Christianity came late to Uganda compared with many other parts of Africa. Missionaries first arrived at the court of Kabaka Muteesa in 1877; almost a century after the missionary impetus from Europe had begun. And yet within 25 years, Uganda had become one of the most successful mission fields in the whole of Africa. What were the causes of this phenomenal success?
Origins of the East African Revival Fellowship
Widely called the Balokole (“saved ones”) this evangelical revival was arguably the most famous and influential African spiritual renewal movement of the twentieth century. The movement began in 1929-30 when an English missionary doctor Joe Church, sat physically and spiritually exhausted with an African friend, Simeoni Nsibambi, a government official and in many ways the father of the whole revival movement.
A terrible famine had swept Rwanda and thousands had died. They together with many others, lamented the tragedy of a lukewarm, nominal Christian church that seemed as powerless to energize its own members as it was to evangelize the untouched tribes beyond Lake Muhasi.
Despite the Pilkington Revival which was named after another well-known missionary to Uganda who witnessed an earlier revival among Baganda in the late 1890s, George Pilkington, and indeed partly because of the very success of that Revival in giving the impetus for the wide diffusion of the Gospel, Anglican Christianity had grown in terms of numbers and prestige, but at the expense of real faith and genuine commitment to a distinctive Christian life.
But something stirred in the doctor’s heart as they sat under a tree on Namirembe Hill while on holiday in Kampala. They spent three days reading the Bible together. They also began to seek “the filling of the Spirit and the Victorious Life,” and after these days of prayer and Bible study, both of them experienced a sense of the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. Joe Church recalled later this unforgettable moment, which is now widely considered to mark the beginning of the revival in East Africa:
I have often referred to this time in my preaching in later years as the time that God in His sovereign grace met with me and brought me to the end of myself and thought fit to give me a share of the power of Pentecost. There was nothing very spectacular, nothing ecstatic… The only special gift is the experience of the transforming vision, of the Risen Jesus Himself.
Patricia St. John tells the story in Breath of Life:
He prayed passionately for the scattering of the mists of superstition and sin, and the shining forth of the light of the Gospel, and the site of the beautiful spreading acacia tree seemed like holy ground to be claimed for God.’ Soon others realized that their lives had changed. Their fervour spread; the hills and valleys echoed to gospel hymns. Whole communities were told the New Testament message by small groups of believers. Many people saw visions and came crying to the churches. Converts returned stolen property and forgot old feuds.
Other serious-minded Baganda, as much as missionaries, were disturbed by the problems of the Church. They soon discovered that though they were busy having Bible Studies, holding prayer meetings and attending church services, the things they were doing were not the central message of Christ’s teaching. They had to ask themselves, did Jesus die for our meetings or was it something else?
They found that Jesus had given the instruction that, before they enjoyed their devotional life, they were to be united with their brother or sister whom they might have wronged during the day. It was not for their devotions Christ died. What He had paid the price for was their relationship with God and one another.
Simeoni Nsibambi and other Revivalists
Simeoni Nsibambi was a member of the Protestant elite whose dominant position in Kiganda society had been assured by the 1900 Agreement. The son of an important chief, the Ssenkanzi of Busiro, he went to the top Church Missionary Schools of Mengo and Budo and, after military service during the First World War, he became a clerk in the Kabaka’s administration.
In the early 1920s, Nsibambi’s life had been set on a new course by a significant religious experience. Disappointed that he had not got a scholarship to study abroad, he was assured in a vision from God that such earthly things were not the most important things in life; rather to receive eternal salvation was the pearl of great price.
In the light of this experience, Nsibambi began to devote himself increasingly to preaching this message of repentance and salvation. He abandoned his job to become a full-time (self-appointed) preacher who became a familiar figure dressed in a Kanzu (a long white cotton or linen robe worn by East African men) and sandals addressing the worshippers outside Namirembe cathedral (his home was nearby).
One disciple was Nsibambi’s own younger brother, Blasio Kigozi. Converted in his youth by Nsibambi, Kigozi expressed a burning desire to follow in the footsteps of the pioneer Muganda evangelist, Apolo Kivebulaya. He was referred to as the “apostle to the pygmies” for his work among the Bambuti people of the Ituri forest in eastern Congo. Apolo is considered the principal pioneer of the Anglican Church in the Belgian Congo. He trained as a school master at Mukono (the college at that time combined a teacher training section with theological training).
After graduating in 1929 he went out to Gahini to take charge of the school network there. He soon got a reputation as an uncompromising preacher of the Gospel, denouncing sin wherever he found it. The chief medical assistant at Gahini was a Muhima called Yosiya Kinuka, from the pastoralists of Ankole in western Uganda. He had at first somewhat negative feelings towards this stern, unbending, preacher, but by 1931 he had been converted. He became a strong ally of Blasio in his forceful evangelism. In 1932 Blasio himself returned to Bishop Tucker College, Mukono, for a special ordination course in English. He came back to Gahini as a deacon.
Kigozi’s, passionate intensity, had in no way diminished by his becoming a clergyman. His renewed zeal irritated those who resisted the implications of his message, especially among the relatively sophisticated Ugandans working at the hospital or in the schools at Gahini. But it was among this group that the first breakthrough occurred, at a convention organized during Christmas and New Year 1933/4. As Kigozi preached; many repented.
The fires of revival set a light within the mission station, began to reach out to the hill communities of Batutsi pastoralists around. The revivalists were named Abaka (meaning “those on fire” in Kinyarwanda). Many of the features particularly associated with the revival manifested in these early days were: the emphasis on repentance through open confession, the breaking down of barriers of race, tribe or clan, the use of “teams” of evangelists, and the awareness of a new equality between Europeans and Africans.
