I. The Anglican Beginning in Buganda

By the nineteenth century, and for centuries prior, the East African kingdom of Buganda occupied the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria, where the Nile River begins its course in present-day Uganda. Populous, relatively wealthy, and highly centralized under their king, the kabaka, the Baganda were the object of great interest by numerous outsiders. In the 1840s, merchants arrived from Zanzibar via the overland trade routes, bringing their Islamic faith with them. In 1874, Egypt sent Gordon Pasha to explore the source of the Nile River, flowing northward through the heart of the kingdom. Having its own interests in the Nile's headwaters, England sent the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who arrived one year later, in April 1875, bringing with him the Bible and promises of friendship from his sponsors in London. Concerned about Muslim collusion between Zanzibar and Egypt over Buganda's independence, and perceiving England to be more powerful than either, Kabaka Mutesa I welcomed Stanley's arrival.Footnote ⁴

Following an audience with the kabaka, Stanley reported back to the London newspapers that Mutesa and his people were eager for the Christian Gospel. Anglican and Catholic missionaries quickly answered the call. The first emissaries of the Anglican Church Missionary Society [CMS] arrived in June, 1877, to establish Buganda as an Anglican province. Two years later, in February, 1879, the Catholic White Fathers arrived, adding further diversity to an already complex religious milieu. A decade of conflict and turmoil unfolded as Baganda traditionalists, Muslims, Anglicans, and Catholics vied for converts among the people and influence over the kabaka.

Regardless of what he told Stanley, evidence suggests Mutesa had little personal interest in Christianity and never converted.Footnote ⁵ But many young Baganda did convert, to both Anglicanism and Catholicism. Many of the new Baganda Christians were either clan chiefs, or the sons thereof, and served the monarchy and court in one capacity or another and when Mutesa's unstable son, Kabaka Mwanga, acceded to the throne in 1884 upon his father's death, chaos ensued.

Mwanga's tenure was a time of turmoil which saw both increasing numbers of conversions to Christianity and a subsequent weakening of the role of the kabaka. Suspicious of outsiders and eager to reassert traditional religious practices, Mwanga turned on the Christians in 1885 and executed over forty of them at Namugongo.Footnote ⁶ Owing to his erratic ways, Mwanga was overthrown in 1888 by a combined force of Baganda Muslims and Christians. A turbulent year followed known as the “Year of the Three Kings” as both religions initially cooperated to place Mwanga's brother, Kiwewa, on the throne, at which point conflict erupted immediately between the Muslims and Christians. The Christians were driven southwards where they formed an alliance with Mwanga himself to oppose the Muslim Kabaka Kalema, who replaced Kiwewa just after the expulsion of the Christians. More numerous, better armed, and backed by England, the Christian forces regrouped and defeated Kalema and the Muslims. Only a year after being deposed, the thoroughly chastised Mwanga was back on the throne in 1889.

The effect of these events was two-fold. First, the power of the kabaka was greatly weakened in favor of the largely Christian chiefs. Secondly, the events of the late 1880s spurred a near mass conversion of the Baganda to Christianity, known as the Christian Revolution in Ugandan history. With Islam and the traditionalists checked, the Anglicans and Catholics fell into conflict themselves in 1892 at the Battle of Mengo Hill, ultimately resolved by British intervention in favor of the Protestants. Britain took formal control of Buganda two years later and solidified its control over the wider Uganda Protectorate in the Buganda Agreement of 1900. In addition to paving the way for the extension of British rule over the region thru Buganda Sub-Imperialism, the Agreement of 1900 completed the Christian Revolution by giving the Protestant chiefs a lion's share of the land and offices in a newly empowered legislative body, the Lukiko.

The importance of the Christian Revolution in Buganda cannot be overstated when considering the spread of Anglicanism during the colonial period. The forms and practices of Anglicanism in Buganda influenced the church throughout the Great Lakes region of Central Africa and wider East Africa. Very many of the missionaries and founders of both the Anglican and Catholic churches of Ruanda, such as the Catholic Bishop Jean-Joseph Hirth, spent their early years in Buganda. Arguably it was in Buganda where they learned the value of seeking out key converts among the ruling class, as happened especially for the Catholics in Ruanda. Nor could the energy and enthusiasm of the Christian Revolution in Buganda be contained. As Adrian Hastings remarked, “by 1882 a collective movement of conversion was under way which nothing would be able to hold back and over which the [European] missionaries themselves had remarkably little control.” Moreover, he writes, “Buganda was the only place in Africa where there was both large-scale conversion to Christianity in the pre-colonial era and a mass conversion movement within the early colonial age.”Footnote ⁷

This mass conversion movement refers not only to the Baganda but also to the evangelization, carried out mostly by Baganda catechists, of the wider region. Having survived years of persecution and conflict in Buganda, energetic young converts fanned out across the countryside to preach and teach the Anglican understanding of the gospel. By 1910, they could be found not only throughout Uganda but also in Rwanda, eastern Congo, southern Sudan, western Kenya and northern Tanzania.Footnote ⁸ Acting as cultural agents of a sort, they generally insisted upon converts using Buganda's language, Luganda, in church functions and demanded rigid submission to their authority, an insistence which initially provoked conflict in the neighboring Ruanda Mission.

