The Global Church Era · 1930s-1970s · Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania
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The East African Revival began around 1930 at the mission station at Gahini in Rwanda, where African and missionary Christians started confessing sin to one another out loud and in public. Those who joined were called balokole, the saved ones. It spread through fellowship meetings and through conventions, at Kabale from 1935 and then elsewhere, with testimony given openly and the hymn 'Tukutendereza Yesu' sung wherever they gathered. It ran through Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania as well as Rwanda, and it was led by Africans inside the mission Anglicanism that had planted the church — often against it, since a movement that asked bishops and catechists alike to confess in public was not always welcome. Its record is unusually communal: the testimony culture generated its own written material, and oral-history projects are still gathering the rest from people who remember it.