The two volumes of Jean and John Comaroff’s Of Revelation and Revolution (RR) are a tour de force, and raise major questions about the nature of consciousness and the impact of modernity over the past two centuries…I read both volumes of RR with a rare sense of exhilaration. The scope and span are extraordinary, as is their ability to match the truly global sweep of their imagination with attention to detail and the ability to tell a spellbinding but pointed story Given its span and sophistication, the Comaroffs’ work stands as a challenge to historians of southern Africa, wherever our interest falls. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more central task for understanding the world we live in than an exploration of the ways in which cultures and consciousness have been reconfigured and reconstructed in their encounter with ‘mod- ernity’, however it is construed…