II. The Ruanda Mission

For several years, despite Protestant growth underway across southern Uganda, neighboring Ruanda was left to the Catholic White Fathers, whose initial success was much more limited. Upon their arrival in 1900, under Bishop Hirth, the Catholics were neither liked nor trusted by the ruling Tutsi monarch Mwami (or, king) Musinga. They found themselves relegated and confined to the south to proselytize among impoverished Hutus, while they deliberately tried to make in-roads among the Tutsi rulers. Because of the opposition from the court, Catholic numbers remained modest and growth was slow during these first two decades. Still, when Belgium assumed control of the colony from Germany following the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the church had sixteen mission stations, over thirteen thousand congregants and five Rwandan priests.Footnote ⁹

As it turned out, Belgian rule accomplished what the church could not. In accordance with the colonial policy of supporting the continued rule of the mwami, privileged schools were opened for Tutsi children. The management and instruction of the schools was turned over to the church, which included Catholic indoctrination in the curriculum. Not surprisingly, Catholic growth started accelerating dramatically. Indeed, over the course of the 1920s, as the conversion of young Tutsis was firmly underway in the schools, a split developed among the Tutsi elites between progressives, who had converted to Catholicism and supported the Belgian administrators and traditionalists, who remained steadfastly skeptical of both. Mwami Musinga, as the head of the traditionalist faction, was finally deposed by the Belgian governor in 1931. He was replaced by his son Rudahigwa, a Catholic catechumen, who, when formally baptized after his accession, was dubbed the first “Christian King” of Rwanda. Taking the name Mutara IV, he was held forth as the representative of Christ as opposed to his traditional role of representing the Rwandan deity Imana. Bauer describes what followed as a “Constantinian wave of conversion” which saw ninety-five percent of the Batutsi as baptized Catholics by 1945.Footnote ¹⁰ Rwanda was eventually called the “the most Christian country in Africa.”

The Anglican incursion into Rwanda was much more modest. In 1916, two doctors from Mengo Hospital in Uganda, A. C. (“Arthur”) Stanley Smith and Leonard Sharp, traveled through eastern Rwanda in the area of Gisaka and returned with a conviction to begin medical missionary work.Footnote ¹¹ In April, 1917, Leonard Sharp wrote to the CMS Africa Secretary G. T. Manley, “You have doubtless heard much lately about . . . opening missionary work in any new country . . . but with Ruanda it is much more than that—a Medical Mission is imperative.”Footnote ¹² His letter also indicates he was aware of the lack of success by the Catholics in making converts from among the Tutsi. But evidently lacking funds and resources as a result of the First World War, Sharp and Smith were rebuffed and remained at their posts in Uganda. In 1919, with the war over, the two were in England raising funds from private sources to start a medical mission. With the necessary funds secured from a group of supporters known simply as the “Friends of Ruanda,” the CMS General Committee authorized Sharp and Smith to begin medical work in Kigezi in the southwest part of the Uganda Protectorate in June, 1920. Following an agreement with Belgium, they were soon venturing into neighboring Rwanda.

Five years later, in 1925, Geoffrey Holmes, a captain in the British Army, along with Reverend H. S. Jackson, Rev. Harold Guillebaud, and a young doctor, Joseph E. Church, started the first Anglican mission at Gahini, presently in Rwanda but then in British-controlled Tanganyika. The mission quickly constructed a hospital and a school while Church was joined by his wife Decie and his brother W. F. Church, another doctor, in 1930.Footnote ¹³ In May 1926, Guillebaud baptized the first Rwandan converts at Gahini and translated portions of the Bible into Kinyarwanda. That same month, on May 25, 1926, the CMS Executive Committee authorized the formal creation of the Ruanda Medical Mission, to be known as the Ruanda Mission (CMS Auxiliary). In 1931, two additional mission stations were founded at Kigeme and Shyira, which later became Shyira Diocese, the first Anglican province of Rwanda with its present seat at Ruhengeri. By 1939, the Ruanda Mission claimed “55 European workers, 7 stations, 6 hospitals and over 6000 baptized Christians in over 450 village churches.”Footnote ¹⁴ The Rwandan churches remained under CMS control until 1965.

As the CMS churches spread throughout northern Rwanda, they were marked not only by their liturgy but by several distinct church practices and African cultural traditions, all of which left an indelible stamp on PEAR and its beliefs down to the present. These practices and traditions, in many discernable ways, prepared the ground for the East African Revival and now stand at the core of the revivalist tradition to which the Anglican Church in Rwanda today sees itself as the heir. Understanding this is necessary to comprehend the meaning of the East African Revival in the church's history and how the CMS became the progenitor of the revivalist tradition for both the Rwandan Anglicans and other churches across the region. Moreover, the revivalist tradition clarifies how the church, and especially the post-genocide Tutsi Anglicans, have comprehended and defined their own role in the supposedly new Rwanda.

