Festo Kivengere

On February 10, 1973, three men in Uganda stood before a firing squad. They had been sentenced for political crimes against the government of President Idi Amin. According to Festo Kivengere, the charge was false. They came from his diocese, and together with two other pastors he was allowed to speak with them one last time.

That is how he told it later in his book. The men said that they had received Jesus in prison. They asked him to let their families know that they were forgiven. About three thousand people watched as the shots were fired.

The bishop would not forget it. Four years later he himself had to flee from the same president, and that same year his book appeared with a title he was asked about again and again: I Love Idi Amin. He became one of the best-known preachers in Africa and was nicknamed the Billy Graham of Africa. He himself spoke above all about the cross.

It began among the cows, in the hills of the southwest.

A COWHERD IN KIGEZI

Festo Kivengere was born around 1919. The sources do not agree on the exact year: 1918, 1919 and even 1921 are mentioned. He grew up in Rujumbura, in the north of Kigezi, a mountainous region in the southwest of Uganda. It lies in what is now Rukungiri District, not far from the borders with Rwanda and Congo.

His family was a ruling family among semi-nomadic cattle herders, and it was not Christian. As a child Festo herded cows. In those years Uganda was a British protectorate. The British governed the country through local kings and chiefs, and missionaries of the Anglican Church Missionary Society had founded schools and churches there since 1877. The Anglican church is the church that grew out of the Church of England, with bishops and a set liturgy.

At around ten, Festo went to a mission school. There he heard about Jesus for the first time and was baptized. According to a later biography, he was disappointed. He had thought he would change after baptism, and he noticed nothing.

According to the Ugandan newspaper Daily Monitor, he then went to Kinyasano, Kigezi High School and Mbarara High School, and between 1938 and 1940 to Bishop Tucker Theological College in Mukono, near Kampala. In 1938 his mother died. In secondary school he had left the faith behind. He drank and smoked heavily, according to the short biography by Frank Retief.

PEOPLE WHO CONFESSED THEIR SINS OUT LOUD

While Festo was letting go of the faith, something unusual was happening in the churches around him. From the 1920s and 1930s a movement swept through East Africa that later came to be called the East African Revival. A revival is a period in which many people come to a living faith at the same time and churches come back to life.

It began with a Ugandan layman, Simeoni Nsibambi, and a British missionary doctor, Joe Church. They met in 1929 and prayed together. In 1933, during a convention at Gahini, in Rwanda, people publicly confessed their sins and found forgiveness. The movement spread to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Its followers were called balokole: the saved ones. They mostly stayed in the Anglican church, but they also met in small groups to read the Bible and to tell each other honestly what was going wrong in their lives.

In 1935 the revival reached Kigezi, during a week of Bible study on Rugarama hill near Kabale. According to Retief, the churches in North Kigezi became so full that people gathered under trees and in houses.

Not everyone was pleased. Festo’s uncle Karegyesa paid men to beat Christians. He stopped when the men said they could no longer sleep at night. Some of them later came to faith themselves. In those years Festo shared his uncle’s dislike.

A NINE-YEAR-OLD BROTHER IN THE CHAPEL

After his training Festo became a teacher at a mission school. Retief tells of an incident from that time. Once Festo had to lead a chapel service and had nothing to say. His nine-year-old brother stood up and spoke, and according to this story about twenty boys gave their lives to the Lord.

He knew, he said later, that he had nothing to give, and the boys knew it too. Living with him at the school were his stepsister Eva, his stepbrother Jonathan and his niece Kyabyarwa. The girls belonged to the revival and prayed for him.

A BICYCLE ON THE ROAD

What followed is the best-known story from his youth, and it comes from his own mouth, through his biographers. In early October 1941 Festo was thinking about suicide. One Sunday his fourteen-year-old niece said in church that God had promised her and Eva that their prayer for Festo would be answered that weekend. Festo walked off angry and spent the rest of the day drinking with his uncle.

That afternoon a friend came towards him on a bicycle. His name was also Festo, Festo Rwamunahe. He said that three hours earlier Jesus had become a reality to him. Then he asked Kivengere’s forgiveness for three specific things he had done to him.

At home Festo went down on his knees. He saw, he said later, Jesus on the cross. Not a helpless criminal. In his own words: “I saw my God slaughtered for my sin.” He knew he was forgiven.

