Papers by Paul G Grant
Chapter in E. Sasu Kwame Sewordor & Anne Beutter (eds.), African History Between Ghana and Switzerland, 2024
As in the performing arts, historical creativity is predicated on discipline. Both musicians and ... more As in the performing arts, historical creativity is predicated on discipline. Both musicians and historians must know their respective texts inside and out, understanding not only why certain phrases recur and how they contribute to the whole, but also what the composer’s intentions were—even if the latter must be transcended. A missionary archive is a peculiar text in which the voices of the principal subjects are usually refracted through the interpretive lens of outsiders. Such an origin requires of historians a deep understanding of all the people involved—the Africans and the Europeans alike—and the ways they changed over time, as they influenced one another. If the goal is a kind of creativity whence profound insights may arise, the surest way to get there is courtesy of archival endurance—long listening.
KOORTS, 2022
Belgian Congo: a short essay on the ways an old missionary rejected his paternalism and re-learne... more Belgian Congo: a short essay on the ways an old missionary rejected his paternalism and re-learned his faith after spending twenty-four years listening to Congolese Christians.
Translated into Dutch by Jonas Van Mulder, with an original illustration by Ruth De Jaeger
Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 20, 2022
Encyclopedia entry on the Biblical word "Nation" - Greek ethne - as pertains to its translation i... more Encyclopedia entry on the Biblical word "Nation" - Greek ethne - as pertains to its translation in West Africa
Chapter in Klaas van Walraven (ed.), The Individual in African History (Brill), 2020
African biography potentially contradicts sweeping political narratives and false binaries, such ... more African biography potentially contradicts sweeping political narratives and false binaries, such as between collaboration and resistance during Europe’s imperial scramble.
Chapter in Sara Pugach, David Pizzo, and Adam A. Blackler (eds.), After The Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies, 2020
After WWI, Ghanaian churches forgave deported Germans, thus expressing a view of community not sh... more After WWI, Ghanaian churches forgave deported Germans, thus expressing a view of community not shared by the latter, who prioritized ethnicity as fundamental human denominator.
Chapter 15 in African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives, and Challenges, ed. Dana L. Robert (Pi... more Chapter 15 in African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives, and Challenges, ed. Dana L. Robert (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 2018) (275-294).
Biographical essay on Catherine Zimmermann, born Geveh in Angola, enslaved in Jamaica, twice married (first to a Liberian, then to a German), missionary in Ghana with Switzerland's Basel Mission, mother and grandmother.
Fides ed Historia, 2018
Facing floods of refugees, Akuapem (Gold Coast) reformulated two foreign religious institutions: ... more Facing floods of refugees, Akuapem (Gold Coast) reformulated two foreign religious institutions: an ancestral veneration festival and a sanctuary shrine system.
Fides et Historia 50:2 (Summer/Fall 2018): 94-107
Chapter in The ‘Golden Pod’: Its Religious, Socio-Economic, and Political Impact on the Gold Coast and Ghana, ed. Robert Addo-Fening and Allison M. Howell (Akropong-Akuapem, Ghana: Regnum Africa, 2018).
The cocoa economy of the early twentieth century in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) put unprecedented ... more The cocoa economy of the early twentieth century in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) put unprecedented sums of money into the purses of indigenous planters and thus the churches to which they belonged. These Christian communities converted some of their currency into restored relationships with former missionaries—Germans deported by Britain during World War One. Beginning in the early 1920s, their initiatives took the form of monetary donations raised for destitute former missionaries, but when the missionaries first returned in early 1926, it involved the restorative warmth of forgiveness and inclusion.
Studies in World Christianity, 2014
Throughout the eighty years preceding the First World War, the Basel Mission’s activities in the ... more Throughout the eighty years preceding the First World War, the Basel Mission’s activities in the Gold Coast were overshadowed by endless reports of missionary death and disease. Lengthy bouts of sickness and grief described the very context of mission work. With each turn in the road, the missionaries and the home office alike turned to writing and rewriting their history, and in the process incorporated death into the message of the mission: sacrifice with an assurance of ultimate accomplishment gave way to notions of sacrifice as service in itself. This conversation was profoundly emotional and frequently expressed itself in song and poetry – the field hymnal, for example, included several songs for death and sickness. At the centre of Basel Mission grief lay a particularly German notion of home and spatial belonging called Heimat. To these German missionaries, including their supporters in Europe, the tragedy of dying in the mission field was above all dying far away from home.