From the outset, the CMS missionaries were representative of the various debates and divisions that beset the Church of England in that era. Smith and Sharp were both at Cambridge University in 1910 at a time of heightened tensions between evangelical “conservatives” and “liberals” over scriptural authority. The tensions led to the withdrawal and formation of the conservative Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CiCCU) from the national Student Christian Movement (SCM). Joe Church himself, who later became a key founder of the East African Revival, had gone to Rwanda as a missionary from the CiCCU. Moreover, the division at Cambridge reflected wider tensions within the CMS, which, in 1922, led the conservatives to form the Bible Churchman's Missionary Society (BCMS) over the same issues. The supporters of the Ruanda Mission were largely sympathetic to the BCMS position and agreed to remain within the CMS as its parent society only if they were allowed to have their own governing body in London with the freedom to insist upon “uncompromising conservative evangelical loyalty” from its missionaries. Thus, from the outset and until 1945, nearly two-thirds of the doctors and clergymen sent to Rwanda were from Cambridge and reflected the CiCCU/SCM and BCMS/CMS divisions.Footnote ¹⁵ As it was, the SCM/CMS missionaries were mostly in Uganda while the Ruanda Mission was represented by CiCCU/BCMC missionaries who took a “the more conservative attitude to Scripture,” and coupled with the on-going controversy, emphasized “evangelism rather than engagement with the public life of the nation or critique of the socio-political context.”Footnote ¹⁶

In addition, the CMS missionaries in Rwanda were influenced by the Keswick holiness teachings and the Higher Life Movement of the nineteenth century. Inspired by the American Holiness Movement of the mid-1830s and espoused at conventions in Keswick, England, the Higher Life Movement insisted Christians move beyond their initial conversion and experience a second transformation by the Holy Spirit. The expression most commonly used to describe this event was that the believer should seek to be “filled with the Holy Spirit,” which in turn empowered the Christian to live a more holy and sinless life.

The Keswick Higher Life Movement reached Cambridge and Oxford University students in the form of large gatherings in the 1870s. One of the organizers was Sir Arthur Blackwood, president of the CMS. In 1893, the Keswick Movement influenced the outbreak of the Pilkington Revival which tried to “assert the priority of the spiritual over the political and social in the life of the church.”Footnote ¹⁷ Roger W. Bowen wrote of the Higher Life Movement: “This hunger for a deeper experience of the transforming power of God in one's life was a deep undercurrent leading to the outbreak of revival . . . and this movement profoundly marked the Anglican Church in Rwanda at its foundation.”Footnote ¹⁸

Joe Church, while home on furlough in England, was a guest speaker at the 1937 Keswick Convention. There, he noted that many of the supporters and members of the Rwandan Mission were “well-known on the Keswick platform” and elsewhere in his letters he wrote frequently of the need for “pentecost” and prayed for Holy-spirit filled Christians.Footnote ¹⁹ In considering the East African Revival, which itself originated out of the Keswick-influenced Ruanda Mission, one should note Allan Anderson who, in speaking of charismatic, pentecostal churches in Africa, writes, “a limited . . . understanding of ‘Pentecostal’ fails to recognize the great variety of different Pentecostal movements in most of the rest of the world, many of which arose quite independently of Western Pentecostalism and even of Azusa Street.”Footnote ²⁰ It is argued here that the East African Revival, inspired by the Higher Life Movement, represents a thoroughly, and certainly in the eyes of the revivalists, independent tradition that was pentecostal in style, yet very much distinct, as its followers amalgamated Anglicanism with their own traditions. In that sense, the Revivalist tradition can be seen as similar to what Jesse Zink labeled, in writing of the so-called “new generation” churches in Nigeria, “Anglocostal,” which themselves were inspired by a revival in the 1960s.Footnote ²¹

Finally, the young church in Rwanda was marked not just by the theological inclinations and divisions within the CMS but also aided by a distinctive cultural belief among the inhabitants of northern Rwanda. As several historians maintain, including John Bauer, Ian and Jane Linden, and this author, the inhabitants of northern Rwanda were impacted deeply by the prophetic tendencies of the Nyabingi cult. In the mythology of the region, Nyabingi was a female spirit-deity who communicated prophesies through her priestesses. Known as the bagirwa, they allegedly received communications from Nyabingi and made supplications for the people directly to her, who offered cures for illnesses and protection from evil. The Lindens credit part of the initial success of the CMS in northern Rwanda to the conversion of a number of bagirwa, who then directed their followers and supplicants to church.Footnote ²²

