Hastings sets out to fuse five centuries of scattered regional scholarship into one continuous account of Christianity inside black Africa, deliberately setting aside the Mediterranean coast and the settler churches of the south. The story runs from fifteenth century Ethiopia, where the emperor Zara Ya'iqob used a church council to tie monastic authority to the crown, through Kongolese Catholicism under Afonso I and the Capuchin missions, into Protestant and Catholic expansion in the nineteenth century and the mass conversions and prophet movements of the colonial decades. Two claims carry the book. African kings, catechists, evangelists and prophets shaped these churches at least as much as European missionaries did, and the Atlantic slave trade, which drew a wildly disproportionate share of its captives from Kongo and Angola, ruined the very societies early Catholic missions had courted. Ethiopic monastic texts, Portuguese and papal records and mission archives supply the evidence.