healer. He came from Uganda's dominant kingdom, yet downplayed his own Baganda identity and advocated for a Runyoro-Rutoro Bible (over and against official Church Mission Society [CMS] policy which envisioned Luganda as a unifying national language for all of Uganda's Anglicans). And yet Kivebulaya's determination to localise the church through the vernacular language was balanced by a more universal vision of Church as a pan-ethnic, cross-border, international communion.
Wild-Wood's monograph is an outstanding example of biography as an entrée into a richly textured local history. I confess that when I first heard the title, I imagined that this would be a micro-study of a single Baganda missionary's life and influence in the Great Lakes region. But The mission of Apolo Kivebulaya is much more than this. The attentive reader also gains rich insight into the early colonial and Christian history of Buganda. In fact, Kivebulaya's roots in outlying Singo on the Bunyoro border significantly expands Buganda's Christian story beyond the standard focus on the royal court at Mengo. In tracing Kivebulaya's peripatetic life, the book also moves beyond Buganda to offer a finely grained history of political and religious developments in Toro (western Uganda) as well as the Ituri region of north-eastern DRC.
The surname ‘Kivebulaya’, which he adopted in the 1890s, literally means ‘the one who comes from Europe’ (p. 124). Wild-Wood generally explores the positive and constructive dimensions of Kivebulaya's cosmopolitanism, but one wonders what if any baggage might have come with his dismissal of his previous identity as Waswa Munubi. Did his shedding of his earlier name, embracing of a vow of celibacy, criticisms of Baganda culture and choice to permanently leave Buganda involve any kind of self-rejection or cultural alienation? Wild-Wood does not really delve into these questions. More attention to Kivebulaya's interactions with Catholic missionaries would also have been welcome, especially in light of their shared commitment to work among the marginalised poor in regions like Toro.
Whatever these minor lacunae, The mission of Apolo Kivebulaya is a terrific book, and should be widely read by scholars and graduate students of global Christianity, East African history, Ugandan studies and missiology. Wild-Wood's framing of Kivebulaya through the lens of the ‘local enactment of cosmopolitan Christian values’ (p. 201) will surely be debated and discussed for years to come.