Book Reviews by Paul G Grant
H-Africa, 2022
Spanning a half millennium’s worth of change and drawing on a corresponding variety of archival, ... more Spanning a half millennium’s worth of change and drawing on a corresponding variety of archival, ethnographic, and artistic sources in several European and African languages, In My Time of Dying argues “that death and the dead stood at the very heart” of human culture in the Gold Coast and Asante and that they “materialized in myriad ways as historical action” (p. 327)
H-Africa, 2021
In the concluding pages of A Spirit of Revitalization, Kyama M. Mugambi takes his readers through... more In the concluding pages of A Spirit of Revitalization, Kyama M. Mugambi takes his readers through central Nairobi on a Sunday morning in 2018. Within a tight radius of five hundred meters, a colorful diversity of living congregations collectively represents the history of Christianity in Kenya as European-initiated and African-initiated movements alike hold their services. “This small area in Nairobi,” Mugambi says, “acts as a microcosm of African Christianity,” not only in urban Kenya but in many other places around the continent (p. 287).
H-Africa, 2021
In Singing Yoruba Christianity, Vicki L. Brennan builds on years of relational work to present a ... more In Singing Yoruba Christianity, Vicki L. Brennan builds on years of relational work to present a case study of the Ayọ ̀ ni o Church in Lagos, one of the larger congregations within Nigeria’s Cherubim
and Seraphim family of churches. At a time when Nigerian Christianity—especially its Pentecostal core—has drawn the passing attention of so many global observers, a study such as this, grounded in years of patient participation and listening, grows in importance. Insights derived from longitudinal experience cannot be faked. Brennan’s core argument is that since the 1970s the Ayọ ̀ ni o Church has sought to mediate divine authority, above all through music, to help its members navigate the
times.
Books & Culture, 2016
It took Mark Gevisser nearly fifty years to find his way home in Johannesburg, and when he did it... more It took Mark Gevisser nearly fifty years to find his way home in Johannesburg, and when he did it was as someone else’s guest. He was visiting a childhood acquaintance named Hope. In the 1970s, his parents had employed Hope’s mother as a domestic servant, but the young Gevisser knew nothing about Hope herself—what kind of person she was, what her dreams were, or who she became as an adult. This kind of privileged ignorance is possible anywhere in the world, but apartheid’s domination of the human environment, public and private alike, had made any kind of interracial friendship that much harder.
Restoration and reconciliation, however, operate on a different timeline, and Gevisser was finally able to meet Hope at a genuine level: in her apartment in the township of Alexandra, among her grown children and neighbors, and at her table. If home could be found in a place like this, the worst dreams of apartheid’s desperate defenders had indeed come true. “In all the indicators of social malaise," he writes, “from infant mortality to AIDS to homicide rates to xenophobia, Alexandra remains near the bottom of South Africa’s charts.” But Gevisser is far too sophisticated for humanistic platitudes across social divides. As one of South Africa’s leading journalists, he is aware of what racial healing in Johannesburg might actually cost. And he knows that without this kind of healing, there is no chance that this city might ever become a home to anyone.
Fides et Historia, 2013
During the 1950s in British East Africa, it was the missionaries, and not the imperial officials,... more During the 1950s in British East Africa, it was the missionaries, and not the imperial officials, who changed the most. They began to unlearn paternalism and embarked on the painful process of un-imagining the British Empire as a Christian institution. Throughout the postwar years the politics of imperial devolution was inextricable from religious change, and no history of African nationalism can afford to explain one without the other.
Books & Culture, 2011
Near the end of his essay on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Thierry Cruvellier d... more Near the end of his essay on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Thierry Cruvellier drops the word "pogrom" to describe the 1994 genocide. This reference to traditional European anti-Semitism subtly advances his argument that the Rwandan genocide must be viewed in other terms than the Holocaust.
