Winner of the 2016 Lavinia Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing Awarded first place in the 2016 American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award in the History and Public Policy category The most dramatic growth of Christianity in the late twentieth century has occurred in Africa, where Catholic missions have played major roles. But these missions did more than simply convert Africans. Catholic sisters became heavily involved in the Church’s health services and eventually in relief and social justice efforts. In Into Africa, Barbra Mann Wall offers a transnational history that reveals how Catholic medical and nursing sisters established relationships between local and international groups, sparking an exchange of ideas that crossed national, religious, gender, and political boundaries. Both a nurse and a historian, Wall explores this intersection of religion, medicine, gender, race, and politics in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on the years following World War II, a period when European colonial rule was ending and Africans were building new governments, health care institutions, and education systems. She focuses specifically on hospitals, clinics, and schools of nursing in Ghana and Uganda run by the Medical Mission Sisters of Philadelphia; in Nigeria and Uganda by the Irish Medical Missionaries of Mary; in Tanzania by the Maryknoll Sisters of New York; and in Nigeria by a local Nigerian congregation. Wall shows how, although initially somewhat ethnocentric, the sisters gradually developed a deeper understanding of the diverse populations they served. In the process, their medical and nursing work intersected with critical social, political, and cultural debates that continue in Africa today: debates about the role of women in their local societies, the relationship of women to the nursing and medical professions and to the Catholic Church, the obligations countries have to provide care for their citizens, and the role of women in human rights. A groundbreaking contribution to the study of globalization and medicine, Into Africa highlights the importance of transnational partnerships, using the stories of these nuns to enhance the understanding of medical mission work and global change.

The translation of Scripture into non-European languages has been an essential undertaking of the modern missionary movement. However, when translators cling to the ideal of scholarly objectivity or fail to interrogate the lenses through which they view Scripture and the world, they risk perpetuating a belief in the West’s political, cultural and epistemological superiority, with dangerous consequences for the good news of the gospel. This study provides detailed historical accounts of the origins of two of Africa’s most revered vernacular Bibles: the Efik Bible of modern-day Nigeria and the Nyanja Bible of Southern Africa. It illustrates the nature and challenges of early missionary translation work, highlighting the impact of particular translation theories and tracing the development of modern approaches. Evaluating Hugh Goldie’s and Robert Law’s translation practices against the interwoven backdrop of imperialism, the modern missionary movement and the Enlightenment’s belief in objectivity, Dr. Misheck Nyirenda demonstrates how the missionaries’ presuppositions often dominated their projects at the expense of African agency and epistemology. Issuing a powerful warning for those involved in the vast ongoing task of translating Scripture into the world’s vernacular languages, Nyirenda reminds us that we must first reckon with our social, cultural and historical embeddedness when seeking to communicate gospel truth across linguistic or cultural barriers.