Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Social History of Africa) - Softcover

'Khama III of the Ngwato ... was paraded before Victorian England as an epitome of missionary success. This book penetrates behind this stereotype to examine the precise political role of Christianity for Khama and his subjects. In contrast to Jean and John Comaroff, authors of the other major recent book on Christianity among the Tswana, Dr Landau does not assume that Tswana converts merely accepted the missionaries' understandings of Christianity.' - Richard Gray in SOAS Bulletin '... gives us one of the best case-studies to date, not only of an African Christianity but of the inter-weaving of the religious with the social and political history of an African people.' - J.D.Y. Peel in Journal of Religion in Africa '... no doubting the significance of this imaginative, theoretically sophisticated and genuinely interdisciplinary book.' - James T. Campbell in African Affairs '...a meticulous, innovative account of Christianity in a Tswana kingdom, paying unusual attention to language, to gender, to African agency within a mission church.' - Journal of African History

This grassroots history of mission Christianity in colonial southern Africa treats religion and society as a coherent whole. It shifts the focus away from European missionaries and African Christians, and on to African evangelists, schoolchildren, healers and - most of all - Christian women. The ideologies and practices of Christianity emerge as inseparable from a kingdom's construction of power in central Botswana - a realm of the word premised, not on western hegemony, but instead on Tswana self-rule.