With over three decades of serious scholarship on Christianity, Andrew Barnes demonstrates yet again that he is at the forefront of originality and innovative scholarship. He emphasizes, with remarkable skill and compassion, how Africans extended ideas of modernization and education, thereby transforming Christianity itself, in this impressive book on the connection between religion, change, and progress.
~Toyin Falola, University Distinguished Teaching Professor and Jacob and Frances Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin
Barnes traces an overlooked but important episode in South and West African intellectual history during which Africans and African American leaders allied through the medium of Protestant Christianity to define and promote a program of educational reform designed to empower Africans in the modern world. He deftly advances our appreciation of how intellectual life in colonial Africa, too long constrained by notions of resistance and domination, is indeed rich with creative agendas for change which drew on Black Atlantic currents.
~Philip S. Zachernuk, Dalhousie University, author of Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas
Andrew Barnes brings to life an important but largely forgotten world: the ‘Christian black Atlantic’ of the early twentieth century. Carefully interweaving African American history with the histories of Western and Southern Africa, he reveals the complex strategies by which African Christians addressed colonialism and white racism, inspired by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee. An authoritative, illuminating, and absorbing book.
~Richard H. Elphick, Emeritus Professor of History, Wesleyan University
...Barnes’s exploration of Ethiopianism to tell a different story about industrialism, civilization, and modernity is noteworthy. His work challenges the field of religious history to highlight a cadre of African educators and leaders who traveled from Africa to the United States and back, a tale that will surely inspire more conversations.
~Jamil Drake, Journal of Religion in Africa
In this rich, content-laden study, Barnes introduces us in depth to several significant figures on both sides of the Atlantic and to the vital role the African-edited newspapers played in the transmission of their ideas, African American leaders were especially widely quoted and reprinted in the newspapers….In short, this is a book that belongs in every missiological and African studies collection.
~Richard V. Pierard, International Bulletin of Mission Research
Barnes has an important story to tell and he makes a signal contribution to the study of the Black Atlantic while also giving scholars considerable food for thought about the potential payoffs and pitfalls of digitised sources in historical research.
~Robert Trent Vinson, Journal of Southern African Studies
This book is a stimulating and provocative read which raises very interesting questions.
~David Killingray, Studies in World Christianity
