If you can find it:

J. D. Y. Peel. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. (African Systems of Thought.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 420. $49.95.

J. D. Y. Peel has written widely on the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria; this is his third book on this well-studied ethnic group. It is the product of years of archival research at the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) in England. Peel uses CMS missionaries' "annual letters" and journals—"the pride of the archive"—to examine and to analyze "the nature and consequences of the CMS intervention in Yoruba history" in the nineteenth century (p. 44). These journals, as the author correctly notes, provide sociological and historical information about nineteenth-century Yoruba society, as well as accounts of CMS evangelical work among the Yoruba. In his analysis, therefore, he adopts an anthropological and historical approach to craft a very readable piece of work on the transformation of nineteenth-century Yoruba society. In the process, he highlights the role CMS African agents, most of whom were Yoruba, played in the religious and social transformation of nineteenth-century Yoruba society. After all, about fifty-five percent of the journal accounts emanate from them. This acknowledgement of the African factor is certainly a welcome departure from the hitherto obsessive focus on European missionaries as the sole architects of change in Africa.