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Historically there has been a major difference between the early Catholic colonization from Spain and Portugal and British colonization. In those early colonizations the political and religious orders were transplanted as a unity, whereas by the time the British were involved they were quite distinct enterprises, sometimes collaborating, sometimes in conflict. The district officer, the missionary, and the merchant might well work together, but their interests and objectives were different. In Africa the consequence has been a voluntary, pluralistic, and fissiparous Christianity capable of nurturing the elites which supplanted the colonial regimes and of expanding rapidly in the postcolonial era. Though England itself might retain a church-state connection, what it exported to Africa (as also to North America) was a voluntaristic pluralism.
There is another major difference. Just as the missionaries represented a religion distinct from the political order so they also represented a social and cultural world uncoupled from the world of nature. Catholicism might retain some unity of society and nature, and be thought on that account less alien to African reality, but for evangelicalism nature had been disenchanted. Thus in enforcing two far-reaching distinctions, the religious from the political and the social from the natural, evangelicalism put asunder what Africans had joined together. No wonder black Pentecostalism so successfully puts them back together again.
It is precisely these major differences that John Peel presents as the context of his magisterial study, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Peel's new book is the result of many years of work on evangelical mission by the Church Missionary Society in what is now Nigeria. He gives us an account of a mission to a major people, which provided them with the narrative for their ethnic self-understanding, within what is today one of Africa's two major sub-Saharan powers. Though the detailed documentation and complex analysis is mostly concentrated on the period from the 1820s to the 1890s, we are also taken up to the emergence of the Pentecostals and "born agains" since the Seventies.
Prior to the 1890s the Yoruba were not under British control, and the key agents of mission were the Africans themselves. What ensued reflected Yoruba needs as much as missionary intentions, so that mission was not some one-sided transmission of the moral economy of liberal capitalism in the imperial marketplace but a genuine encounter between a lively indigenous religion and a world religion. Hence redemption did not imply double-entry bookkeeping or vice versa. Here Peel contends against the kind of interpretation associated with J. and J. L. Comaroff and effects a major revision in our understanding.
In one sense the Yoruba were encountering broader horizons consonant with universal monotheism, whether Christian or Islamic. However, the main stumbling block was not the notion of a "High God" but cults of ancestors intimately related to a cycle of death and new birth. "Heaven" lay in the woman's womb, whence emerged the next generation, while for the missionaries heaven was an eternal destiny opened up by regeneration and grace. The Yoruba sought health, wealth, and protection from evil here and now, whereas they were being offered a Physician of the soul who required the pure sacrifice of a good and faithful heart. Neither the inwardness of sin nor the "moral gyroscope" of conscience made much sense. Spirit meant access to life and power rather than the struggle between the spirit of holiness and the affections of the flesh.
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