Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival
A History of Dissent, c.1935–1972

This book focuses on the struggle between cosmopolitan Christian converts and East African patriots to define culture and community in the mid-twentieth century.

Derek R. Peterson (Author)

9781107636965, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 March 2014

370 pages, 6 b/w illus. 3 maps
22.6 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.54 kg

'As a meticulous researcher and astute scholar, Peterson provides excellent footnotes and an extensive bibliography on the topic, including detailed descriptions of forty-six archives on three continents and 170 informants from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. This insightful and comprehensive monograph serves the scholarly purpose of stimulating further research on the Revival and its socio-political implications in late colonial Africa.' Daewon Moon, African Studies Quarterly

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.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: the pilgrims' politics
2. The infrastructure of cosmopolitanism
3. Religious movements in southern Uganda
4. Civil society in Buganda
5. Taking stock: conversion and accountancy in Bugufi
6. Patriotism and dissent in western Kenya
7. The politics of moral reform in northwestern Tanganyika
8. Subjects of the law: conversion and court procedure
9. Casting characters: autobiography and political argument in central Kenya
10. Confession, slander, and civic virtue in Mau Mau detention camps
11. Contests of time in western Uganda
Conclusion: pilgrims and patriots in contemporary East Africa
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Religion: general [HRA], African history [HBJH], History [HB]