Yosiya Kinuka — The Man Who Dressed Wounds

Who he was

Yosiya Kinuka (1905–1981) was a Muhima, from the cattle-keeping people of Ankole in south-western Uganda, and he worked at the mission hospital at Gahini in Rwanda as a dresser — the man who cleaned and bound wounds. In the hierarchy of a colonial mission station that is close to the bottom of the paid staff.

He is one of the two or three people without whom the East African Revival does not happen, and he is the one most likely to be left out of the telling.

When the thing Joe Church had received at Namirembe reached Gahini, it did not stay among the Europeans. It went through the hospital staff, and Kinuka was at the centre of it. He and Blasio Kigozi formed one of the movement's first evangelistic teams. In 1947 he and William Nagenda travelled to Switzerland and Britain — the first of many journeys that would take African revivalists to preach in Europe, at a time when the traffic was assumed to run the other way.

The man from the bottom of the staff list

Two things about Kinuka are worth pressing.

The first is the reconciliation. The early Gahini story is not a story of harmony. There was real friction between the African hospital staff and the European missionaries — over authority, over money, over respect — and Kinuka was in the middle of it. What the revival did there was not to spiritualise that conflict away but to force it into the open and require both sides to confess. The unity that came out of Gahini was expensive, and it was made between people who had been genuinely at odds.

The second is his rank. He was not a pastor. He was hospital staff, from a pastoralist people, in a country not his own, working under missionaries in a colonial system that had a clear view about who taught whom. The revival handed him a platform that structure would never have given him — and then Europe asked him to come and preach.

That inversion is not incidental to the movement. It is the movement. A thing that begins with confession has no natural way of preserving rank, because everyone's confession sounds the same.

What he teaches us

The revival went where the hierarchy was thinnest. It did not arrive through the bishops. It arrived through a health officer, a doctor at the end of himself, and a man who dressed wounds. If you are waiting for renewal to be handed down to you by someone senior, you may be watching the wrong door.

Unity that costs nothing is not unity. Gahini's reconciliation was between people with a real grievance, and it required naming the grievance. Most of what we call unity is an agreement not to mention things. That is peace-keeping, and it is not the same.

Your work is not beneath your calling. Kinuka went on dressing wounds. The hospital was not a holding pattern until ministry started; it was where the thing happened, among the people he already worked beside.

Be ready to be sent somewhere absurd. A dresser from Ankole preaching in Switzerland in 1947 is, by every assumption of that moment, the wrong direction of travel. He went.

The text underneath it

The revival's favourite proof that rank had been abolished was not an argument; it was the cross itself, and the place they went for it was Galatians 3:28 — neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Colonial East Africa had every one of those partitions and several more: European and African, missionary and staff, Muganda and Muhima, educated and not. The revival did not abolish them by argument. It abolished them by putting everyone in the same posture. A confession from a dresser and a confession from a doctor are the same shape, and once a room has heard both there is no dignified way to reassemble the hierarchy.

Kinuka's Switzerland is the proof. The direction of travel had reversed because the seating had already reversed at Gahini.

A prayer

Lord, I measure myself by rank more than I admit, and I keep my grievances where they cannot be examined. Give me the courage of the man who confessed to the people he resented, and let the work of my hands be the place You meet me rather than the thing delaying me. Amen.