Janani Luwum

Janani Luwum was born about 1922 at Mucwini, a village in the Acholi country of northern Uganda, near the Sudan border. His father was a church teacher. He went to Gulu High School and then to teacher training at Boroboro, near Lira, and he became what his father had been in a smaller way: a schoolmaster in a village.

Then, on 6 January 1948, he went to a meeting in an Acholi village where a married couple were preaching. They had been changed by the revival that was moving through East Africa in those years, and what they said went through Janani Luwum like a spear. He wept. He confessed Christ. He cried out so loudly, before God and before everyone standing there, that villagers came running from their houses to see what was happening. Margaret Ford, who was later his secretary, wrote the scene down; that is how we know how loud it was.

He did not go quietly back to the classroom. Within a year he had left teaching altogether and was walking about as a lay evangelist, preaching against drink and tobacco with enough persistence to annoy the local authorities. In 1949 he entered the theological college at Buwalasi in eastern Uganda. He was ordained deacon and then priest in the middle of the 1950s (the records disagree by two or three years, and one of them says he was made deacon on St Thomas's Day, 21 December 1955). He served in parishes, studied a year at Canterbury and later a year in London, and came back to Buwalasi, first as vice-principal in 1962 and then as principal in 1965. In 1966 he became Provincial Secretary of the whole province. On 25 January 1969 he was consecrated at Gulu as the first Bishop of Northern Uganda. In 1974 he was elected, and on 9 June consecrated, Archbishop.

By then Uganda was a frightening country. Idi Amin had seized power in 1971, and his security men were taking away educated and prominent people who were never seen again. In August 1976 soldiers sacked Makerere University in Kampala, and the church leaders, with Luwum in the chair, drew up a formal memorandum protesting the rape and killing that went with the raid. On Sunday 30 January 1977, Bishop Festo Kivengere of Kigezi preached a sermon called "The Preciousness of Life" to a congregation that included many high government officials, and said plainly that killing people at will was wrong.

Six days later, at half past one on the Saturday morning of 5 February, security men broke through the fence around the Archbishop's own house. They had a prisoner with them whom they had already tortured, and they put him at the door so that it would look as though a man in trouble needed help. When Luwum opened it, armed men sprang out of the compound, cocking their rifles and shouting, "Archbishop! Archbishop, show us the arms!" He said, "What arms?" They pushed him at rifle-point up to the bedroom where his wife Mary was asleep, woke her, and crawled about under the bed looking for guns. There were no guns. He told them what his house was: "Our house was the house of God. We pray for the president. We pray for the security forces, whatever they do. We preach the gospel and pray for others. That is our work, not keeping arms." His daughter Julie remembered him telling the soldiers he had only one weapon and it was the Bible, and inviting them to search wherever they liked.

He could have said nothing after that. Instead the House of Bishops, with him at their head, wrote to Amin. The exact day inside that week is remembered differently by different sources, but the letter itself survives, kept in the Church of Uganda Archives at Mukono, and it does not flinch. It told the President that Ugandans were being set against one another, that Muslims in leading positions were coercing Christians in some parts of the country, and that soldiers were brothers and sons of the very people they were now shooting: "The gun, which was meant to protect Uganda as a nation, the Ugandans as citizens and their property, is increasingly being used against the Ugandan to take away life and property." Luwum signed it and carried it to the President himself.

On 16 February Amin summoned him. Luwum did not go alone, and he did not go in secret: he went with the other Anglican bishops, with the Roman Catholic cardinal-archbishop, and with a senior Muslim leader beside him. At a great public gathering, confessions prepared by somebody else were read out, accusing Luwum and two cabinet ministers, Erinayo Wilson Oryema and Charles Oboth Ofumbi, of plotting against the President. The others were let go. He was kept. As his companions were leaving him there he said, "They are going to kill me. I am not afraid." He also said, in those same hours, "I can see the hand of the Lord in this." No one who knew him saw him alive again.

The next day, 17 February, Radio Uganda announced that the Archbishop and the two ministers had died in a road accident: they had tried to overpower their driver, the story went, and the car had crashed. It was a lie, and it was a lie that did not survive being looked at. Amin's own Minister of Health, Henry Kyemba, who fled the country later that year, wrote that the bodies were riddled with bullets, that the Archbishop had been shot through the mouth and had at least three bullets in his chest. On 19 February soldiers took the sealed coffin four hundred kilometres north to his own country and buried him in a hurriedly dug grave in the churchyard at Wii Gweng, with no family and no clergy there. The villagers afterwards opened the coffin, and saw the wounds, and that was the end of the story about the car.

In Kampala about four thousand five hundred people came together for a memorial beside a grave that had been dug for him next to that of Bishop James Hannington, martyred in the same land ninety years before. The grave stayed empty; he was already lying in his village. But the church that gathered around that empty grave had already understood what had happened, and said so, and has gone on saying so: on 30 March that year they sang his memorial in Westminster Abbey, and twenty-one years later his figure was set in stone above its Great West Door among the martyrs of the century. His widow Mary lived another forty-two years and was buried beside him at Wii Gweng. He had told the soldiers in his bedroom that his house was the house of God; the men with the rifles searched it and found nothing else there, and they were right.