African Initiative And Inspiration In The East African Revival 1930 1950

The active agents in the multiethnic, multicultural East African Revival are African leaders who forge a new, distinctly African Christian spirituality that precipitates the moral and spiritual transformation of countless individuals throughout the region.

From the 1930s the East African Revival influenced Christian expression in East Central Africa and around the globe. This book analyses influences upon the movement and changes wrought by it in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Congo, highlighting its impact on spirituality, political discourse and culture. A variety of scholarly approaches to a complex and changing phenomenon are juxtaposed with the narration of personal stories of testimony, vital to spirituality and expression of the revival, which give a sense of the dynamism of the movement. Those yet unacquainted with the revival will find a helpful introduction to its history. Those more familiar with the movement will discover new perspectives on its influence.

Renewal movement within Evangelical churches in East Africa during the late 1920s and 1930s. The revival contributed to the significant growth of the church in East Africa in the 1940s through the 1970s.

Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival shows how, in the era of African political independence, cosmopolitan Christian converts struggled with East Africa's patriots over the definition of culture and community. The book traces the history of the East African Revival, an evangelical movement that spread through much of eastern and central Africa. Its converts offered a subversive reading of culture, disavowing their compatriots and disregarding their obligations to kin. They earned the ire of East Africa's patriots, who worked to root people in place as inheritors of ancestral wisdom. This book casts religious conversion in a new light: not as an inward reorientation of belief, but as a political action that opened up novel paths of self-narration and unsettled the inventions of tradition.

"This book focuses on the struggle between cosmopolitan Christian converts and east African patriots to define culture and community in the mid-twentieth century"--