The Billy Graham Museum at Wheaton College dates his conversion to 1939, during the revival. Retief gives October 1941. I have not been able to establish which year is correct. That he came to faith within the revival, and that a friend who asked for forgiveness played a part in it, he told himself.

Have you ever had to ask someone’s forgiveness for something small and specific? Then you know how hard that is. For Festo, his faith began with a conversation like that on a road. It would also become the heart of his preaching.

TWELVE YEARS IN DODOMA

In 1946 Festo went with the Church Missionary Society to Tanganyika, present-day Tanzania. According to the Daily Monitor, he was a teacher for twelve years in Dodoma, in the middle of that country. Around the same time he married Merab. They were married for forty-two years and had four daughters: Peace, Joy, Hope and Charity.

In the revival, Africans and Europeans also confessed their distrust of each other. At a commemoration in Kabale in 2025, a Ugandan professor told how Nsibambi and Church had once confessed their fear and suspicion to each other in tears.

In 1959 Festo became assistant inspector of the Church of Uganda’s schools in Kigezi, and from 1961 inspector. He earned a teaching diploma from the University of London.

“DON'T BOTHER TO TRANSLATE LITERALLY”

At some point in these years Festo translated the sermons of the American evangelist Billy Graham into Swahili. According to Frederick Quinn, in his book African Saints, Graham told him he did not need to translate word for word: “Don’t bother to translate literally.” The two became lifelong friends.

It is a small story. I like it because it shows that Festo was already a preacher with a voice of his own early on.

His road to ordination was not a straight one. According to the historian Louise Pirouet, he was at first turned down for ordination in Uganda. He was ordained deacon in the United States and earned a theology degree at Pittsburgh Seminary. In Uganda he became a priest; Pirouet gives 1967, the Daily Monitor 1965. In the 1970s Christianity Today wrote that he had been traveling the world as an evangelist since 1962.

In 1969 the South African evangelist Michael Cassidy invited him to build a team in East Africa for his organization African Enterprise. Around 1971 this became African Evangelistic Enterprise, with Festo as its leader in East Africa. The aim was to spread the revival across the whole continent.

A BISHOP IN THE DAYS OF AMIN

In 1971 General Idi Amin seized power in Uganda in a military coup. He was a Muslim and allowed the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches to operate only under his supervision. No one knows exactly how many people were killed under his rule. African Enterprise mentions an estimate of 400,000.

In November 1972 Festo was consecrated Bishop of Kigezi, with his seat in Kabale. He remained an evangelist as well and kept up his work for African Enterprise.

Then came February 1973, and the three men before the firing squad. Quinn writes that Festo confronted Amin about this execution.

Meanwhile he kept speaking about the revival. On July 21, 1974, he stood up at the great International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland. The transcript has been preserved. He told how people divided by tribe, race and doctrine returned to the cross: “The theme of the East African revival was the cross, and we needed it!” Then he asked the East Africans in the hall to come forward and sing.

WAITING OUTSIDE THE BUILDING

In 1977 the Church of Uganda celebrated the centenary of the gospel’s arrival in the country. It was also the year in which the tension between church and government snapped. According to Christian History, in January 1977 Festo preached a sermon on the value of life in which he denounced the violence.

In February the Anglican bishops wrote a letter of protest to Amin about killings and arbitrary rule. Archbishop Janani Luwum stood behind it, and Festo signed it too. According to the Daily Monitor he even drafted it, but the paper presents that as something people say. Luwum himself is the subject of another chapter of this book.

On February 16, 1977, Luwum and the other bishops were summoned to a gathering in Kampala. Luwum was arrested, together with two government ministers. According to Tim Stafford in Christian History, Festo was one of the last to see him alive. He waited outside the building where Luwum was being interrogated, until guards sent him away at gunpoint. The next day the government announced that Luwum and the ministers had died in a car accident. Later it emerged that he had been shot dead.

OVER THE HILLS BY NIGHT

Festo was told that he would be next. Christians around him urged him to leave. According to a Canadian account from 2025, he refused at first because he did not want to abandon his flock, until they kept insisting.

