Barbra Mann Wall. Into Africa

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the role that missions and religious figures played in the development of European colonial empires. Much of this work has shown that missionaries pursued their own independent agendas that evolved over time in response to changing social and political influences at home, growing awareness of local culture, and the agency of colonized peoples. Barbra Mann Wall’s slim volume Into Africa: A Transnational History of Catholic Medical Missions and Social Change continues and expands upon this trend by looking at Catholic medical missions run by women religious in post-1945 British Africa. While it breaks new historiographical ground in terms of the time period studied, it focuses on Catholic rather than Protestant missions, and it emphasizes the transnational character of mission work. Into Africa is uneven and fails to deliver on some of its promises due to an overly ambitious attempt to cover too many of the Catholic mission societies over too many territories. The result is short on detail and often presents a series of generalizations that are insufficiently supported by the evidence. This is odd because the extensive notes show that the book is well researched, drawing on archives in the U.S., Britain, Ireland, and Africa.

Agency (philosophy) · Colonialism · Historiography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Social change · Social history (medicine) · Social science · Sociology · Work (physics) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies