Religion and Politics in the East African Revival

The East African revival in history

Many Ugandan revivalists today will speak about the East African Revival as a singular movement that has existed and persisted since the early to mid 1930s, when it first emerged among Anglican Christians in southwestern Uganda and northern Rwanda. While one can trace the movement’s progression through history, it is also apparent that the movement has been shaped by that history as well.

The early revival movement was a dynamic and restless force. Ugandan converts insisted upon remaining in the native Anglican Church of Uganda, even while challenging it to the brink of rupture in the 1940s. The revival’s contentious first decade reflected the realities of a socially and politically tumultuous era leading up to Uganda’s political independence in 1962. It was an era in which many East African societies, and particularly those around Lake Victoria, were experiencing the acute ramifications of colonial presence: migration expanded towns and cities and strained family life, mission schools trained a new elite for professional colonial employment, and new religious ideas and identities were carried by Western missionaries and African converts throughout the region. ³

Nevertheless, by the 1950s, the revival seemed to be settling into broader Ugandan society. There were fewer accounts of revivalists being arrested for “disturbances” (compared with events of the late 1930s and early 1940s), and a number of revivalists could be counted among the Ugandan Anglican clergy. While Erica Sabiti, a revivalist, proved to be a controversial choice for archbishop in the early years of independence, a majority of subsequent Ugandan Anglican archbishops have been formed by the spiritual practices of revival fellowships. Ugandan revivalists today also remember these fellowships as being a persistent, if minority and necessarily insular, form of Christian witness within Uganda during the uncertain and brutal Amin and Obote regimes. ⁴

Since the 1980s, the revival has become a more diffuse movement because of two primary factors. First, the relatively high number of priests and bishops (compared with the small number of Anglican parishioners) who identified as Balokole has served to incorporate revivalists’ sensibilities into Ugandan Anglicanism more widely. Second, Pentecostal Christianity, which has grown significantly within Uganda over the last thirty years, has borrowed revivalists’ language, and many Ugandan Pentecostals refer to themselves as Balokole. This muddled use of nomenclature is a frequent source of consternation to older Anglican revivalists, who often view Pentecostals as usurping the deeper revival tradition, which extends back to the 1930s. Despite these tensions created by an increasingly competitive religious marketplace, Anglican revivalists have also found themselves in the favor of President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement party, both of whom have remained in power since 1986. ⁵

While the remainder of my analysis focuses upon the late colonial era, this brief overview is intended to show that the revival movement has been shaped by a wide variety of political and social contexts, as well as other religious movements, since its emergence in the late colonial era.

The East African revival as a true work of the Holy Spirit

In the early 1930s Harold Guillebaud, an evangelical Anglican missionary stationed in northern Rwanda, wrote a letter for Ruanda Notes, his mission’s journal, in which he commented: “My wife and I were struck by the Holy Spirit’s working. . . . One could see faces really shining with the joy of the Lord, . . . lives really changed by the Holy Spirit’s power.” ⁶ This movement of the Holy Spirit seemed to continue, and five years later, Joe Church, an evangelical Anglican medical missionary, could write: “A deep movement began of individual conviction and repentance, and out in the two hundred and fifty out-schools it has become in places a mass movement.” ⁷

The East African Revival, as this movement came to be known, is frequently traced to these early manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s work in northern Rwanda and southern Uganda in the early and mid 1930s. ⁸ Its adherents believed that sin pervaded colonial mission churches, that this sin needed to be confessed publicly and specifically in order to be forgiven, and that those who had confessed ought to join intimate, regular fellowship meetings in addition to Sunday worship in mission churches. This movement spread rapidly, reaching the eastern Congo, southern Sudan, and the Kenyan coast by the mid-1940s. Dr. Church would become one of its staunchest European chroniclers and defenders, to the extent that the brief description I gave is itself a product of Church’s influence. ⁹ Church assessed what the movement inherently was and, therefore, what it was not. Letters to and from Church from the 1930s through the 1950s frequently address concerns about the continuation of “true revival” and how to protect it from “excesses,” “dangers,” or other pitfalls. ¹⁰

