BOOK REVIEW Niels Kastfelt. Religion and Politics in Nigeria: A Study in Middle Belt Christianity. London: British Academic Press, 1994. xii + 204 pp. $59.50. Cloth. ISBN: 1850437882. In Religion and Politics in Nigeria: A Study in Middle Belt Christianity, Niels Kastfelt engages the religious and identity history of the people of Adamawa state, focusing on the emergence of Christianity in the Adamawa region, along with its evolution and interactions between colonialists, missionaries, indigenous Muslims, national politics, and the indigenous cultures of the people that were unfamiliar to the missionaries (11). Kastfelt situates the religious history of the Adamawa people in the Middle Belt, as this is where most of them continue to see themselves (11). The Middle Belt culture, people, and history are very peculiar, compared to Hausa Fulani in the North, Yoruba in the Southwest, Igbo in the Southeast, and other ethnic groups in the South- South. The Middle Belt people are often confused with the Hausa Fulani ethnic group in the North for two reasons (75). First, except for the upper Middle Belt, many ethnic groups of the Bauchi Plateau, Southern Kaduna, Niger Nasarawa, and Abuja speak Hausa today. In fact, in the post-missionary period, there were more Hausa-speaking churches in those areas than other ethnic language churches. Second, because of Nigeria’s political boundary division following independence, the Middle Belt was forcefully merged with the North with regard to geographical location, against the people’s wishes. The merging of territories following independence has put Nigeria in a state of limbo regarding ethnic, cultural, religious, and political identities, as non-Hausa Fulani continue to disassociate themselves from the North, which they consider to be a Muslim-dominated region. From the very beginning of this book, Kastfelt describes the Adamawa people and ethnic groups before the region became divided, with Taraba and some parts of Gombe in what used to be known as the former Gongola. “In 1991 Gongola State was divided into Adamawa State and Taraba State” (11). Kastfelt notes that in the early 1800s, the Adamawa region of the Middle Belt was dominated by non-Hausa Fulani ethnic groups and a few nomadic Fulani people. At the start of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio’s jihad, the Fulani warriors, a different group of Fulani, raided many parts of Adamawa, forced people to convert to Islam, and established an Islamic Caliphate (12–13). With the annexation of northern © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the African Studies Association. 1 https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2023.32 Published online by Cambridge University Press