Apart from its effect on church growth, the Nyabingi tradition reinforces Thomas Spear's observation that pre-Christian African prophecy was common. According to Spear, as African lay leaders sought greater control over their churches, the charismatic teachings of evangelicals synthesized the two traditions with their emphasis on divine inspiration and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Spear writes that African Christians “built on the traditions of the Old Testament and Christ's ministry as much as on African prophetic traditions and quests for spiritual power to contest . . . God's word.” Moreover, he points to the belief in the presence and power of evil spirits and witches in most African cultures, beliefs which aligned well with orthodox, evangelical beliefs about Satan and his power.Footnote ²³ A. C. Stanley Smith first encountered what he called “the cult of Nyabingi” in 1921. Writing to the “Friends of Ruanda,” he labeled it as “worship of the personal devil” and described how young girls were often offered as wives, or in his view to be “handmaidens of Satan,” to the bagirwa in exchange for blessings.Footnote ²⁴ Spear noted that when church leaders attacked such beliefs as the work of the Devil, as Smith did, they “inadvertently incorporated African doctrines of evil within Christianity, leading African Christians to adopt prayer and baptism by the Holy Spirit as a means of combating witchcraft in general.”Footnote ²⁵

In many ways and in many places, Christianity has succeeded by co-opting and grafting itself onto indigenous beliefs and practices. The traditional African religious heritage enables people to retain certain elements of their culture, which they consider necessary for integration into their Christian faith.Footnote ²⁶ Although the later Balokole Movement of the East African Revival would, with its denunciations of witchcraft, vehemently deny any connection between Nyabingi and the Revival, it is argued here that the CMS missionaries and their first converts in Rwanda were no exception. In 1938, M. J. Bessell recorded how bagirwa priestess would go behind a bark-cloth curtain to invoke Nyabingi, and those who had brought offerings and supplications would hear the words: “Lady of the Great Spirit, come, save, cure your people . . . Save us from evil, from sickness . . . [and then] . . . My children, I will cure you . . . but your Lady is not satisfied with your gifts . . . You must return and bring others. . . Then I will intercede for you again before her.”Footnote ²⁷ It is not difficult to imagine the effectiveness with which the oracles of Nyabingi were replaced with the revelations of the Holy Spirit. More significantly, however, the ingrained belief in supernatural revelations and interventions provided fertile soil for the Keswick-inspired East African Revival.

III. The East African Revival

The East African Revival, known in Uganda as the Balokole Movement (or “saved ones”), and in Kinyarwanda as the Abarokore, was a pietistic reform movement which emerged among young Baganda working at the CMS's Ruanda Mission at Gahini. Emphasizing the need for a “second conversion” experience from the Holy Spirit, the Balokole reflected the Keswick teachings and the Higher Life Movement of the nineteenth century, which first came to the forefront among the CMS community and its converts in Buganda. Thus while its common to refer to the movement as beginning in Rwanda it was heavily influenced by the church in Buganda. Regardless, one of the widely acknowledged founders of the Revival, Joe Church, later described it as “essentially . . . a Holiness movement.”Footnote ²⁸ Demanding strict adherence to biblical orthodoxy and the need for a fully changed life without sin, the Revival's influence has been far and wide across the region. Regarded as an evangelical and somewhat fundamentalist movement within the Anglican Communion, the Balokole Movement called for Christians to maintain uncompromising standards of behavior and personal piety, which occasionally earned the resentment of nominal Christians who were often the targets of their implied criticisms.Footnote ²⁹

Scholarship on the Revival, much of which is based on first-hand accounts by participants and adherents, holds four men largely responsible for its beginning: Joe Church and three Baganda evangelists, Simeon Nsibambi and Yosiya Kinuka, both health care workers, and Nsibambi's brother, Blasio Kigozi, who went to Gahini as a school teacher. Helping first to provide assistance in the midst of a drought-induced famine in northern Rwanda, Church was the doctor in charge of the mission hospital at Gahini. In September, 1929, with the famine subsiding, he travelled to Kampala, Uganda for a period of rest and there met Nsibambi at the CMS headquarters at Namirembe Cathedral.Footnote ³⁰

Nsibambi, born in 1897, was an officer in the public health department of the Ugandan civil service.Footnote ³¹ Educated at CMS schools in Kampala and at King's College in Budo, he served as a sergeant in the African Native Medical Corps during World War I, which interrupted his career. Nsibambi, in a 1952 interview, claimed his first conversion to Christ was on a ship bound for Zanzibar during the war. Nsibambi further claimed to have a “second conversion” by the Holy Spirit in 1922, a direct reflection of the Keswick teachings and the Higher Life Movement.Footnote ³²

Throughout the 1920s, Nsibambi was involved in church matters and teaching, often leading Bible study groups in the evenings. In 1929, he resigned from his post in the Ugandan health department and devoted himself to full time evangelism. According to Richard MacMaster, based upon interviews he conducted among the participants, Nsibambi was impressed with American evangelist Charles Finney's 1835 book Lectures on Revival.Footnote ³³ Finney's ideas influenced the Keswick holiness movement and the Anglican revivalists of Uganda and Rwanda. Evidently, when Church met Nsibambi in 1929, he was inspired by his example and returned to Rwanda to work toward revival and evangelical renewal at Gahini. Church soon formed a team at Gahini with Blasio Kigozi and Yosiya Kinuka.

