ABSTRACT
It would be common sense in English to attach the label ‘charismatic’ to the four local leaders whose stories we will tell. It makes particularly good sense because they mix religious and political leadership in their lives. But we have to reckon with the Eurocentric load carried by the word ‘charisma’, though translated into several non-European languages, and to check how it has had to be changed in the study of non-European religious and political leadership.
