Book Review

In this study of religion and activism, Lamin Sanneh argues that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical Christianity, in the hands of black American settlers and African recaptives (people rescued from slave ships and returned to Africa), revolutionized the social milieu and cultural ethos of littoral communities in West Africa. Starting at the founding of the British colony of Sierra Leone, African American immigrants brought to Africa a liberative ideology of social mobility and personal enterprise that threatened the old arrangements of chiefly power and hereditary privilege that had been nurtured by the slave trade. This progressive impulse drew inspiration from both the democratic promise of the American Revolution and the thrust for social justice and individual equality enshrined in the evangelical tradition. Additionally, this gospel of personal redemption and achievement undergirded the antislavery zeal of nineteenth-century abolitionists and made possible the regeneration of Western man's moral sensibilities and the ex-slave's sense of self and communal place.

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