Central to the story of the revival at Gahini was an alleged conflict between Kigozi and Kinuka. Owing to disagreements between the two of them, Kinuka returned to Uganda in 1930 and lodged with Nsibambi. Evidently he realized his wrong doing with Kigozi but his “heart was still unchanged.” According to Church, Kinuka finally “yielded his heart to Christ” as he was on the road back to Gahini, made peace and restitution with Kigozi, and was then “truly converted,” referring apparently to the second conversion experience the revivalists spoke of frequently.Footnote ³⁴

Anglicans in present-day Rwanda remember that it was Kinuka's harsh dealings with the Rwandan students at Gahini which caused the conflict. And when he repented of his harsh ways with the students, the Revival began. As Joe Church wrote in 1945, “most of the staff, all nominal Christians, were broken down and then brought out by the Spirit of God into a life of burning zeal for God and holiness.”Footnote ³⁵ As it was, Church, Kigozi and Kinuka spawned the East African Revival from Gahini in 1929.

The Revival now occupies a central place in the history of the Anglican Church of Rwanda; in part because it began at Gahini, the first Anglican mission in the country. For Rwandan Anglicans, the Revival is a historical movement filled with great pride, for its effects were felt widely across East Africa in the 1930s and beyond, especially among the Kenyan Anglicans, for whom the movement is still the dominant persuasion in the church. Writing in 1975, Catherine Robins notes from its origins in Rwanda, the movement spread into all neighboring territories and among at least twenty different language groups and several mission bodies. “Its characteristic hymns, greetings, teachings, and its rigid norms of dress and behavior are familiar to Roman Catholics and non-Christians in these areas as well as to the Protestants among whom the Balokole worship.”Footnote ³⁶

The Balokole Movement endured well past the 1930s and throughout the history of the Ruanda Mission remained an active and sometimes a contentious issue for church authorities. The CMS church authorities issued a circular to their missionaries in 1942 that sought to better define the “inter-relation of the organized church and the Revival movement.” In 1945, Reverend P. J. Brazier summed up the “Characteristics of Ruanda Revival Fellowship” and described practices still observed at Revival gatherings in Rwanda today.Footnote ³⁷ More important than the recounting the Revival's history through the colonial and post-colonial periods is the contention of this article that the Revival has become the focus of much attention as the Anglican Church has regained its status in post-genocide Rwanda. And along with the ascendency of the post-genocide Anglican Church and the Revival has come a renewed and often revisionist interpretation of the Revival's history, meaning, and implications for the country.

In addition, the Revival has become much better known to American Episcopalians as numerous congregations and parishioners have left the Episcopal Church in America to join the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA). In 2001, then Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini made the unprecedented and controversial move of creating AMIA to act as a missionary province of the Anglican Church of Rwanda. The issue at stake for Kolini and AMIA's supporters was the belief that the Episcopal Church in America had departed from scriptural orthodoxy and a literal interpretation of the Bible. The most high-profile issues, ones which brought the controversy to the American forefront during the 1990s, were the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of openly gay clergy, culminating in Gene Robinson's 2003 consecration as an openly gay bishop. Following Robinson's consecration, the AMIA movement grew rapidly. By the time Kolini retired in 2011, the new Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje presided as the head of a “missionary province” in the United States which claimed close to twenty thousand members and more than one hundred congregations. By December of 2011, however, PEAR and AMIA dissolved their formal ties due to internal disagreements, but many AMIA parishes still remain deeply involved in Rwanda.Footnote ³⁸

These “Rwandese Anglicans living in the United States,” as Kolini called them, see themselves as beneficiaries of the East African Revival. The AMIA's website and literature frequently claims it has inherited Rwanda's “revival DNA” as they, with PEAR's leadership, promoted a revival of church orthodoxy in America. At the AMIA's annual Winter Conference in 2005, John Rucyahana, then Bishop of Shyira Diocese, delivered a speech on the East African Revival, but with little historical context.Footnote ³⁹ In turn, Rwanda and its Anglican Church have benefited greatly as AMIA's American congregants have provided and facilitated much aid and development in the years since.

As this author frequently observed at church gatherings in Rwanda, the fundamental practices of the Revival, similar to ones described throughout by the Anglican missionaries and observed by Catherine Robbins in 1975, are still evident. Anglican services and “revival meetings” are energetic and spirited, with pastors often giving personal testimonials and calling people to seek a “transformed life” in the Holy Spirit, as was espoused by the Keswick Movement. Singing often erupts sporadically and sometimes in Luganda, as evidence of the Ugandan heritage of many Rwandan Anglicans, as was observed by this author at the St. Pierre Remera church in Kigali. The historical anthem song of the Revival, “Tukutendereza” (meaning “Praise the Lord” in Luganda), was heard elsewhere in the country.

