Christianity in Northern Malawi deals with the interaction of the missionary methods of the Scottish missionary Donald Fraser and the traditional culture of the Ngoni people of northern Malawi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It looks at Ngoni origins and culture prior to first contacts with the missionaries, at the early life and ideas of Fraser, and at Fraser's disagreements with some of his Scottish colleagues. There are also sections on Ngoni interactions with the early colonial government, and the development of a genuinely Ngoni Church. The book uses primary and oral...

In its earliest days, photography was seen as depicting its subjects with such objectivity as to be inherently free of ideological bias. Today we are rightly more skeptical -- at least most of the time. When it comes to photography from the past, we tend to set some of our skepticism aside. But should we?
In Light on Darkness? T. Jack Thompson, a leading historian of African Christianity, revisits the body of photography generated by British missionaries to sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and demonstrates that much more is going on in these...