Religion did not seek power, at least as Joe Church understood it; power, so conceptualized, was the domain of the colonial state. To speak of “religion” and “politics” with respect to the revival from Joe Church’s perspective is, then, to presuppose that religion was largely the domain of the individual’s soul, which was interior and private, and concerned with morality and salvation. When the British district commissioner of Kigezi wrote to Anglican missionaries in 1939 and asked them to account for revivalists’ “contempt for the authority of native chiefs” and wished to know whether the missionaries “consider that the movement is subject to proper control,” ¹¹ the missionaries could respond: “We appreciate your feelings of anxiety that this movement should not prove detrimental to law and order or the good name of Christianity. . . . We will continue to uphold the authority of the Government.” They later added, for good measure, that the revival movement has led to “a standard of moral purity which is nothing short of miraculous among Africans.” ¹²

Not only missionaries used these terms to distinguish “true revival” from possible aberrations. It was common for Ugandan revivalists in the early years of the movement to confess, “We shall do something for salvation, but we can’t manage politics.” ¹³ This statement reflected the reality that it was quite common for early African revival converts who occupied positions, such as chieftainships, to resign those positions upon conversion. ¹⁴ As the revival splintered in the early years of independence, revivalists also tried to delegitimize some branches of it by saying that they simply “had politics in it,” whereas the “true revival” was about conviction of sin, confession, fellowship, and salvation. ¹⁵ Through these upheavals, missionaries and most African converts, it would seem, remained united: the revival was not about “politics.”

The East African revival as potential subversion

While colonial officials in the Uganda Protectorate had been aware of the bothersome Balokole since the late 1930s, it was not until the mid-1940s that the protectorate as a whole and, by consequence, the Colonial Office in London took much notice. In February 1944 one official reported to London that the revival movement “seems to be thoroughly undesirable. . . . Its effect seems likely to prejudice good relations between European and African . . . [and] the life of the community generally.” ¹⁶ Mr. Seel of the Colonial Office then warned the Church Missionary Society of his continued concern that the revival could “portend political subversiveness.” ¹⁷ In fact, just how subversive the revival appeared to them had to do with a kind of parsing of, as one official put it, “that which at first sight may appear to be connected solely with religion.” ¹⁸

For these officials, the difference between “religion” and “politics” in a movement like the revival seemed to come down to a question of power, which is also to say, violence. They were wanting to know whether the revival would result in a “shooting war.” ¹⁹ Colonial memory of the Maji Maji rebellion on the Kenyan and Tanganyikan coast in the early twentieth century, or of the Watchtower movement of Central Africa in the 1920s and 1930s preserved fears that an African populist movement could quickly turn dangerous for Europeans living as “islands of white” amid Africans, who were usually presented as not fully rational, and whose fickle passions could be harnessed to the detriment of Europeans’ colonial project. ²⁰ Colonial officials feared that any populist movement was a sinister masquerade: an “anticolonial conspiracy in disguise.” ²¹ So when the protectorate government corresponded nervously with Joe Church or suspiciously read other missionaries’ letters, it was looking for reassurance that the revival would remain without power; that is, the government hoped it would remain “religious.” ²²

The East African revival as dissenting politics

Both of these approaches, from missionaries and colonial officials, seem to operate with common notions of the distinctions between politics and religion. It is these clear distinctions that Derek Peterson has so ably critiqued with respect to the revival. In his magisterial Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival: A History of Dissent, Peterson argues: “In the study of the Revival, we can see religious conversion in a different light: not as an inward reorientation in religious conviction, but as a political action that opens novel paths of self-narration, constitutes new ways of living, and unsettles the inventions of tradition. Conversion was a form of political and cultural criticism.” ²³ For Peterson, who argues persuasively that late colonial political activity in East Africa grew out of moral concerns, revivalists’ apologetics highlighting their “miraculous” level of morality were themselves political acts. The revival, therefore, was political not because it sought to grab power at the top of the colonial order but because it did the work of imagining a future and mobilizing people toward that potential goal.

In this context, the revival emerges as a movement of political dissent. Revivalists rejected the ethnic and nationalist constituencies that various “patriots” were attempting to create and mobilize in the late colonial era. For this reason some of Peterson’s “ethnic patriots,” such as the Ganda activist Semakula Mulumba, could refer to the revival as “that violent revival movement”—its violence consisting of revivalists’ refusal to fall into line with an imagined “traditional” order. ²⁴ But it was tradition so imagined that revivalists rejected as sinful. Such things were of the spiritual darkness, and revivalists wished to walk in the new light of salvation. ²⁵

Peterson argues that a politics of dissent infused the revival. But what about the early revivalists, who claimed, “We can’t manage politics”? Insisting, as Peterson does, that revivalists were inherently political elides an important distinction—between “religion” and “politics”—that these same revivalists used to distinguish the movement that they were part of.

