Tukutendereza

It gathers ten lives and two themes from the East African Revival — the movement known as the Balokole, the 'saved ones' — which ran for most of a century through six countries after a Ugandan health officer, in 1929, asked an exhausted English doctor what was missing in himself and in the church. Each chapter tells one life, draws out what it teaches, and ends in prayer.

It is the opening word of the beloved revival hymn of the Balokole — 'Tukutendereza Yesu,' meaning 'We praise you, Jesus' — sung across East Africa throughout the movement, often at moments of repentance, reconciliation, and even martyrdom. The book takes it as its title because that song of praise runs through the lives it tells, expressing the heart of the revival.

The Balokole — the 'saved ones' — were the people of the East African Revival, a movement marked by open confession of sin, repentance, reconciliation, and joyful assurance of salvation. Beginning in Uganda and Rwanda around 1929, it spread across six countries over most of a century, transforming churches and lives and producing a fellowship known for its honesty and its singing.

Figures of the revival: the layman who set it off, the doctor who had nothing left, the man who dressed wounds, the deacon who died at twenty-six with one word, the archbishop who waited twenty-seven years, the deacon who sang on his way to be shot, the evangelist who wrote his enemy's name in a book about love, the archbishop who went to the meeting anyway — and the women whose names the records did not keep.

The book follows two threads running through the movement's lives — woven through the twelve stories it tells. Rather than treat the revival only as history, it uses these recurring themes to show what the Balokole movement teaches about the Christian life, drawing each life toward a lesson and a prayer for the reader.

Because the book is honest about the limits of the record. Women were vital to the revival, yet many of their names went unrecorded, and the book deliberately acknowledges this rather than passing over it — a mark of the same restraint that keeps it close to what the sources actually hold, honouring those the histories overlooked.

Each tells one life from the revival, draws out what that life teaches, and ends in prayer. So the book is devotional as well as historical: it does not merely recount the Balokole story but turns each life on the reader, letting the courage, repentance, and faith of these men and women lead into the reader's own prayer.

Both are companion readings on the East African Revival and overlap. A Hidden Fire tells at length the single life of Simeon Nsibambi, the layman who sparked the movement; Tukutendereza widens the lens to ten lives across the whole Balokole movement. Together they give both the spark and the sweep of the revival.