Biographies
8 authors
The brethren of the East African Revival from Uganda and Rwanda — health officers, schoolmasters, hospital workers, evangelists and bishops. Several of them sealed their testimony with their lives.
Simeon Nsibambi (1897–1978) was an educated, prosperous Muganda health officer in Kampala whose spiritual hunger drove a pivotal September 1929 meeting with the missionary doctor Joe Church at Namirembe. Their weekend of Bible study and prayer over the fullness of the Spirit helped ignite the East African Revival (the Balokole, “saved ones”).
Erica Sabiti (1903–1988) was the first African Archbishop of the Church of Uganda. Ordained in 1933, he met the balokole of the East African Revival in 1939 while travelling with his bishop in Rwanda and Burundi, and became one of the movement's leaders. His election as archbishop in 1966 was opposed on ethnic grounds and the division was healed only when the province's nine diocesan bishops confessed their own part in it and united behind him.
Yosiya Kinuka (c.1905–1981) was a hospital anaesthetist at Gahini in Rwanda who first led the medical staff’s resistance to Dr Joe Church, then — sent to Simeoni Nsibambi in 1931 — returned “an absolutely changed life” and became one of the earliest African leaders of the East African Revival. With Blasio Kigozi he formed the first Bible team around Gahini and stood at the heart of the 1933 convention often named as the Revival’s beginning.
Blasio Kigozi (c.1909–1936) was a Ugandan schoolmaster and evangelist, younger brother of the revival co-founder Simeoni Nsibambi, who preached repentance across the villages around Gahini and died of tick fever in January 1936 while carrying his “Zukuka” (“Awake”) call to the Church of Uganda synod. Remembered as the “John the Baptist of the East African Revival,” he was buried at Namirembe beneath a tombstone bearing the single word “Zukuka.”
William Nagenda (c.1912–1973) was a Ugandan lay evangelist and the most prominent preacher of the East African Revival. Expelled from theological college in 1941, he chose lifelong lay evangelism over ordination, carrying the revival’s message of brokenness at the Cross across Europe, the Americas, India and East Africa.
Festo Kivengere (1919–1988) was a Ugandan Anglican bishop and evangelist of the East African Revival, often called “the Billy Graham of Africa.” Converted from nominal faith during the 1941 revival, he became Bishop of Kigezi in 1972 and a leader of African Evangelistic Enterprise. After Archbishop Janani Luwum's murder in 1977 he fled Amin's Uganda over the mountains into Rwanda, then wrote the celebrated book I Love Idi Amin, a testimony to forgiving the tyrant who had driven him into exile.
Janani Luwum (c.1922–1977) rose from a herdsboy in northern Uganda to Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire. Converted in the East African Revival in 1948, he preached fearlessly and, after leading the bishops’ protest against Idi Amin’s killings, was murdered on 17 February 1977. He is honoured as one of the ten twentieth-century martyrs whose statues stand over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey.
Yona Kanamuzeyi (died 1964) was a Rwandan Anglican deacon of the East African Revival who sheltered Tutsi refugees during the violence of the early 1960s. Arrested by soldiers on the night of 23 January 1964 and led away to be shot, he wrote “We are going to heaven” in his diary and sang a hymn as he walked to his death; his name was later inscribed in the roll of modern martyrs at St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
The writers on this page come from Uganda and Rwanda, the two countries where the East African Revival began.
Yona Kanamuzeyi was a Rwandan Anglican deacon of the revival who was killed in 1964; the accounts agree that he sang as he was led out to be shot.
Yes. Uganda has a page of its own, and this page gathers its writers together with those from Rwanda.