The East African revival as a negotiated movement

Revivalists despised the politics of indirect rule in Uganda. They believed that it had corrupted society, because the British held real power and only politely colluded with a colonial Ugandan elite. ²⁶ Young revivalists assailed these native chiefs for taking bribes, for “fearing men instead of God.” Such men were bakulu, a Luganda word that could refer to just about anyone in a position of authority. To revivalists, bakulu were the dead weight of the colonial order. On this point, when revivalist preachers felt there were unconverted elders—bakulu—in their audience, they would sometimes reference Ezekiel 37, in which the prophet witnesses a valley of old, dry bones become infused with life as the breath of God enters them. ²⁷ Youthful revivalists even coined a hybrid term, “bakulu-ship,” to refer to the particular sinfulness of holding onto one’s position illegitimately. ²⁸ Revivalists of the 1930s and 1940s therefore fit in with the tense generational politics of that era, in which antagonisms between youth and elders could boil over into riots and disturbances. ²⁹ Cyril Stuart, the Anglican bishop of Uganda during the revival’s most contentious years, lamented that it had simply become popular for youth to show “disrespect for any mukulu [Luganda for elder, or a person in a prominent position].” ³⁰ It was these sorts of episodes that colonial officials had in mind when they voiced their concerns that the revival movement could “portend political subversiveness.”

The government wanted to be sure that the revival remained merely a “religious” movement, which meant, practically, that the revival would not exercise any formal power. One can therefore see a desire for self-preservation in revivalists’ insistence that they were not doing “politics.” By the mid-1950s, however, Balokole began taking over positions of power within the church and Ugandan society. They became priests, bishops, and even archbishops. They filled top posts within the newly independent government and were praised for doing so. ³¹ What does this shift illuminate about the relationship between the revival and various forms of power?

Revivalists’ early rejection of politics was not generic; rather, revivalists’ critique of colonial politics was that one could not be involved in acquiring power in the colonial world without being corrupted by it. In revivalists’ estimation, sin and power were intertwined, and public confession was the means by which revivalists ensured the ritual performance of renouncing that power. When Balokole later took up positions of authority, they did so assuming that they would not create the barriers that had earlier separated bakulu from everyone else. Revivalists who have occupied these positions have tried to cultivate a different relationship to those under their authority, for example, by joining with their parishioners or constituents in weekly fellowship meetings. ³² One could criticize revivalists for accepting some of the very positions that they had previously disregarded. One could also say that the movement had always been political, as would be the implication of Peterson’s argument.

But the legacy of revivalists’ earlier position, that theirs was a religious movement as opposed to a political one, carried over into the era of decolonization. They continued to hold large revival conventions and maintain vast informal fellowship networks, focusing upon living the “life of salvation” in a way that mapped onto earlier colonial assumptions about the locus of religion. What changed more dramatically was politics. The 1950s saw the growth of formal political parties and, with them, a push for greater democratization. One might say then that the politics that Balokole had earlier rejected and defined themselves as outside of had shifted, and that a new kind of politics, one that was more democratic and representative, suited revivalists better. ³³

Conclusion

Talal Asad argues that the process of secularization defines the realm of the religious as that which is without power because, in such a society, religion is a privatized matter of interior dispositions. Consequently, in a context shaped by liberal modernity, does the fact that we call the East African Revival a religious movement signify that it had no real power? If we accept that assumption, then missionaries’ and revivalists’ insistence upon the strictly religious nature of the revival is a claim relative to the exercise of power. Framing the revival as a strictly religious movement, however, shaped it in the minds of those who joined the movement as well as those who did not. Nevertheless, it is clear that revivalists hoped to shape how power was distributed in Uganda, despite their early insistence that they “can’t manage politics.” Agreeing with Asad, there is nothing in a movement that makes it inherently religious or political—the act of categorization itself is a function of power. Yet, one can observe the contestation of power by examining revivalists’ discourses about these categories and what was produced as a result of accepting the terms. In this sense, the revival was made into a religious movement, and the implications of this categorization likely facilitated the movement’s endurance into the postcolonial world. In exchange, revivalists seem to have tempered their earlier skepticism that powerful positions inherently corrupted the people occupying them. In short, they found that they could manage politics just fine.