The East African Revival

In the late 1920s the Church Missionary Society ran a string of stations across Rwanda, Uganda, and Kenya, and the men who worked them were discouraged. Churches were full of people who had been baptized without being changed. At Gahini in eastern Rwanda a young English doctor named Joe Church ran a hospital through the famine of 1928–29, burying more patients than he saved, and privately wondered whether any of it was worth doing.

In September 1929 Church went up to Kampala for a rest and met a Ugandan he had seen before. Simeoni Nsibambi was a government health officer, a Muganda of some standing, and he was hungry in exactly the way Church was hungry. By Church's own account they met near Namirembe Cathedral and spent the next several days going through the Scriptures on the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and neither man was the same afterward. Nsibambi soon gave up his post to devote himself to prayer and to pressing this on everyone he met.

Nothing happened for years. Back at Gahini, Church worked alongside a hospital dresser named Yosiya Kinuka, and the two of them fell out badly; Kinuka was converted in 1931 in the middle of that quarrel, and the reconciliation between an African orderly and a European doctor turned out to be the pattern for everything that followed. Through 1933 to 1936 the stations at Gahini and Kabale began to break — meetings that ran long, confession that spread, and conventions that drew people in from miles out.

What marked it was not tongues or healing but light. People stood up and named their sins out loud, specifically, in small fellowship groups and then in front of whole congregations: theft, adultery, witchcraft, bribes, hatred of another tribe, hatred of the missionaries. Then they went and made it right — property carried back, debts paid, enemies visited. They called it walking in the light with one another, straight out of 1 John 1:7, and they did it as a daily practice rather than a crisis.

They sang one chorus everywhere, in Luganda, to a tune the mission hymnbooks had already taught them: Tukutendereza Yesu — "We praise You, Jesus; Jesus, the Lamb; Your blood cleanses me; I thank You, Savior." It became the movement's signal. Two strangers on a road could identify each other by it, and for fifty years across five countries it opened and closed every meeting.

Names attached themselves. In Luganda the saved ones were balokole; in Kinyarwanda the burning ones were abaka. Leadership was African from early on — Nsibambi, Kinuka, William Nagenda, Festo Kivengere, Blasio Kigozi — and the teams travelled, two and three together, preaching in villages, schools, and other missions. From Rwanda and Uganda it went into Kenya by about 1937 and on into Tanganyika, Burundi, and the southern Sudan, and it kept going in waves for decades rather than months, which is not how revivals usually behave.

It was not tidy and it was not always kind. Some teams turned confession into spectacle, pressing people for the details of sexual sin in public. Some balokole treated Christians who had not had their experience as unconverted, and split congregations doing it. Mission authorities pushed back hard: in 1941 a group of revivalist students at Bishop Tucker College in Mukono, Uganda were expelled over their early-morning fellowship meetings and their refusal to drop them, and William Nagenda resigned from the staff in solidarity. The remarkable thing is what did not happen next — they did not start a rival denomination. They stayed inside the Anglican Church and eventually became its mainstream.

The staying power showed when the cost came due. During the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya in the 1950s, Kikuyu balokole refused to take the oath because they had already sworn to walk in the light, and a number of them were killed for refusing. Under Idi Amin in Uganda, Archbishop Janani Luwum — a son of this movement — was murdered in February 1977 after confronting the regime, and Bishop Festo Kivengere fled the country and wrote a book titled I Love Idi Amin. A movement built on confessing your own sin turns out to produce people who are very hard to intimidate.

The hardest sentence belongs here. The revival began in Rwanda, and in 1994 Rwanda — one of the most heavily Christianized countries in Africa — fell into a genocide in which churches were among the killing places and some church leaders were complicit. Individual balokole sheltered neighbors at the cost of their own lives, and survivors' accounts name them. But no honest telling of this revival can stop at 1977. Sixty years of walking in the light did not inoculate a nation, and that is a warning the page leaves standing rather than explains away.

What survives is the fellowship meeting itself. Small groups still gather across East Africa on the same pattern — Scripture, testimony, confession, the chorus — and the Anglican churches of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania are shaped by it from the inside. It never had a headquarters, a magazine, or a founder's name on the door. It had a verse about light and a song about blood, and it lasted longer than almost anything else in this book.