THE POWER OF THE WORD

Abstract

THE COVER OF PAUL LANDAU S BOOK features a black and white photograph of an elderly African couple in what appears to be a kgotla.l Bright sunlight illuminates the man's face, but the woman's features are lost in shadow. The shadow of the photograph falls across the foreground. A photo credit identifies the couple as Mokakapadi and Mosele Ramosoka, representatives of the chiefly line that once ruled in Lerala, a village in northeast Botswana. One can never judge a book by its cover, but many of the central themes of Landau's provocative study reside in this unassuming photograph: the struggle over public space; the partial emergence of women into the public sphere; the problems of perspective inherent in any attempt to represent the African past. The fact that the photograph features the Ramosoka family serves to introduce the transformation at the heart of the book: the eclipse of older, village-based institutions and hierarchies by an expansive 'realm of the Word', resting on the three pillars of mission Christianity (specifically the London Missionary Society), imperial authority, and an expanding Ngwato chiefdom. Landau's argument defies easy summary. At the most basic level, the book examines the spread of Christianity within GammaNgwato, charting the complex processes of appropriation and transformation by which different groups within Ngwato society made the gospel their own. The book is also a study of the expansion of Ngwato authority under the leadership of chief Khama, whose long reign (1872-1923) saw GammaNgwato grow from a polity of a few hundred subjects to a vast kingdom embracing virtually the entire Bechuanaland Protectorate. Both sorts of processes are familiar to African historians and have any number of analogues elsewhere. What gives Landau's book its novelty is his insistence that these were not two separate processes at all, but rather entwined aspects of a single revolution. What transpired in GammaNgwato was not simply the substitution of one religion for another, or of one set of traditional leaders for another, but the construction of an entirely new political, religious and cultural realm.