The Revival's new-found impact on the post-genocide Anglicans is evident outside of church gatherings as well. The use of alcohol and tobacco products and gambling is strictly prohibited and formal Western dress-codes are adhered to closely, especially by men. Monogamy is encouraged and expected. On the occasions in which this author spoke to and greeted Anglican gatherings, it was suggested the introduction begin with “I am the husband of one wife.” Many young men and women, usually workers at the Anglican guesthouses, gather on their own to pray and study long into the night, much like at the start of the Revival in the 1930s. While some of this may be ascribed to conservative church practices common to many denominations, they are exactly as Robbins described in 1975.Footnote ⁴⁰

Additionally, the Holiness Movement teachings of the nineteenth century permeate the Anglican Church. While there is no specific doctrine regarding what are called the “sign gifts” of the Holy Spirit, these practices take place (that is, a belief in miracles, praying in tongues, prophecy and divine healings). A pastor in Kibungo Diocese claimed a man had recently been raised from the dead in his parish after an all night prayer session. Many parishioners in Gahini Diocese believe a structural problem in the diocesan office walls miraculously was repaired by divine intervention.Footnote ⁴¹ Based on these and other observations, Anglicans generally believe in the literal persona and power of the Holy Spirit as well as the sign gifts of the New Testament church.

Belief in divine prophecy is prevalent as well. The synthesis of biblical prophecy with pre-Christian African traditions, as in the co-opting of the early twentieth century Nyabingi cult, reinforces this despite the Revival's efforts at distancing itself from the Nyabingi. At a revival meeting at Ruhengeri in 2004, the church claimed a divine prophecy had been issued for Rwanda to become the source of a “Spiritual Renaissance” for the world; that is, “the revelation to His servants was that Rwanda would be united and reconciled to such an extent that the whole world would marvel.”Footnote ⁴² Moreover, the lofty rhetoric espoused by this prophecy plays well in the hands of AMIA which sees itself as leading a “Spiritual Renaissance” in America.

The charismatic nature and miraculous claims of the Revival Movement are not confined to the Anglicans. Anne Kubai places this in a larger context, writing “Rwanda is experiencing what has been termed “Gospel explosion,” as evangelists from different parts of the world conduct large interdenominational Revival Conferences or Crusades.Footnote ⁴³ Pentecostal and independent charismatic churches have mushroomed since the genocide and now constitute the largest group among the Protestants. Concomitant with the rise of pentecostal practices is a wider belief in miraculous healings and divine visions and interventions. Interestingly, coming alongside the return of the Revival Movement, most of the new charismatic churches have been started by Tutsi returnees who mistrusted the established pre-genocide churches and who also were fluent only in English, as Rwanda was traditionally a Franco-phone country.Footnote ⁴⁴

In all its ways, from its acceptance of a Holiness-inspired interpretation of the Bible to its espousal of prophecy, the present Revival practices of the Anglican Church bear stark similarity to pentecostal traditions, although the Balokole founders would have denied any formal connection to pentecostalism itself. In part, this reflects somewhat of a divergence from the original Revival movement by its present practitioners. Nevertheless, Kubai has written on the proliferation of new churches in post-genocide Rwanda. And while the Anglican churches are not new per se, many of her insights are applicable owing to the nature of their Revival practices. In practice and effect, the coming to prominence of the Revival-inspired Anglican Church in Rwanda represents one of the “new churches” to which she speaks. As Kubai writes, “the term ‘new’ is being used here to refer to churches which were not present in Rwanda prior to the genocide . . . that have now been imported into Rwanda by the returnees.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The importation of the Revival movement into Rwanda by the Tutsi returnees, and the dominant role it now plays in the Anglican Church at large, provides for the same need Kubai speaks of when she writes of pentecostal churches: they “offer people a purpose to live and a strong sense of identity—the purpose to live for survivors and returnees and a sense of identity—which are crucial for the creation of a newly reconciled society.” She could well be writing of the Anglican churches when she says, “they encourage their members to participate in the national reconciliation and political process. They preach forgiveness and impress on its importance as a religious imperative.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Apart from church practices, the Revival provides the Tutsi returnees with a mechanism to process and explain both their own plight in the refugee camps in Uganda and a means by which to cope with and heal themselves and Rwanda from the traumas of the recent past. When the RPF ended the genocide in 1994, the way was open for more than 800,000 refugees to return to their home country, some of whom were Hutu Balokole. But it is the majority Tutsi returnees who presently occupy positions of power and authority in both the new Anglican hierarchy and in Rwandan society. And in seeking to promote a new, and supposedly, ethnically harmonious nation inclusive of themselves as new-comers in a Hutu majority populace, the Anglicans have constructed a narrative which places the East African Revival at the center of their history.

IV. The Remembrance of the Revival and Its Uses in Post-genocide Rwanda

In the years since their coming to power in post-genocide Rwanda, the Anglican hierarchy has attempted in its rhetoric to promote unity and reconciliation under the banner of Christianity, among both its now Hutu and Tutsi congregants. As such, the church frequently recalls the memory of the Revival, to which they see themselves as direct heirs and present participants. In addition, the Revival and its history has been incorporated and re-told as an organizing framework for making sense of the past and present. Specifically, the Revival is used to explain both what happened in Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide and to encourage reconciliation and healing in the post-genocide state.

