Christian revival movements have played an ambiguous role in social and political history. Their devotees are usually pietists, women and men of exceptionally intense vision and often narrow horizons. The revival agenda is at heart a backward-looking one, concerned with the restoration of a lost apostolic zeal and the rebuilding of what has broken down. In comparison with the renewal of spiritual life, programs of political or social reform appear redundant. Yet enthusiasts for the revival of ‘genuine’ piety make those in positions of power uncomfortable. The revivalists' demand for repentance and repudiation of past sin threatens to bring into the limelight what respectable people wish to keep under wraps. Existing moral norms, communal loyalties, and even structures of authority are called into radical question. Derek Peterson's brilliant study shows how this pattern was exemplified in the East African Revival that broke surface at the Anglican mission at Gahini in Rwanda in December 1933 and, over the next three decades, spread throughout East Africa, affecting all Protestant denominations. Its missionary mentors were conservative British Evangelical Anglicans, devotees of the Keswick holiness Conventions. They were Christians of fundamentalist tendency, with no sympathy for the Social Gospel and with their eyes set on the imminent return of Christ. In Rwanda, they were unwavering supporters of the monarchy and chiefly tradition. Yet, as Peterson shows, in African hands the message of the balokole (as the ‘saved ones’ were often called from their Luganda name) acquired subversive undertones that its zealous exponents did not always recognize. Even the colonial authorities, at least at national and metropolitan levels, took little notice of the movement: the archives in Nairobi, Kampala, and Dar es Salaam are largely devoid of references to the Revival, and the files of the Colonial Office contain only occasional expressions of disapproval of the Revival's encouragement of ‘dissension’ and ‘rowdyism’. But for chiefs, village elders, and the local organizers of ethnic politics, it was different. The Revival forged new ties of loyalty that relativized all previous obligations of kinship, ancestry, or nationhood. It undermined chiefly authority, subverted the subordination of women, and contravened customary notions of respect and modesty. The heart of the Revival experience were public meetings in which those moved by the Holy Spirit were expected to testify openly to their sins; many of those sins were sexual, so that the confessions made by some necessarily involved the public indictment of others. The Revival motto of ‘walking in the light’ necessarily involved exposure and challenge. Here was nakedness of the soul of a shocking kind, analogous, according to one informant, to the shameless wazi wazi bodily exposure of the Haya prostitutes who plied their trade on the streets of Nairobi.

Through analysis of an impressive range of church and government archives in East Africa and beyond, Petersen uncovers the intricate web of preaching and response spun by revivalists as they energetically bicycled from town to town. They invited their hearers to compile painstaking inventories of their sins and submit the authenticity of their confessions to the courts of the assembly of the saved. This was spiritual accountancy and spiritual forensics on a scale that left a lasting mark on the cultural and political landscapes of the region. During the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya, revival evangelists regularly ministered in the detention camps, holding ‘cleansing’ services and seeking confessions of their detainees' dark deeds. Later, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, testimonies of atrocity offered to the gacaca courts also bore the enduring imprint of Revival typology.

Peterson’s book ranges widely, crossing ethnic and national boundaries with abandon just as the revivalists themselves did. It also covers a broad spectrum of themes, in places perhaps rather too broad for the coherence of the narrative – Chapter Seven is about the efforts of Haya patriots to counter the threat posed by the extent of Haya women's involvement in prostitution, and seems only tangentially connected to the history of the Revival. At times, too, some readers may feel that Peterson pushes an ingenious argument beyond the limits of the evidence. Did Buhaya converts really structure their confessions on the model of the law courts (184), when the revival model of conversion was structured according to a quite different judicial sequence, in which the prior declaration of divine judgment led to the self-diagnosis of offence, the self-abnegation of public repentance, and finally to the climax of the communal pronouncement that the offender had been saved, marked by the joyful singing of the universal revival Luganda anthem, ‘Tukutendereza Yesu’? Nonetheless this is a richly rewarding book that will provide continuing stimulus for many historians of East African societies, both those interested in the processes whereby missionary traditions became radically indigenized and those for whom religion is only a subsidiary concern.