No abstract

Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival shows how, in the era of African political independence, cosmopolitan Christian converts struggled with East Africa's patriots over the definition of culture and community. The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of East Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition.

The oxidation of TcO2 with O2 in the presence of H2O at 250 °C was investigated; Tc2O7 and a red product were observed after the reaction. UV/Visible spectroscopy and a cerium titration on the “red” product are consistent with the presence of a reduced Tc species. It is proposed that the “red” product was formed by the hydrolysis of Tc2O7 to HTcO4 followed by the reduction of HTcO4. The reaction products of TcO2 with O2/H2O at 250 °C were also studied by mass spectrometry. The main dinuclear species were Tc2O7 and Tc2O5, while the main mononuclear species were TcO3 and HTcO4. The compound HTcO4 and associated hydrates were simulated to identify candidate structures for the “red” product; however, neither the acid nor any related hydrates exhibited the UV/Visible signature of the “red” product.

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth‐century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not “mistakes”; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.

 : This essay explores conversion to the East African Revival as a way that Gikuyu women and men argued about moral and economic change. Rural capitalism in the s and s attacked the material basis of Gikuyu gender order by denying some men land. Familial stability was at stake in class formation : landless laborers could scarcely be respectable husbands. Rural elders and revivalists offered contending answers to the terrifying problem of gender trouble. Literate male elders at Tumutumu Presbyterian church used customary law and church bureaucracy to discipline young men and women. Revivalists, many of them women, talked : they confessed private sins vocally, cleansing themselves of sorcerous familial strife. Tumutumu's debate over Revival played out as a contest between the oral politics of conversion and the bureaucratic power of church elders. Mau Mau continued the debate.