Books & Culture, 2011
Lodge’s is a fresh approach to a well-known event. While Africans remember the Sharpeville crowd ... more Lodge’s is a fresh approach to a well-known event. While Africans remember the Sharpeville crowd as cheerful and good-natured, (white) police experienced the chanting crowd as menacing.
Lodge’s insight, as he considers the protests in the context of broader scholarship on non-violent protest, is that fear trumped everything else. Successful non-violent protest is essentially a moral gamble: it works best, Lodge writes, “in a setting in which a civilian population that normally supports authority becomes disaffected by brutal excesses.” But in the case of Sharpeville, that disaffection did not mature: it was short-circuited by fear.
Published in Books and Culture: a Christian Review (Oct. 2011)
International History Review, 2011
The ongoing scholarly rediscovery of the history of Christian missionaries gains an important con... more The ongoing scholarly rediscovery of the history of Christian missionaries gains an important contribution with Julia Lederle’s study of the economics of Jesuit activities in eighteenth century India. Lederle continually invites scholars from several fields to consider whether this remarkable set of Catholic missionaries—simultaneously navigating chronic Indian warfare following the collapse of the Mogul Empire, heightened European national rivalries in the Indian Ocean, and Enlightenment-era religious turmoil back home—might not have stumbled upon organizational models closely resembling today’s international non-profit organizations.
Books & Culture, 2011
Some memories are so horrible that, in the absence of realistic possibilities for healing, they a... more Some memories are so horrible that, in the absence of realistic possibilities for healing, they are best shoved into what Steve Stern calls a “memory box” and consigned to oblivion. But sometimes, the contents of that memory box are too potent, too bitter, and too credible to remain confined. In one of Stern’s visceral images from his book on the Chilean transition to democracy, these festering wounds have become “memory knots” on the political body, “screaming” when touched.
In Reckoning with Pinochet, Stern explores how the Chilean memory box was repeatedly opened and shut by politicians, judges, commissions, and the public in the years after Augusto Pinochet resigned from the presidency in 1990, and how memory knots continually pushed the process past apparent impasse for a slow, cumulative achievement of global import.
Books & Culture, 2011
After the economic collapse and street-fighting of the early 1930s, the Nazis made it a big point... more After the economic collapse and street-fighting of the early 1930s, the Nazis made it a big point to restore family values to a holiday they perceived as over-commercialized and wanting in community spirit. And yet, as Joe Perry carefully shows in his Christmas in Germany, complaints about the shallow materialism of Christmas predated Hitler's Christmas by a good century.
This is not the story of how the Nazis stole Christmas. Perry manages to resist such low-hanging fruit, even as he documents patriotic and jingoistic holiday celebrations. He has a bigger story to tell: of the very creation of a modern space.
Books & Culture, 2010
A few hours after the December 1966 premiere of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, CBS ran an hour-l... more A few hours after the December 1966 premiere of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, CBS ran an hour-long special report called "Harvest of Mercy." After learning, courtesy of Dr. Seuss, that the spirit of Christmas could not be stifled by an empty table, television viewers now watched relief convoys ship surplus wheat from Nebraska to famine-stricken India. The bounty of America's farmers was saving, in Charles Kuralt's words, "an estimated 70 million Indians from starvation."
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Papers by Paul G Grant
Translated into Dutch by Jonas Van Mulder, with an original illustration by Ruth De Jaeger
Biographical essay on Catherine Zimmermann, born Geveh in Angola, enslaved in Jamaica, twice married (first to a Liberian, then to a German), missionary in Ghana with Switzerland's Basel Mission, mother and grandmother.
Fides et Historia 50:2 (Summer/Fall 2018): 94-107
Book Reviews by Paul G Grant
and Seraphim family of churches. At a time when Nigerian Christianity—especially its Pentecostal core—has drawn the passing attention of so many global observers, a study such as this, grounded in years of patient participation and listening, grows in importance. Insights derived from longitudinal experience cannot be faked. Brennan’s core argument is that since the 1970s the Ayọ ̀ ni o Church has sought to mediate divine authority, above all through music, to help its members navigate the
times.
