Africa's Forgotten Fires: What the Continent's Revivals Teach Us

When Christians write the story of revival, the same names appear. The Great Awakenings in America. The Prayer Meeting Revival of 1858. Azusa Street in 1906. The Welsh Revival of 1904. The Korean Revival of 1907. Wesley and Whitefield in eighteenth-century England.

Africa seldom appears on the list. Professor Gary Maxey finds this a regrettable gap. He argues that no honest history of revival can be written without giving Africa significant space, and he asks African believers to learn this history and never forget it.

South Africa: revival from the 1820s

The Grahamstown Awakening of 1822, repeated in 1831, brought revival to Methodist circles and then to surrounding villages. Both Europeans and local people were touched. Under Robert Moffat of the London Missionary Society, the Bantu of Botswana were deeply affected. In the 1860s a wave of revivals among the Dutch Reformed Church followed the great awakenings in America and Britain.

Later came a long line of revival preachers, among them Bishop William Taylor, John G. Lake and the Welsh revivalist Rees Howells. Howells's influence reached a young German student named Reinhard Bonnke. In the middle of the twentieth century Nicholas Bhengu, sometimes called the Black Billy Graham, saw revivals in Port Elizabeth and East London.

East Africa: fifty years of fire

In the late 1920s a movement began in Rwanda and Uganda that spread through Kenya and Tanzania. It lasted about half a century. Professor Maxey calls it one of the greatest revivals of modern times. It stressed full surrender to Christ, confession, and the return of stolen goods. It crossed tribal lines and carried joy and liberation to thousands.

Bishop Festo Kivengere, who was converted in this revival, was once asked why it lasted so long. His answer was short. It is God's work, not a technique. It is a movement that cannot be contained, renewal within renewal, an attitude toward the Lord, the Bible, the fellowship and the Spirit.

The Congo, Sierra Leone and the Niger Delta

In the Congo, revival began as early as the 1880s under C. T. Studd and the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, and echoes continued into the 1930s. In 1944 fire from the East African revival spilled into the northeast. The most dramatic outbreak came in 1953, with copious tears, shaking, dancing, praise and prayer. Thousands were changed, and holiness became a central emphasis.

Sierra Leone saw stirrings among resettled Africans. In Nigeria's Niger Delta, Garrick Sokari Braide led a movement between 1909 and 1918 in which baptized Christians grew thirteen-fold. Braide called people to cast away their idols, give up charms and confess sin before seeking healing.

What the pattern shows

Professor Maxey notes the same pattern in every case. Mighty surges of preaching, repentance, confession and restitution came first. Transformed lives followed, and then dynamic evangelism and missions. Revival never stopped at feelings. It changed conduct and sent people out.

Several of these movements were led by African men such as Braide, Bhengu and Kivengere.

A reason to hope

If you grew up believing revival is something that happens in other countries, this history corrects you. God has visited Africa repeatedly. He did not wait for permission from the West.

So read this history. Teach it in your youth group and Bible class. Tell your children about Grahamstown, Rwanda, Kampala and the Niger Delta. People who know that God has done it before pray with more faith that he will do it again.

Drawn from the teaching of Professor Gary S. Maxey.