Janani Luwum

On Wednesday, February 16, 1977, the archbishop of Uganda stood in Kampala between soldiers and a large crowd. “Confessions” were read out that day. In them he was named as someone who had smuggled weapons for a coup against President Idi Amin. He was not allowed to answer. According to a report from the Anglican news service, he only shook his head. Soldiers shouted that he should be killed.

Next to him stood Festo Kivengere, bishop of Kigezi in the southwest of the country. To him Janani Luwum whispered a few words that have since been repeated in churches all over the world: “They are going to kill me. I am not afraid.”

The other bishops were allowed to leave. Luwum was called back. Kivengere waited outside until guards sent him away at gunpoint. None of them saw the archbishop alive again.

A day later the radio said he had died in a car accident. That was not true. He had been shot.

In Uganda, Janani Luwum became the first martyr of his church’s second century. His country now remembers him every year with a national holiday. In London his statue stands above the West Door of Westminster Abbey. He was a herd boy from the north, a teacher who only truly came to faith at twenty-six, and an archbishop who stood firm when standing firm became dangerous.

His story begins with the cattle, in a village close to the border with what is now South Sudan.

A BOY WITH THE HERD IN MUCWINI

Janani Luwum was born in Mucwini, a village in East Acholi, in the north of Uganda. It lies in the present-day district of Kitgum. The sources do not agree on the year of his birth. Most give 1922, a few 1924.

Uganda was a British protectorate at the time, a territory under British rule. It would remain so until 1962. The Acholi are a people in the north of the country. Christianity was still young there. The first missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, an English Anglican mission organization, had arrived in the south of Uganda in 1877. The north followed later.

Luwum’s father was called Eliya Okello. He was one of the first Christians in the region and later became a catechist, a layman who teaches the faith in a village and helps lead the church. The family was poor. As a boy, Janani herded the family’s cattle. He did not go to school until he was about ten.

He learned quickly. He went to Gulu High School and then to Boroboro Teacher Training College near Lira. According to the Daily Monitor, he completed that training in 1941 and became a teacher at the primary school in Puranga.

A CHURCHGOER WHO DID NOT YET BELIEVE

Luwum grew up in the church. He knew the hymns and the prayers. But his later secretary Margaret Ford, who wrote the first biography of him in 1978, was honest about it: “He was not at this time a converted Christian.” His faith was a habit.

Do you recognize that? You can sit in a pew for years without it ever reaching your heart.

On January 6, 1948, that changed. An Acholi couple came to his village to preach. According to the Daily Monitor, their names were Yusto and Josephine Otunno. They belonged to the East African Revival, a movement that had been spreading through Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania since the 1930s. The people touched by it called themselves balokole: the saved ones. They usually stayed members of their own church, often the Anglican one. But they put the emphasis on openly confessing sin, on a personal encounter with Jesus and on bearing witness in front of everyone.

That day Luwum confessed his sins and gave his life to Jesus. The date appears in Ugandan, British and church sources. He was twenty-six, or twenty-four, depending on which birth year is correct.

A TEACHER WHO DISTURBED THE PEACE

What happened next was typical of the balokole. Luwum started preaching at once. He warned people against drink and tobacco. The local authorities did not like that. According to Westminster Abbey, the authorities saw his preaching as a disturbance of public order.

The Daily Monitor goes further. According to that newspaper, he was arrested with eight others and held in Kitgum. For two days they were given no food. Luwum is said to have told his guards that he loved them. I have found this last part only in this one newspaper, without any source given. It fits who he later became, but I cannot check it.

There is another story, told by the Christian History Institute: that as a young believer he preached from a tree to fellow students. That too appears in only one source.

What is certain is that his life turned around. In January 1949 he left for the theological school in Buwalasi, in the east of Uganda. At home he left behind his wife Mary, with a young daughter.

A BICYCLE AND TWENTY-FOUR CONGREGATIONS

In 1950 he came back as a catechist and was attached to St. Philip’s Church in Gulu. In 1953 he went to Buwalasi again, this time to train for the ministry. On December 21, 1955, he was ordained deacon. A year later he was ordained priest. An Anglican priest is what many other churches would call a minister or pastor. A few sources give earlier years for the ordinations, but most give 1955 and 1956.

