Alexander Bedward, the Prophet of August Town: Race, Religion and Colonialism (University of the West Indies Press), by historian Dave St. Aubyn Gosse, is a study of a historical figure once considered a joke, now being recognised as an important Black nationalist thinker. The Jamaican Revivalist preacher Alexander Bedward, born in 1848, won an islandwide following for his teachings challenging racist colonial laws and conventions. He spent the last decade of his life in a mental asylum, but Gosse argues that the portrayal of Bedward as a comic eccentric was part of a deliberate colonial policy to suppress his influence and his ideas about Black self-sufficiency, which make him an important precursor to Marcus Garvey.