Central to the theology of the current Balokole Revival Movement is the belief that only the Holy Spirit can move people's hearts to repentance, reform and ultimately revival. Thus, for the Balokole, the revival movement comes and goes with the Holy Spirit, which, as they explain it, left Rwanda in 1959 with the Tutsi refugees but returned with them, their descendants, after the genocide. A retired headmaster of a school in Shyogwe during the 1950s, who left for Uganda after the 1959 Revolution but who now lives in Gahini, claimed there was “no Holy Spirit in Rwanda during the 1960s but [the Spirit] was in Uganda,” presumably with the Tutsi Diaspora.Footnote ⁴⁷ This belief, that the troubles which beset Rwanda during the years from 1959 and until the genocide was over occurred because of the parting of the revival spirit with the Tutsi Balokole, is widespread and endorsed from the highest levels of PEAR.

Former Archbishop Kolini explained to this author that when the Tutsis, of which he is one, left Rwanda for the refugee camps in Uganda in 1959, the Spirit left as well. He attributed their survival in the camps to an “outpouring of the Holy Spirit” and a renewal of the Revival among the refugees. Kolini noted how Western churches and aid workers often tell him “one cannot worship God on an empty stomach.” He denied this and said of the revival in the camps in the 1960s, with an air of sincerity: “We were living in hell. Children were dying young and the people had no food or medicine but when the Spirit came, we were praising God and He preserved us.” Robins' work suggests there may be some credibility in this claim, noting a renewal of the Balokole Movement in the Kigezi District of Uganda starting in the early 1960s, where many Tutsi refugees resided.Footnote ⁴⁸ Zablon Nthamburi also contends that Kigezi had long been a strong hold of the Balokole movement. As Kolini further maintains, the Revival has returned and will bring healing to Rwanda from the genocide. The same sentiment was also expressed to this writer by many pastors and officials across the dioceses.Footnote ⁴⁹

This claim is somewhat at odds though with the most recent scholarship on the church's history in Rwanda prior to the genocide. Timothy Longman notes that while nearly all of the pre-genocide Anglican leadership, including the bishops of Kigali and Shyira dioceses, was vocal in its support of the Habyarimana regime, many rank and file parishioners remained a part of what he terms, in Kinyarwanda, a new Abarokore movement. The new Abarokore movement, which re-emerged in the 1980s following a revival at Kigeme in 1971–72, drew support from both the East African Revival and many charismatic North American churches. Throughout the pre-genocide years, the Abarokore was often at odds with its church leaders for insisting upon a code of moral conduct that condemned corruption and political involvement. They often broke church expectations by openly criticizing pastors and church leaders, calling them to task for the “immorality they saw within the churches” and presented “an alternative vision of church life.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In 1986, three hundred members of the Abarokore and several other Christian sects were brought to trial for refusing to pay the state-required membership dues in the ruling MRND party and for failing to venerate the Rwandan state and its symbols of sovereignty. When the genocide began, a disproportionate number of the Abarokore, including soldiers and policemen, refused to participate. A number of witnesses reported to Longman how people sometimes saved Tutsis from the genocide because they were “umurokore,” a member of the Abarokore. So despite Kolini's claims, elements of the Revival survived in pre-genocide Rwanda, questioning the policies of Habyarimana's regime and their church leaders' collusion with its policies. Interestingly, several interviewees admitted that some Hutus affected by the Revival spirit did not participate in the genocidal killings, and indeed the Anglican hierarchy today includes a small number of Hutu bishops, most prominently Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje, formally Bishop of Byumba Diocese.Footnote ⁵¹

Regardless, Kolini and many key figures in the current Anglican leadership were not present in Rwanda in the years prior to the genocide. In 1996, the Anglican Consultative Council instituted a new church hierarchy to replace the discredited, and, with one exception, Hutu leadership lost during the genocide.Footnote ⁵² Kolini became the Bishop of Kigali and the Archbishop of PEAR in 1997. Others, such as Rucyahana, former Bishop of Shyira Diocese, followed in his wake. Most of the bishops and clergy in PEAR are Tutsis who represent the revivalist wing of the church. In addition to Kolini and Rucyahana, their numbers include Bishop Augustin Ahimana of Kivu Diocese, Bishop Alexis Bilindabagabo of Gahini Diocese, Bishop Geoffrey Rwubusisi of Cyangugu Diocese, and Josias Sendegeya, former Bishop of Kibungo Diocese. This author has met and spoke with all of the aforementioned figures, including Rwaje, and all of them share a common belief in the Revivalist persuasion. Generally, they are, or have been, prominent spokespersons to a wider audience outside of Rwanda, such as AMIA, and all of them endorse the RPF's version of Rwanda's history and present condition. Kolini, Rucyahana and Bilindabagabo have authored books.Footnote ⁵³ Many have a shared experience in the refugee camps of either Uganda or elsewhere. In effect, the Balokole now occupy the highest levels of Anglican leadership in Rwanda.