He was put in charge of a vast area. According to the Episcopal Church in the United States, it covered twenty-four congregations. The Christian History Institute writes that he served a poor rural area some forty miles wide by bicycle. Much of his time went into settling quarrels between groups and tribes.

Another path was open to him as well. According to the same source, he could have been given a leading role in his tribe. He chose the church.

Luwum was twice given the chance to study in England. First a year at St Augustine’s College in Canterbury. According to the Daily Monitor, he returned in 1959, to the parish of Palwo near Lira. In 1962 he became vice principal of the school in Buwalasi where he had studied himself. After that he studied at the London College of Divinity. In 1965 he became principal of Buwalasi.

These were the years in which Uganda became independent. In 1962 the British left. In September 1966 he became provincial secretary of the Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire. Boga lies in the east of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was a church that stretched across four countries.

In 1968, according to the Daily Monitor, he attended the Lambeth Conference, the gathering of Anglican bishops from all over the world held every ten years, as an adviser.

BISHOP IN A STADIUM

On January 25, 1969, Janani Luwum was consecrated in Gulu as bishop of the new diocese of Northern Uganda. It was an open-air service in Pece Stadium. Among the guests were President Milton Obote and the army commander Idi Amin. Two years later the one would drive out the other.

As bishop, Luwum worked for leprosy patients in Gulu. He brought a German group to his diocese to train farmers in agriculture, so that the church would also have its own income. He was a practical man. He preached, but he also kept an eye on the harvest.

On January 25, 1971, Idi Amin seized power in a coup. The German group left. Luwum kept preaching and traveled around to his clergy to encourage them.

A COUNTRY UNDER THE SHADOW OF AMIN

Under Idi Amin, Uganda lived in fear. Thousands of people were picked up, beaten, held without trial or killed. The violence fell especially on the Acholi and the Langi, the peoples from the north where Luwum himself came from. In 1972 Amin expelled the Asian population from the country.

Amin came from a largely Muslim people. Even so, it is too simple to call the conflict that followed a struggle between Islam and Christianity. After the raid on Luwum’s house, Catholic and Protestant bishops protested together with Muslim imams. Luwum himself brought religious leaders together, Christians and Muslims, to talk about human rights.

In May 1974 he was elected archbishop. On June 9, 1974, he was enthroned, succeeding Erica Sabiti. He was the third archbishop of the province and the second African in that position. According to the Christian History Institute, Amin did not come to the enthronement.

“I AM PREPARED TO DIE IN THE ARMY OF JESUS”

As archbishop, Luwum wanted to reform his church. He warned it not to conform to what he called the powers of darkness. Westminster Abbey preserves one sentence of his that sets the tone: “I am prepared to die in the army of Jesus.”

He was not a man of grand gestures. The Ugandan historians Tom Tuma and Phares Mutibwa described him as a gentle, peaceful and humble man. According to the Anglican news service, he often went himself to the State Research Bureau, Amin’s notorious secret police, to get prisoners released. About his own safety he said: “I face daily being picked up by the soldiers.” He would keep on preaching.

Not everyone agreed with his approach. According to the Christian History Institute, some grumbled that he cooperated too much with Amin. Luwum answered that he was not taking the government’s side. On the contrary, he was telling the president what the church disapproved of. That is how narrow the road is for a church leader under a dictator. Whoever talks is called an accomplice. So is whoever keeps silent.

I find that a question you cannot quickly brush aside. What would you do, if the only door to the prisoners led through the palace of their tormentor?

A CHRISTMAS SERMON TAKEN OFF THE AIR

In August 1976 soldiers stormed Makerere University in Kampala. Luwum chaired the group of Christian leaders who then wrote a memorandum of protest against murder and rape carried out with the knowledge of the government.

At Christmas 1976 he preached on the radio. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, he spoke about the victory of Christians through suffering. The broadcast was cut off before he had finished.

Words of his from that time have been preserved in several church sources: “While the opportunity is there, I preach the gospel with all my might, and my conscience is clear before God.” He did not know how long he would occupy his chair, he said. He lived as though there would be no tomorrow.

Meanwhile his church was preparing a great celebration. In June 1877 the first missionaries of the Church Missionary Society had arrived in Uganda. On June 30, 1977, the Church of Uganda was to celebrate its centenary.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1977

On February 5, 1977, soldiers raided the archbishop’s house. They said they were looking for weapons. According to the Christian History Institute, they held a gun to his ribs. They found nothing.

