Love after Idi Amin

In the dark years when Uganda lived under the shadow of Idi Amin, there was a man whose voice carried hope across a frightened nation. His name was Festo Kivengere. He was an Anglican bishop, an evangelist, a child of the great East African Revival, and a man who had learned to preach the love of God where fear ruled the streets. In the 1970s, Uganda was a land of disappearances. People were taken. People did not come back. Soldiers ruled by terror, and the church was not spared. Pastors vanished. Christians wept. And into that grief, Kivengere kept speaking of a love that was stronger than hatred.

Then the violence reached the very heart of the church. In 1977, Janani Luwum, the Anglican archbishop of Uganda and Kivengere's own friend, was accused by the regime and summoned. Soon after, the nation was told the archbishop had died in a car accident. Few believed it. Most understood that Luwum had been killed. The shock ran through the churches like cold water. A shepherd of the people had been struck down, and the man who had stood beside him now had every reason to run, or to burn with rage.

Kivengere did neither. He fled, yes, slipping over the border to save his life, for the danger was real and the threat against him was real. But he did not flee into bitterness. From exile he wrote, and the words he chose stunned many who heard them. He titled what he had to say with a phrase that sounded almost impossible after such loss. He spoke of loving Idi Amin. Not excusing him. Not pretending the killings were small. Not calling evil anything other than evil. But refusing, deliberately and openly, to let hatred become his master.

This was no soft sentiment. Kivengere had seen the bodies of a broken nation. He had buried friends. He knew the weight of a country soaked in fear. And still he insisted that the cross of Christ gave him another road than revenge. He could name the murder. He could grieve the dead. He could long for justice. And in the same breath he could pray for the man who had ordered the killing, asking God to reach even him. That is a far harder thing than forgetting. Forgetting only buries the wound. Kivengere kept the wound open before God, and chose love anyway.

He did not stay in exile forever. When the regime fell, he returned to his people, to the work of healing a traumatised land. He kept preaching. He kept teaching that the love of God was not a luxury for peaceful times but a power for the worst of times. He died in 1988, an evangelist to the end, remembered across East Africa and far beyond.

What Festo Kivengere left behind was not a tidy lesson that suffering does not hurt. He never said that. What he left was a witness that a Christian can stand in the ruins of terrible violence, tell the truth about it, weep over it, cry out for justice, and still refuse to let the murderer own his heart. He showed that forgiveness is not the denial of evil. It is the defeat of evil's last claim, the claim to turn the wounded into haters. In a nation taught to be afraid, one bishop kept speaking of a love that no dictator could kill. And long after Amin was gone, it was that love, and not the terror, that endured.