Another prominent theme in the church's recounting of the Revival's history was the alleged harmony between Hutus and Tutsis. Nearly always, when asked what the Revival means for Rwanda, the first point made was the unity it brought between the two groups and the same revival spirit would unite Rwanda again. In actuality, the supposed unity brought about by the Revival was remembered far more than the specific practices of it. For example, several interviewees were unclear and in disagreement about whether the so-called “sign gifts” of the Holy Spirit were practiced by the Balokole at the start of the Revival.

But the remembrance of the Revival as a time of unity between Hutus and Tutsis is problematic in several respects. The official version of Rwanda's history, endorsed by the RPF regime in Kigali, asserts Rwanda had always been a harmonious country with no conflict or differences between Hutus and Tutsis prior to the racialization of the country under Belgian rule in the 1920s. This author, though, is in agreement with numerous Rwanda scholars, such as Catherine Newbury, Alison Des Forges, and Jan Vansina, who claim the distinction between Hutus and Tutsis was firmly established by the end of the nineteenth century during the reign of Mwami Rwabugiri. Following their arguments, Johan Pottier argues the RPF's version of the past is used by the Tutsi-dominated regime to mask past oppression of the Hutus and blame the genocide on Europeans.Footnote ⁵⁴

Moreover, the church itself in its earlier years embraced the Tutsis as a distinctly higher class, inadvertently helping to sow the seeds of Rwanda's tortured modern history. In his first letter to the “Friends of Ruanda” in November, 1920, Smith reported, “The Batutsi, the ruling class, are a race distinct from the negro population.” Later he suggested the Batutsi are “thought to have migrated from ancient Egypt or Abyssinia [Ethiopia],” a wide-spread belief among Europeans which had a chilling echo in 1994 when Hutu-power proponent Leon Mugesera exhorted Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia, this time by the “river route.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Joe Church was endorsing this view of the Tutsis as late as 1937.Footnote ⁵⁶ In all of this, the Anglican missionaries were influenced, as where many Europeans, by the writings of Charles Gabriel Seligman who later popularized the Hamitic Hypothesis in his 1930 book The Races of Africa, which held that any evidence of higher civilization in Africa, as opposed to the “inferior negro civilization,” was the result of the biblical Ham's offspring who migrated southwards from the Horn of Africa. Thus, Tutsis were privileged throughout colonial history as being a superior caste to the “negroid” Hutus.

In a perhaps unexpected way, the contention by many Anglican Church figures of the Revival bringing unity between Hutus and Tutsis serves to undermine the official version of Rwanda's history, a version that PEAR does not challenge otherwise. Church figures publically contend there are no more Hutus and Tutsis, only Rwandans. Privately, they know otherwise, although it's technically illegal in Rwanda to even ask. At a dinner conversation in Byumba Diocese with Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje, this author was corrected and gently chastised on this point when he used the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Later, and privately, Rwaje admitted he “used to be a Hutu,” the only bishop in Rwanda, incidentally, of whom this is true.Footnote ⁵⁷

In Gahini, the very birthplace of the Revival, several interviewees spoke glowingly of their Tutsi heritage. One diocesan official, quietly and with evident pride, pointed out Kagame's private retreat home, overlooking the parish grounds from across Lake Muhazi, and claimed it was the site of the first Tutsi kingdom in the 1500s. He was generally correct in this. Kagame's home, and Gahini Parish, is indeed very close to Buganza, where the ruling Nyinginya (Tutsi) Dynasty was born in the sixteenth century. With its proximity to Buganza, it is an interesting choice for a retreat home as Kagame himself, according to Paul Rusesabagina, of Hotel Rwanda fame, is from the Abeega clan.Footnote ⁵⁸

When Mwami Rwabugiri died in 1895, following his expansion of the Nyinginya Kingdom and subsequent entrenchment of Hutu-Tutsi identities, his son and designated successor Rutarindwa was overthrown in a violent coup known in Rwandan history as the Rucunshu.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Rucunshu was orchestrated by members of the rival Abeega clan who killed Rutarindwa and replaced him with Musinga, one of their own who came from another of Rwabugiri's wives, Kanjogera, herself of the Abeega clan. To outsiders un-studied in Rwandan history, the Lake Muhazi region represents the Rwanda projected to the outside world by the RPF: peaceful, quiet and bucolic. But to Rwandans and scholars who know otherwise, Lake Muhazi, and Kagame's home there, is a powerful symbol of the Tutsi-controlled Nyinginya monarchy.

These conversations and the very memory of the Revival itself supports the conclusions of many Rwanda observers that despite the public claims of the RPF, Hutu and Tutsi identities not only existed prior to colonialism and were reinforced by state and church teachings but remain intact and privately recognized. None of this per se means the Revival was not a time of Hutu-Tutsi unity but as the church presently promotes this history, it is also contradicting the official version of Rwanda's past so assiduously maintained by the government. In this, one sees a reflection of Lars Waldorf's argument of there being “an inherent tension between the government's forward-looking reconciliation narrative, which seeks to erase ethnicity, and its backward-looking genocide narrative, which inevitably emphasizes ethnicity.”Footnote ⁶⁰