Three days later, on February 8, almost all the Anglican bishops of Uganda wrote a joint letter to the president. They protested against the raid. They wrote about killings, about people who disappeared, about security services abusing their power. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography calls it the first time the church had addressed the military regime so openly. The bishops also asked for a meeting. On February 12 Luwum delivered the protest.

According to one source, Amin received him and his wife at the palace on February 14. Luwum denied any involvement in a plot. He was advised to stick to his church work from then on.

“I SEE GOD'S HAND IN THIS”

Two days later, on February 16, the church leaders were summoned to Kampala. There was a large gathering, with soldiers and onlookers. Three men read out confessions in which they named Luwum as a key figure in a plot to smuggle weapons into the country. His family has always denied that accusation. Amin asked the crowd what should be done with the traitors. Soldiers shouted that they should be killed.

Then Luwum spoke the words to Kivengere that stand at the beginning of this chapter. Other last words have also been handed down. According to the Anglican news service, he said to the bishops as he was led away: “Do not be afraid. I see God’s hand in this.” The Christian History Institute gives a similar sentence. Perhaps he said both, to different people. Where the sources differ, I let them stand side by side.

Two cabinet ministers were also arrested that day: Erinayo Wilson Oryema and Charles Oboth Ofumbi. They too were Christians.

The next morning Radio Uganda reported that the three men had died. They had supposedly tried to overpower the driver of the car they were in, after which the car crashed. No one was allowed to see the bodies.

The story did not hold up. Henry Kyemba, Minister of Health under Amin, wrote in his book A State of Blood that the archbishop had been shot. Eyewitnesses said the same. According to the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, it happened on Amin’s orders. No court has ever established that.

There is no certainty about the exact date of his death. Uganda keeps February 16, the day of his arrest. The Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States remember him on February 17, the day his death was announced.

A SERVICE WITHOUT A COFFIN

The church wanted to bury him in Kampala. That was not allowed. The body was not released for a funeral. According to the African platform This is Africa, about four and a half thousand people still came to the cathedral on Namirembe Hill, for a service without a body. According to the Christian History Institute, the preacher was Erica Sabiti, the man Luwum had succeeded as archbishop.

His body was taken north, to Mucwini, the village where he was born. According to This is Africa, it arrived there on February 19. He was buried at St. Paul’s Church in Mucwini. The Anglican news service writes that Amin’s soldiers buried him there. An American source says the family only received the body weeks later. Here too the accounts differ.

He left behind his wife Mary Lawinyo and, according to most sources, nine children. Mary died in 2019, at the age of ninety-three.

Festo Kivengere expected to be next. He fled the country with his family, partly on foot. Within a year he wrote a book titled I Love Idi Amin. In it he asked how, after everything Amin had done, he could do anything less than love him. It is the voice of the same revival that had touched Luwum in 1948.

On March 30, 1977, a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey in London. In Uganda the church did celebrate its centenary in June, led by Luwum’s successor Silvanus Wani. According to the minister Geoffrey Byarugaba, it felt more like mourning than celebration. In his own church, Luwum was declared the first martyr of its second century.

In 1979 Tanzanian troops drove out Amin’s regime. Amin fled abroad. He was never brought to trial.

I think of the village where Luwum began. As a young man he preached there against drink and was arrested for it. Almost thirty years later he contradicted a president and was killed for it. Between those two moments lies a life of cycling, teaching, mediating and visiting. What made the difference between the churchgoer before 1948 and the man in Kampala? He never explained it in grand terms himself. He preached while the opportunity was there.

A STATUE ABOVE THE WEST DOOR

In July 1998, ten statues of Christian martyrs of the twentieth century were unveiled above the West Door of Westminster Abbey. The statue of Janani Luwum was made by the sculptor Corin Johnson.

In Uganda, February 16 has been a national holiday since 2015. For the first major commemoration that year, John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, was invited to Mucwini to preach. The grave by the church has become a place of pilgrimage.

In Mucwini, by a village church in the north, lies the man who herded cattle there as a boy. In London he stands in stone above the West Door of Westminster Abbey, facing the street.