Biography
Blasio Kigozi was born around 1905 in Buganda, in what is now Uganda. He grew up in the years when the Christian church was newly established in the country, and he was educated in mission schools. He became a teacher and a catechist in the Anglican church. He was a thoughtful young man, serious and eager to grow in his faith. He later trained for the ministry, and in the late 1920s he was sent to work in the mission station at Gahini, in neighboring Rwanda.
Gahini was a station of the Church Missionary Society where a young doctor named Joe Church was establishing a hospital. Kigozi came to work alongside him as a teacher and evangelist. He had been burdened for some time by the coldness and nominal faith that he saw in the churches. He felt that many church members had little real knowledge of Christ and that the church needed a fresh work of the Spirit. He and Joe Church began to pray together. The two men were different in background, but they shared a longing for revival.
In those years, Kigozi spent time studying and praying about the need for a deeper walk with God. He wrote letters to his friends in Uganda to urge them to pray. He called for a church that would confess its sin, break down barriers of tribe and race, and walk in the light of Christ. He believed that revival would come only when believers dealt honestly with their sins and humbled themselves before one another. He asked God to make him a man who would help.
He and Joe Church found that when they spoke honestly about their own failures, the people responded. Africans and Europeans began to meet together as equals, to confess to one another and to share what God was doing. In the early 1930s, a spirit of revival began to move through Gahini and the surrounding area. People came under conviction of sin and sought forgiveness. They began to speak publicly of their salvation, and they were called the saved ones. The movement spread to Uganda and Kenya, Tanzania and beyond, and became known as the East African Revival.
Kigozi did not live to see its full extent. In 1935 he returned to Uganda, and in early 1936 he fell ill with relapsing fever, a disease carried by ticks, which was common in the region. He died in January 1936, when he was about thirty years old. He was a young man with a short life, and he had done little that the world noticed. Those who knew him said that the vision of revival was his, and that he held on to it with faith, even when others doubted.
The revival that followed his death reached into millions of lives and shaped the church in East Africa for generations. It brought unity between peoples who had been divided, strengthened the faith of the church and inspired many to take the gospel to others. Kigozi is remembered as the man who helped to light the fire. His story reminds us that a single faithful life, lived in prayer, can be the beginning of a great work.