Jason Bruner's new book offers an excellent addition to a spate of recent scholarship on the mid-twentieth-century Anglican East African Revival movement. Bruner has the unenviable task of writing in the immediate wake of two widely-acclaimed works on the Revival: Kevin Ward and Emma Wild-Wood's edited collection, East African Revival: History & Legacies (Ashgate, 2012), and Derek Peterson's Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival (Cambridge, 2012). Yet far from mimicking these earlier studies, Bruner's book appears as a fresh reading, in large part because he succeeds in analyzing revivalists in their own terms and on their own terms.
If there is one consistent theme in Bruner's narrative, it is the importance of revivalist agency. This emphasis on African agency is nothing new in modern scholarship on African religion, from J.D.Y. Peel and Terence Ranger to the Comaroffs. But where many scholars have privileged narratives of indigeneity, dissent, and exoticism—focusing for example on African Independent Churches that broke away from Western churches or modern Pentecostal movements—Bruner recognizes that the vast majority of African Christians have remained within the folds of historic Protestant and Catholic mission churches. He therefore pivots away from the scholarly obsession with the “agency of rupture” (14) to explore the agency of revival, examining the lives of the Ugandan “Balokole” (literally “the saved people”), who challenged, but never left, the Anglican church.
In this regard, African Christian agency cannot be reduced to simple categories of rebellion or capitulation. For example, although the Balokole mirrored the British Keswick school's emphases on “sobriety, moderation, and cleanliness” (60), they were not simply parodying missionary spirituality. Rather, the Balokole's passionate, embodied, and highly-public conversion experiences undergirded a charismatic authority that challenged the institutional authority claimed by missionaries and the “Bakulu” class of Africans who based their leadership on ordination and hierarchical status. Although the Bakulu retained the upper hand in early 1940s leadership disputes, the Balokole turned the tables over the next several decades. By the 1970s, Anglican leadership belonged to figures like Erica Sabiiti and Janani Luwum who had embraced the Revival movement, publicly confessing their sins and “walking in the light.”
Bruner's work is also distinguished by his emphasis on Ugandan Christians’ quotidian practices—namely how Revivalists “lived salvation” on a daily basis. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources in the U.K. and Uganda and a series of oral interviews, Bruner convincingly demonstrates how the Revival transformed ordinary practices concerning “bodies, homes, families, and daily habits” (3). In turn, the nature of Balokole “conversion as a physiological act” (67) included the well-known practices of public confession as well as the moralistic rejection of alcohol, smoking, adultery, and theft. But the experience of “living salvation” was also demonstrated in school and the ordering of the home itself, challenging traditional food taboos, marital practices of bridewealth, and even the ordering of jerrycans (99).
Such practices enabled Anglican Balokole to creatively navigate the disruptive wave of colonial modernity in Uganda. Their rejection of traditional concubinage and ethnic food taboos helped forge a more cosmopolitan, pan-ethnic identity. At the same time, Balokole emphases on the nuclear family and their cultivating of transnational networks helped them adjust to the destabilizing currents of mass migration and urbanization in mid-twentieth-century Uganda. Embodying what Bruner calls “ascetic cosmopolitanism” (74), Balokole gained an empowering sense of purpose and identity that moved beyond precolonial ethnic particularity, late colonial nationalism, and rootless, urban anomie.
Ultimately, Bruner convincingly demonstrates how Revivalist themes of sin and darkness, public confession, and “walking in the light” were not simply eschatological hopes for the other side of death. Rather, they were lived experiences and practices that led to joyful, innovative forms of personal and communal identities. One could wish for more testimonies from those who left or rejected the movement; at times Bruner's account can feel overly one-sided toward the Balokole insiders. And I found myself wishing for expanded analysis in the concluding chapter's provocative exploration of the connections between Revivalist practices and recent political developments such as Uganda's 2009 anti-homosexuality bill.
But any book that leaves you wanting more deserves a wide audience. Bruner's multifaceted analysis of Balokole agency offers a groundbreaking contribution to the field of African Christian studies. Yet in its cogency, eloquence, and succinctness—the main text clocks in at just under 150 pages – this book is suitable for students and other nonspecialists. If you are looking for an accessible and erudite introduction to colonial East Africa's most important religious movement, Living Salvation is your book.
