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Southern Africans configured missionaries as medical, bodily practitioners because of the meaning of ritual specialization in southern Africa. At the same time, ‘practicing medicine’ often meant minor surgery to missionaries, who lagged behind Europe's medical advances at the turn of the century. Whereas southern Africans located their well-being in the nexus of person and community, missionaries' surgery attacked this nexus. Surgery implied, and missionaries asserted, that healing derived from a resolution of interior somatic conflicts, in which troublesome body parts might be removed. A new way of speaking about certain kinds of physical pain was developed, whereby the body briefly became a total site for illness and healing. At the same time, Nonconformist evangelism demanded that individuals rid their interior selves of unsavory forces and extract themselves from those aspects of their communal lives which generated such influences. Because both Africans and missionaries moralized illness, and because some forms of surgery, like tooth-pulling, ‘worked’ for Africans, surgery marked a rite of passage to a new group of peers: Christians, who could recontextualize the catharsis of getting well.

This article reviews recent scholarship on African religion and argues that, while much has been accomplished, historians have inherited a problematic view of the processes that they have investigated. They have unknowingly adopted evangelical ideas, in the form of written words and concepts that they wrongly assume have maintained consistent meanings down through the decades. Because missionaries’ translations have been taken in this way as accurate guides for understanding what gave rise to them, much of Africa’s intellectual history appears religious. The article focuses on the example of tui‐qua, a term used by Khoikhoi and translated as “God,” and suggests a model for understanding evangelism and conversion that does not rely on the supposed ubiquity of religion. It is argued that missionaries used Christian notions to accommodate the falsity of analogous practices, which although often unrelated in their original setting, together became a single entity (religion) as a result.

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Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 offers an inclusive vision of South Africa's past. Drawing largely from original sources, Paul Landau presents a history of the politics of the country's people, from the time of their early settlements in the elevated heartlands, through the colonial era, to the dawn of Apartheid. A practical tradition of mobilization, alliance, and amalgamation persisted, mutated, and occasionally vanished from view; it survived against the odds in several forms, in tribalisms, Christian assemblies, and other, seemingly hybrid movements; and it continues today. Landau treats southern Africa broadly, concentrating increasingly on the southern Highveld and ultimately focusing on a transnational movement called the 'Samuelites'. He shows how people's politics in South Africa were suppressed and transformed, but never entirely eliminated.