Blasio Kigozi — Zukula! Awake!

Who he was

Blasio Kigozi (1909–1936) was Simeon Nsibambi's younger brother. His brother led him into a living faith; he was ordained deacon in the Anglican Church of Uganda and posted south to Gahini in Rwanda, where he joined Joe Church and Yosiya Kinuka.

He was, by every account, a burning man. He prayed for the mission with an intensity people remembered for decades. He preached for conviction rather than assent. He and Kinuka formed one of the revival's first teams, and the awakening that ran through Gahini in the mid-1930s ran substantially through him.

In January 1936 he was called back to Uganda to put the case for revival before the synod of the church in Kampala. He carried one word: Zukula. Awake.

He delivered it. He had contracted tick fever on the journey. He died on 26 January 1936, aged twenty-six.

His brother buried him. The funeral was on Cathedral Hill at Namirembe and the crowd was large, and the word he had carried to the synod was cut into his headstone, where it still is.

The word he carried

Zukula is not a gentle word. It is not an invitation to consider, or a proposal for a committee to examine. It is what you say to someone who is asleep while something is happening.

He said it to a synod — to the assembled, ordained, respectable leadership of a church that was by then two generations old, well organised, and spiritually cold in exactly the way second-generation churches become. That church did not obviously want waking. Kigozi was a deacon in his twenties from a mission station in another country.

And then he died, immediately, before anything could be decided.

The histories are unanimous that his death did more than his speech. A plea can be received politely and filed. A plea from a young man who is dead within days of making it cannot. The synod that might have nodded at Kigozi's message instead had to bury him, and the Ugandan church dates a great deal of what followed from that week.

What he teaches us

Say the one word. Kigozi had a single message and he did not decorate it. Most of us, given one chance at a room like that, would have hedged, contextualised and softened until nothing was left that anyone had to answer. He said: wake up.

Urgency is not rudeness. There is a way of being so careful of people's feelings that we never tell them anything true. He was not cruel and there is no record of him being contemptuous. He was simply not willing to pretend the situation was fine.

You do not need a long life to be used. He was dead before thirty, after a ministry of a very few years, having written nothing. Almost a century later a movement across six countries traces part of its origin to a word he said once.

God is not obliged to let you see the result. This is the hard one. Kigozi did not live to see the revival that his death helped release. He got the obedience and not the outcome. That is a more common arrangement than our stories usually admit.

The text underneath it

Kigozi's one word has a New Testament twin: “Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light” (Ephesians 5:14).

It is worth noticing who that is addressed to. Not the pagan world outside; Paul is writing to a church. The people who need waking are already inside the building, already believing the right things, already attending. That is exactly the audience Kigozi had at the Kampala synod, and it is a harder audience than an unbelieving one, because they can agree with everything you say without anything happening.

The revival's whole theory of its own existence sits in that verse. It never thought of itself as bringing the gospel to people who had not heard it. It thought of itself as waking people who had.

A prayer

Lord, I have softened what You gave me to say until it could not wake anybody. Give me one clear word and the nerve to say it plainly, to the people who least want to hear it. And if I never see what comes of it, let that be enough. Zukula — and begin with me. Amen.