If you think you have seen this book somewhere before, you probably have. It might well have been on this very blog some five years ago. Now it is appearing in a new guise, with a new colour and some updates as my co-author Klaus Fiedler and I have brought out a revised edition.
This was our “covid book.” It was a project that had been in gestation, but we expected it would take us many years to bring it to fruition. Instead, when we found ourselves near neighbours at a time when the country was in near-lockdown, we realised we would never get a better chance to have a writing retreat together.
So we met every 48 hours on the strict condition that each of us had drafted another section for the book. We observed social distance and all the covid protocols. Everything else that we had expected to be doing was cancelled. For one thing, the project helped to keep us sane. For another, after three months we had a 500-page manuscript.
It is the only attempt so far to provide a comprehensive one-volume history of Christianity in Malawi. In fact, so far as we know there are few countries that have any comparable volume. It has been heavily used by students. Therefore, keeping it in print seemed to be important and by now the first printing has very nearly sold out. We could have done a straight reprint but we thought it better to take the opportunity to do some updating.
Substantially the book is still the same, but we have added a chapter-length postscript to take account of historiographical developments over the past five years and have included some updates, especially to the references. We hope the revised edition will give the book a further lease of life and allow it to continue informing the study of Malawi’s rich and varied church history.
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