He and Merab drove as far as they could. Then they walked by night along forest paths through the mountains to Rwanda, where they were taken in. The sources do not fully agree on the route: a few name Kenya or Tanzania as the country they fled to. Rwanda was probably the first step, and Nairobi in Kenya the place where they ended up. He could no longer take part in the memorial service for Luwum, which reportedly drew some 45,000 people.

In Nairobi he found the African Enterprise office full of Ugandan refugees. With colleagues he started RETURN, a relief program for Ugandan refugees. According to African Enterprise itself, it paid for more than three hundred scholarships at universities abroad. In that period he had no contact with people in Uganda. A letter or a phone call could put them in danger.

GOOD FRIDAY IN LONDON

On their way to the African Enterprise office in California, Festo and Merab traveled through London. On Good Friday they went to All Souls Church, Langham Place, the church of the well-known British preacher John Stott. The sermon was on the words of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

What happened inside him we know from his own book. He noticed that he had become hard and bitter. The Holy Spirit showed him, he wrote, that he had to ask for grace to love Amin more. According to Christian Today, he prayed there: “Lord, I am here and now forgiving Idi Amin.” In a later book he wrote that he got up that day with a liberated heart.

Look at the order of events. He did not forgive because it was over. Amin was still in power. His friend had just been murdered, his diocese was unsafe, and he did not know whether he could ever go back. How do you forgive someone who is still carrying on?

Still in 1977 his little book I Love Idi Amin appeared, written with the retired missionary Dorothy Smoker. At press conferences he was asked how he could mean that. According to African Enterprise, he answered that he might not like Amin, but that as a Christian he was obliged to forgive him. When someone asked what he would do if he stood face to face with Amin and were handed a revolver, he said he would hand the weapon back: “My weapon is love.”

The book was no plea to look away. It described the persecution, the imprisoned church leaders who sang, and the Catholic and Protestant clergy who found each other. He wrote: “A living church cannot be destroyed by fire or by guns.” At a conference in Germany he put it even more briefly: “A bullet can kill, but a bullet cannot heal.”

Anyone who finds that too naive should know that in those same years he worked with Ugandan exiles who wanted Amin gone. The Ugandan jurist George Kanyeihamba, then a lecturer in England, said that in 1977 Festo sent word, through his daughter Hope among others, asking him to help get rid of Amin. For Festo, forgiving went together with resisting injustice. What he refused to do was hate.

BACK TO RUGARAMA

In 1979 Amin was driven out. Festo returned to Kigezi and his diocese. He was now internationally known and traveled to America, Australia and Britain. He became a spokesman for the church of Uganda.

But he did not keep quiet towards the new rulers either. Under Milton Obote’s second government, human rights were violated again. Festo said so out loud. When thousands of Rwandan refugees in Uganda were driven from their homes in 1982, he organized help. Pirouet calls that unpopular and dangerous. He also warned that Obote was favoring the Anglican church and so setting Catholics and Protestants against each other.

In 1983 he did something that was officially opposed in the Anglican world. In the cathedral on Rugarama he ordained three women as priests. The first was Grace Ndyabahika. According to a Ugandan historian, Festo said in a meeting that waiting for the Church of England would take until the end of time. His diocese stood behind him. Seven years later the Church of Uganda unanimously accepted the ordination of women.

You may see that differently from him. I mention it because it fits who he was: here too he did not wait for London’s approval.

A COFFIN IN A CHARTERED PLANE

Festo developed leukemia. According to the Daily Monitor, he died on May 18, 1988, at Nairobi Hospital in Kenya, sixty-nine years old. Michael Cassidy, his friend and fellow leader of African Enterprise, had one last meeting with him in the hospital.

Cassidy and other leaders of African Enterprise flew the coffin to Uganda in a chartered plane. There was a service in Namirembe Cathedral in Kampala. The government wanted to bury him in the national heroes’ cemetery in Kampala. The family chose Kabale, in Kigezi.

In the Billy Graham Museum in Wheaton hangs a banner for him with a red panel, for the years of persecution, and a sentence of his own: “The Cross is the flesh and bones, the heartbeat of evangelism.”

I think of those three men in February 1973. They died while three thousand people looked on, and they wanted their families to know that they were forgiven. The bishop who had spoken with them carried that message for the rest of his life. He took it to Lausanne, to London, to Nairobi and back to Kabale.

In Kabale, where a week of Bible study began on Rugarama hill in 1935, he lies buried.