Restoration and reconciliation, however, operate on a different timeline, and Gevisser was finally able to meet Hope at a genuine level: in her apartment in the township of Alexandra, among her grown children and neighbors, and at her table. If home could be found in a place like this, the worst dreams of apartheid’s desperate defenders had indeed come true. “In all the indicators of social malaise," he writes, “from infant mortality to AIDS to homicide rates to xenophobia, Alexandra remains near the bottom of South Africa’s charts.” But Gevisser is far too sophisticated for humanistic platitudes across social divides. As one of South Africa’s leading journalists, he is aware of what racial healing in Johannesburg might actually cost. And he knows that without this kind of healing, there is no chance that this city might ever become a home to anyone.
Lodge’s insight, as he considers the protests in the context of broader scholarship on non-violent protest, is that fear trumped everything else. Successful non-violent protest is essentially a moral gamble: it works best, Lodge writes, “in a setting in which a civilian population that normally supports authority becomes disaffected by brutal excesses.” But in the case of Sharpeville, that disaffection did not mature: it was short-circuited by fear.
Published in Books and Culture: a Christian Review (Oct. 2011)
In Reckoning with Pinochet, Stern explores how the Chilean memory box was repeatedly opened and shut by politicians, judges, commissions, and the public in the years after Augusto Pinochet resigned from the presidency in 1990, and how memory knots continually pushed the process past apparent impasse for a slow, cumulative achievement of global import.
This is not the story of how the Nazis stole Christmas. Perry manages to resist such low-hanging fruit, even as he documents patriotic and jingoistic holiday celebrations. He has a bigger story to tell: of the very creation of a modern space.
Translated into Dutch by Jonas Van Mulder, with an original illustration by Ruth De Jaeger
Biographical essay on Catherine Zimmermann, born Geveh in Angola, enslaved in Jamaica, twice married (first to a Liberian, then to a German), missionary in Ghana with Switzerland's Basel Mission, mother and grandmother.
Fides et Historia 50:2 (Summer/Fall 2018): 94-107
and Seraphim family of churches. At a time when Nigerian Christianity—especially its Pentecostal core—has drawn the passing attention of so many global observers, a study such as this, grounded in years of patient participation and listening, grows in importance. Insights derived from longitudinal experience cannot be faked. Brennan’s core argument is that since the 1970s the Ayọ ̀ ni o Church has sought to mediate divine authority, above all through music, to help its members navigate the
times.
Restoration and reconciliation, however, operate on a different timeline, and Gevisser was finally able to meet Hope at a genuine level: in her apartment in the township of Alexandra, among her grown children and neighbors, and at her table. If home could be found in a place like this, the worst dreams of apartheid’s desperate defenders had indeed come true. “In all the indicators of social malaise," he writes, “from infant mortality to AIDS to homicide rates to xenophobia, Alexandra remains near the bottom of South Africa’s charts.” But Gevisser is far too sophisticated for humanistic platitudes across social divides. As one of South Africa’s leading journalists, he is aware of what racial healing in Johannesburg might actually cost. And he knows that without this kind of healing, there is no chance that this city might ever become a home to anyone.
Lodge’s insight, as he considers the protests in the context of broader scholarship on non-violent protest, is that fear trumped everything else. Successful non-violent protest is essentially a moral gamble: it works best, Lodge writes, “in a setting in which a civilian population that normally supports authority becomes disaffected by brutal excesses.” But in the case of Sharpeville, that disaffection did not mature: it was short-circuited by fear.
Published in Books and Culture: a Christian Review (Oct. 2011)
In Reckoning with Pinochet, Stern explores how the Chilean memory box was repeatedly opened and shut by politicians, judges, commissions, and the public in the years after Augusto Pinochet resigned from the presidency in 1990, and how memory knots continually pushed the process past apparent impasse for a slow, cumulative achievement of global import.
This is not the story of how the Nazis stole Christmas. Perry manages to resist such low-hanging fruit, even as he documents patriotic and jingoistic holiday celebrations. He has a bigger story to tell: of the very creation of a modern space.