In 1935 Kigozi, Kinuka and Joe Church led a team to a convention in Kabale. Nsibambi joined them from Kampala. Kabale had been evangelized by the Ruanda Mission of CMS, but it was in the Kigezi district of South West Uganda during the 1935 Convention that marked the first large-scale impact of the Revival on Uganda. Lawrence Barham, a clergyman of the Ruanda Mission in Kabale, and an enthusiastic supporter of the Revival described the convention in these terms:
Confession of sin, restitutions, apologies followed; many had dreams, sometimes receiving strong impressions to read certain verses of the Bible which led them to put away some sin, beer drinking for example. Preaching bands have gone out all through the district and very many are stirred. There is naturally a good deal of opposition and a certain amount of persecution.
Fired by the success of this convention in September 1935, Kigozi journeyed at the end of the year to Kampala to attend the Synod of the Native Anglican Church. Though still a deacon he made a passionate speech urging the “sleeping” Church in Uganda to shake off its apathy and “Awake”-Zukuka!
A few days later he suddenly and unexpectedly died of relapsing fever. The word Zukuka was engraved on his tombstone in the grounds of Namirembe Cathedral. Naturally, his death was a great shock and his speech to the Synod came to be regarded as prophetic; Kigozi was the John the Baptist of the Revival.
When Kigozi died, William Nagenda who was a brother-law of both Nsibambi and the late Kigozi inherited the mantle of Kigozi as the leader of the revival at Gahini. Nagenda, like Nsibambi, came from a high-status family in Buganda. Nagenda went to Budo and became a clerk in the Protectorate government at Entebbe. Dismissed for financial irregularities, he underwent a moral crisis and, under Nsibambi’s influence was converted in 1936.
He went off to work at Gahini, where he soon became an indispensable companion to Joe Church on his evangelistic safaris, traveling not only around Uganda but also as far as Nairobi and southern Sudan. In a sense, the meeting of Joe Church and Nsibambi was “a merging of two streams”—one from Pilkington’s revival tradition in Uganda in the late-1890s and the other from a number of powerful revivals in Britain, starting with John Wesley and George Whitefield in the eighteenth century, and followed later by the Keswick movement in the nineteenth century.
This convergence of European and African spiritual renewal traditions illustrates the most significant legacy Church left —his remarkable partnership in the revival movement with African indigenous leaders such as Nsibambi, Blasio Kigozi, and William Nagenda.
It Was a Revival of Unity
The East African Revival would not have been possible without the contribution of these African leaders. It should be noted that Joe Church never claimed to be the leader of the revival, but rather considered himself as one of the co-workers under the leadership of the Holy Spirit. He practiced the team ministry approach and firmly believed in the radical equality of all—black and white, men and women—as sinners saved by the grace of Christ.
Church emphasized unity, reconciliation, and cooperation not only between revivalists and anti-revivalists, but also between Europeans and Africans, between men and women, and between various ethnic groups. Especially in colonial Kenya, where distrust and hatred between blacks and whites was a serious issue, Church courageously said:
We insisted on African and European leaders sitting with us and joining in the planning. Church wrote in Quest for the Highest, ‘I stress this because I believe here lies the secret of blessing and revival in Kenya: mistrust between European and African must be broken.
To curious visitors and inquirers of the East African Revival, Joe Church strongly stressed the absolute necessity of being “born again” by the transformative saving power of Christ Jesus. Church later recalled, “We were told that people wanted to hear news of the Revival in East Africa, but we have to tell them, as we often do, there is such a danger of people trying to copy it, instead of going back to Jesus.”
Over and over again, they emphasized the simplicity of the walk with Jesus, and the “oneness” there is in Him. Neville Langford-Smith, Bishop of Nakuru, Kenya, rightly noted,
Revival as it has come to East Africa is really a return to the simplicity of apostolic faith in a time of apostasy….There is nothing new in the doctrine of revival.
The Emphasis was the Cross
Whereas the overriding theme of various revival meetings was the message of sin, repentance and forgiveness and the second blessing experience beyond initial conversion, the East African Revival focused more on the initial conversion as “an overwhelming experience of brokenness at the cross.
Joe Church and his fellow evangelists were said to preach only Christ and Him crucified. Even in the overwhelming presence of the Holy Spirit, they firmly believed that “the Holy Spirit glorifies Jesus and points us to the Blood of Jesus for cleansing when we may have grieved Him along the way.
The emphasis on the real experience of the saving power of Christ and daily submission to him rather than an emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as speaking in tongues and supernatural healing.
This can also be seen in the terms that the revivalists typically used: “born again,” “cleansed in the blood of Jesus,” and “walking in the light together.” The most famous, triumphant revival hymn—Tukutendereza Yesu (“We Praise You Jesus”)—captures the essence of the movement, that is, salvation through being washed in the blood of Jesus.
Tukutendereza Yesu” was sung at every revival meeting and became the best-known hymn of the Balokole Revival. The lyric is as follows:
Tukutendereza Yesu (“We praise you Jesus”), Yesu Omwana gw’endiga (“Jesus Lamb of God”), Omusaigwo gunaziza (“Your blood cleanses me”), Nkwebaza, Omulokozi (“I praise you, Savior”).
This Luganda hymn illustrates the widespread unifying influence of the revival for those who shared a common spiritual experience all over East Africa—Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, and Tanzania. All Christian experience after being saved in this revival was a continual returning to the Cross in brokenness, repentance, confession, walking in the light and practicing true Koinonia (fellowship).
The effects of this revival were astonishing as this movement profoundly changed many areas of African thought and social organizations, as we shall see in Part 2 of this remarkable story of the East African Revival Fellowship.
