This work grew out of the author's investigations of land, family, and labour during his undergraduate and MPhil studies. Dealing with the social history of a community in the Cederberg mountains of the North-western Cape of South Africa that adopted Christianity through the work of the Rhenish Mission, the book offers insights based on the source material of the Archives and Museum Foundation of the United Evangelical Mission. The longitudinal perspective laid out in the text reveals that it takes enormous effort to ensure the even contextualization of a community's development over the course of 150 years. It is not clear whether the text went through a review process; if so, reviewers should have stressed the necessity to address the historical change in meaning of such ideologically laden terms as ‘black’ and ‘coloured’. They should also have prevented the author from opening up, towards the end of the book, the subject of ‘coloured identity’ in chapters based almost exclusively on primary mission material and lacking discussion of the broader context.

Aside from these important reservations, this text is valuable in that it provides a number of original approaches to a staple topic of South African history. Wupperthal combines the history of church and mission with the investigation of economic and demographic change. Based on the analysis of parish register data, it focuses on family constitution and reconstitution, as well as on the formation of family-driven networks. To read demographic data and mission reports in conjunction represents an innovative approach within the context of studies exploring mission sources. Bilbe shows that ex-slave families moved to the mission after emancipation and formed the emerging mission elite of educated teachers and artisans. They later became entrenched as elite households, with mission-learned professions and vocations handed down within individual families, while the former rural elite, who had evaded harsh mission regimes and controls, remained geographically separated from the mission. A particularly aggressive land accumulation by the Rhenish missionaries, intended to protect the economic independence of black and coloured families, led to the demise of certain rural clans towards the end of the nineteenth century.

In contrast to both missionary discourse and the majority of studies on mission communities, Bilbe considers informal networks constituted through intermarriage as key actors in the process of community building and community change. In these actors he also identifies, for the period following the 1920s, a core group for the construction of a coloured identity in a remote area such as the Cederberg mountains. His focus on families as actors establishes continuity in a process that would have looked more disparate had he resorted to the more traditional focus on the individual. However, as has been mentioned already, the author does not historicize or convincingly explain his use of the terms ‘black’ and ‘coloured’. This makes his larger argument on the formation of a coloured identity difficult to grasp.

Wupperthal also shows originality in approaching the topic of family formation via the analysis of parish register data and relating it to the economic development of the area. Bilbe argues that, in the 1930s, increased rates of illegitimacy resulted in the increase of family size, as single mothers and children, returning from the towns, were added to their parents' households. As the households were not allotted extra land, whole artisan families moved away from Wupperthal, thus weakening the community. After 1950 the Rhenish Mission, whose other stations were in Namibia, was determined to hand over its only South African mission site to a mission society based in South Africa, which resulted in fresh conflict within the community. Elders, deacons, and officers of the community council opposed a handover to the Dutch Reformed Church, with whom the Rhenish Mission enjoyed established relations. Through persistent struggle they finally achieved a transfer to the Moravians in 1965. Once again, coloureds demonstrated sociopolitical agency in the Cape during the 1960s. The victory of the coloured community was paid for by the loss of a substantial portion of the mission land, which was transferred to local white farmers, making it difficult for the community to attain prosperity.