Janani Luwum and Courage before Power

In the years after Uganda won her independence, the country fell under the shadow of one of the most feared rulers of the twentieth century. His name was Idi Amin, and his rule was built on terror. Soldiers vanished into the night. Bodies turned up in rivers. Whole families learned to speak softly and trust no one. And in the middle of that fear stood a tall man in a simple cassock, a shepherd of the church, who would not let the silence win. His name was Janani Luwum, and he had risen from a village in the north to become Archbishop of the whole Anglican church in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Zaire. He could have kept his head down. He chose instead to keep his word.

Luwum had not been born to power. He grew up among the Acholi people, a peasant's son, and came to faith as a young man during the great East African revival that swept through those hills. He became a teacher, then a pastor, then a bishop, and at last archbishop. He was known for warmth more than for thunder. But as the killings spread, the warmth turned to resolve. Pastors were dying. Ordinary believers were disappearing. And a shepherd does not abandon the flock when the wolves come.

So Luwum did a dangerous thing. Together with other church leaders, he drew up a protest against the bloodshed and the arrests and the disappearances. He delivered it to the government, with his own name upon it. To set your name on such a paper, in such a time, was to sign beside your own life. He knew it. By most accounts he had already told those close to him that he was ready, that he did not fear what men could do, that his life was in God's hands.

Then came February of 1977. Soldiers searched his home in the dead of night, claiming to look for hidden weapons. They found none. Days later the archbishop was summoned, along with other bishops, to the capital. He was paraded before a crowd and accused of plotting against the state. The charge was a lie, and everyone present knew it. As the story is remembered, when his fellow bishops were sent home, Luwum turned to them and said quietly that they should not be afraid, that he could see God's hand in it. They never saw him alive again.

The next day the government announced that Janani Luwum had died in a car accident. No one believed it. He had been killed, shot, while in the hands of the regime. He was fifty four years old. The very man who had stood and said that the killing must stop was swallowed by the killing he named.

But the lie did not hold, and the silence did not win. Word of his death spread across Uganda and then across the world. Thousands gathered where his grave should have been, and they sang. Within two years the regime that murdered him had fallen. And the church Luwum served did not shrink in grief; it grew. The blood of the shepherd watered the very flock he had tried to protect.

Today his statue stands above the great west door of Westminster Abbey in London, carved in stone among the martyrs of the modern age. People from every nation pass beneath it. Few of them know the village he came from, or the soft voice that became, at the end, a voice power could not silence. But the stone remembers what the dictator tried to bury. A peasant's son who would not stop telling the truth, who looked into the face of a man with all the guns, and was not afraid.