The ‘Billy Graham of Africa’

This August, crowds will gather at Rugarama hill in Kabale, Uganda, to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the East African Revival arriving in Kigezi. “Uganda is what it is to a large extent because of that East African Revival,” Manuel Muranga, professor of language studies at Kabale University, told me: the revival shaped the country’s current leaders and its shared national values. But the revival also continues to have a global impact, with scholars still musing over what exactly happened all those years ago.

In 1935, Anglican missionaries gathered lay readers for a week of Bible training at Rugarama. Guests came from Rwanda, crossing the newly-drawn British-German border. They brought news of a surprising work of the Spirit and publicly confessed their sins. It exploded. “People came just to see what was happening at Rugarama,” Muranga said. “My father came from my village, a young man at that time. He listened and he repented of arson: burning dry grass. He repented of alcohol.”

In the last month and a half, I’ve interviewed men and women who remember the latter years of the revival, which lasted into the 1940’s before settling into the bones of the Church of Uganda. Everyone mentions Festo Kivengere. What was best and boldest about the revival lives in the memory of this man, buried just a short walk up the hill from the revival’s first appearance.

‘A prophet lived among us’

Kivengere has innumerable claims to fame: he helped organize the Pan-African Christian Leadership Assembly, gathering 800 Christian leaders from 47 African nations. He travelled the world in high demand as an evangelist and preacher, joining Billy Graham on stage. “They took Bishop Kivengere to the white world,” Wycliffe told me. “When Kivengere reached there he performed miracles. He even brought the idea that women should be trained and ordained as priests. They hadn’t heard that before!”

Muniini K. Mulera, a Mukiga historian, recounts the meeting where Kivengere insisted that women be ordained – “If you wait for the Church of England you wait until doomsday,” Kivengere told the other bishops, who wanted Britain to set precedent.

In 1983, at Rugarama cathedral, Kivengere ordained Uganda’s first women priests. (Seven years later, the Church of Uganda unanimously accepted women’s ordination.) The first woman he ordained, Reverend Canon Grace Ndyabahika, told me about the ceremony as I wandered Mbarara’s East African Revival Museum with her and her daughter Ruth. “He really loved my husband and I,” Ndyabahika said. Kivengere championed them throughout their ministry, including the time he applied for a scholarship on their behalf to the States and then, when she got cold feet, showed up the night before their departure to do her packing!

Lydia Barore, now in her eighties or nineties, was an outcast of society, illiterate and a new mother when she trailed behind a crowd headed to a church convention. She wore the only dress she had, mended with reeds. “Remember, I didn’t have anything. Immediately when I left the house, the crowd started ululating [and saying]: ‘the ekiragyi [the mad one] has gotten out and she’s going to church!’” Kivengere was the last preacher of the day. He asked, “’In the whole of Kikungiri is there no one who wants to get saved?’ Then I stood up.” At that moment, the reeds holding her dress together broke and the church audience screamed. But Lydia was determined to carry through with her decision. Kivengere told her that she was meant to be a preacher. And she was – she walked to far-off towns, preaching. She gathered a weekly fellowship in her home that continues until today – and produced three bishops and almost fifty pastors. Lydia Barore became a mother of the church.

Forgiveness

“As we walked into the center of the stadium, I was wondering what to say. How do you give the Gospel to doomed men who are probably seething with rage?” It was February 10, 1973. Three men were facing a firing squad for political wrongs against Idi Amin. Kivengere, with two other pastors, was given permission to speak to these men one last time.

“We approached them from behind, and as they turned to look at us, what a sight! Their faces were all alight with an unmistakable glow and radiance.” Before Kivengere could speak, the prisoners told their stories in a rush: in their prison cells they had accepted Christ. They wanted their families to know they were forgiven, and they died joyfully as three thousand people watched.

This story is recounted by Kivengere in his book I Love Idi Amin. Idi Amin, brief and brutal dictator of Uganda, is a name that invokes fear. When his friend, archbishop Janani Luwum, respectfully but firmly challenged him on acting against the basic rights of his citizens and persecuting Christians, Idi Amin shot Luwum through the mouth. He faked a car accident to cover the murder.

Kivengere signed the open letter Luwum penned and was in the group of bishops summoned before the dictator. Ndyabahika told me that, when Christians came to smuggle Kivengere into Rwanda, he said, “But I am the shepherd. I cannot leave my sheep.” His parishioners responded that they’d kidnap him if he didn’t go willingly. For the years he was exiled, he couldn’t communicate with anyone at home. To do so would have been to endanger their lives.

“The Holy Spirit showed me that I was getting hard in my spirit, and that my hardness and bitterness towards those who were persecuting us could only bring spiritual loss,” Kivengere wrote during that time. “We owe [Idi Amin] the debt of love for he is one of those for whom Christ shed his precious blood. As long as he is still alive, he is still redeemable. Pray for him, that in the end he may see a new way of life, rather than a way of death.”

Legacy

Some moments of the revival still can’t be explained. But it’s clear that something happened – not all of once and not in one place, but across an entire region. Beyond anyone’s expectations, the revival broke down dividing walls. It brought together Baganda and Bakiga (Baganda were brought into this region as agents on behalf of the British and often abused that power). It brought together Bakiga and Banyarwanda (Rwandan clans and kingdoms had invaded this region for three hundred years before the colonial powers took over and more recently, Uganda has resisted Rwandan refugees). And between Africans and Europeans: the revival started, after all, when Semioni Nsibambi (Ugandan) and Joe Church (British) repented to each other. “Nsibambi told him, ‘We fear you people because you’re white and we think you despise us’ and Joe told him, ‘We also fear you because we don’t know what you’re like.’” Muranga recounted to me. “They wept tears of repentance to each other and said, this is true Christianity.”

Not all missionaries were drawn into this new future; not all Bakiga were compelled by the movement; not all balokole were ready to wait on the church’s slow acceptance of them; not everyone benefiting from classism and tribalism wanted it upended. It’s easy to point to the mess.

But that makes Kivengere’s message of forgiveness and reconciliation even more important. When Idi Amin was overthrown in 1979, Kivengere immediately returned (to overjoyed crowds on the streets, Ndyabahika told me with a smile). He hadn’t changed: he confronted the new ruler, Obote, for his abuses of power. And in 1982, he organized help for thousands of recently arrived Rwandan refugees who were, at the time, politically unwelcome in Uganda.

Kivengere died in 1988 of leukemia. The revival that shaped him is now 90 years old. Some of the elders I’ve spoken to voiced the prayer: let revival come again. In every generation, it has to be reborn.