Simeon Nsibambi — The Man Who Set Others Alight

Who he was

Simeon Nsibambi (1897–1978) was a public health officer in Kampala — a sanitation man in the capital of a kingdom that had become Christian at extraordinary speed a generation before he was born. He was married to Eva Bakaluba, they would have twelve children, and by his early thirties he had everything Buganda's new elite thought worth having.

In September 1929 he put a question to a visiting English doctor, and the answer changed his life. That story — his hunger, his resignation, his long illness — is told at length elsewhere in this library.

This chapter is about the other half of him: not what happened to Nsibambi, but what happened through him. Because the striking thing about this man is not that he was converted. It is how quickly he stopped being the only one.

The man who set other people on fire

Within a very short time of that weekend, Nsibambi was no longer a solitary seeker. There was a group around him in Kampala known as the Abaka — the men of fire. They had come into the same experience and would not be quiet about it.

He worked outward through the people nearest him first. He led his own younger brother, Blasio Kigozi, into a living faith; Kigozi went south to Gahini, became one of the movement's first evangelists, and died in 1936 carrying its message to the church's synod. Joe Church, the doctor Nsibambi had cornered, went back to Rwanda changed, and what he carried met Yosiya Kinuka there. Within a decade the thing had teams, and the teams had a method, and the method was the one Nsibambi had used on Church: ask the question that cannot be answered politely.

He is called a father of the revival, and the word is exact in a way that "leader" would not be. He did not run it. There is no organisation he founded, no office he held in it, no body of teaching he wrote. He had children in the faith, and they had children, and that is the whole of his method.

What he teaches us

Start with the person in front of you. Nsibambi's evangelism had no strategy in it at all. He asked his brother. He asked a tired stranger on a hillside. He asked the man at the gate and, notoriously, another man's gardener. Every one of those was simply whoever was there. The revival's reach came from stacking that up, not from planning it.

Do not wait to be qualified. He was a layman. He was not ordained, had no theological training, and held no position in the church at all. When he resigned his government post he had less standing, not more. Everything he did, he did as an ordinary member of a congregation who had decided the thing was true.

Be willing to be embarrassing. His neighbours concluded he had gone mad. A missionary complained about him in so many words. He was a respected man in a society that valued respectability, and he traded it. Nothing in his story works if you remove that trade.

Give the fire away and let it go. This is the hardest, and it is where Nsibambi is most unusual. He set something in motion and then had almost no control over what it became. Others took it to Rwanda, to Kenya, to Europe. Others got the platforms and the titles and, later, the martyrdoms. From 1941 he was too ill to leave his house and watched almost none of it. He does not appear to have minded.

The question, once more

It is worth ending where he began, because the question he asked Joe Church is the most portable thing he left.

Not what should I do, which asks for a task. Not why is the church like this, which puts the fault at a comfortable distance. He asked: what is missing — in me, and in us? He named himself first, he asked a stranger, and he asked it out loud where it could not be taken back.

Every person in the rest of this book is downstream of that sentence.

The text underneath it

The revival's people went back again and again to 1 John 1, and Nsibambi's life is the passage in miniature.

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” Notice the order, because the balokole noticed it. Walking in the light comes first. Fellowship is not something you arrange and then maintain by being polite; it is what happens when two people are both in the open. And the cleansing is in the same sentence as the fellowship — you do not get one without the other.

That is why Nsibambi's Christianity was so relentlessly interpersonal. He did not go away to be holy. He went to his brother, to a stranger on a hill, to the man at the gate. A faith organised around walking in the light has to be conducted in front of other people, because there is no other place to walk.

A prayer

Father, make me the kind of person other people catch something from. Not a leader — a carrier. Give me one honest question for the person in front of me today, and the willingness to be thought strange for asking it. And when what You start runs on past me, let me be glad. Amen.