In political polemics in Uganda from the era of Milton Obote's Uganda People's Congress (UPC) in the 1960s to the rise of Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) in the 1980s, Christian churches were castigated for fomenting and exacerbating Uganda's political divisions. In brief, the standard narrative was that missionary rivalries and colonial religious favoritism undergirded political tribalism and undermined national unity. There is some truth in this stereotype, especially at the boundaries of the colonial period, namely the “religious wars” of the early 1890s and the late colonial mobilization of the Anglican-dominated UPC and the Catholic-dominated Democratic Party between 1954 and 1962.Footnote 1
What this stereotypical narrative overlooks, though, are the growing ecumenical ties between Catholic and Anglican leaders that began in the years leading up to independence and flourished during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. These ties were forged through closer personal relationships amongst local church leaders and were reinforced through the more open ecumenical spirit of the times, symbolized internationally by the founding of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948, the inauguration of the All Africa Council of Churches in 1963, and the Second Vatican Council in 1962–1965.Footnote 2 Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Ugandan political leaders also encouraged Christian ecumenism as a key dimension of postcolonial nation building. Above all, however, the shared experience of political oppression forged solidarity between erstwhile Ugandan Catholic and Anglican rivals, especially during the worst years of the Idi Amin dictatorship (1971–1979) and Uganda's brutal “Luweero War” (1981–1986).
Building on older secondary works as well as newly accessed oral and archival sources, this article offers the first synthesis of post-colonial ecumenical politics in Uganda throughout the 1962–1986 period.Footnote 3 Focusing at the leadership level, I argue that postcolonial Anglican and Catholic ecumenism produced three distinct sociopolitical approaches in postcolonial Uganda. First, church leaders in the 1960s embraced a politically quiescent, “social development” approach. Best embodied in the ecumenical Uganda Joint Christian Council, this approach called for churches to contribute to postcolonial nation building through improving education, poverty, and health services. However, church leaders largely avoided antagonizing government leaders on questions of justice, corruption, and government repression of the political opposition. This attitude peaked under Idi Amin in 1971–1972 before Anglican and Catholic leaders withdrew from active collaboration with the state, embracing a second approach I term “prudent recalcitrance.” This entailed shifting stances of public silence, private lobbying, and carefully crafted public critiques, especially between 1975 and 1977. Third, between Amin's downfall in 1979 and the middle years of Milton Obote's second term in office (1981–1985), church leaders adopted a posture of “prophetic presence,” standing for and with the people in opposition to an increasingly violent state. This collective witness was undermined, however, by growing perceptions that the preeminent Catholic and Anglican leaders were supporting opposite sides during the Luweero War. In the conclusion, I raise several issues that merit further consideration, including the connections between ecumenism, tribalism, and nationalism, the distinction between the churches’ social and political witness, and the role of official ecclesial silence in the midst of political conflict and persecution.
I. Historical Origins of Uganda's Catholic-Anglican Rivalry
The longstanding and at times internecine rivalry between colonial Catholic and Anglican missions in Uganda is a well-known story. It bears repeating in brief, if only to place the ecumenical thawing of the 1960s in proper perspective.
The roots of Christian missions in Uganda can be traced to the 1870s.Footnote 4 In 1875, the Anglo-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited the royal court of Buganda on the northern shores of Lake Victoria. Although he had encouraged Muslim practice for several decades, Kabaka (King) Muteesa I was disenchanted with Islam at the time, and he decided to invite Christian missionaries to his court.Footnote 5 Rival groups of Protestant and Catholic missionaries duly arrived between 1877 and 1879. Protestant missionaries worked with the British-based Church Missionary Society (CMS), led in Uganda by Alexander Mackay, himself a member of the Free Church of Scotland. The Catholics were represented by Father Siméon Lourdel and the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers). Each leader's personal charisma was strong enough that their followers became known as “AbaMackay” and “AbaLourdel” during the 1880s.Footnote 6 For his part, however, Muteesa seemed more amused than convinced by Mackay's and Lourdel's theological polemics at court. Ultimately, neither won the allegiance of the kabaka, in part because both were reluctant to facilitate the French or British trade relations that Muteesa so deeply coveted. However, the missions planted seeds at court amongst a rising group of young court pages. After Muteesa's death in 1884, his capricious son and erstwhile Catholic catechumen Mwanga first favored and then violently rejected the Christian missions, famously massacring over 100 “Uganda Martyrs” between November 1885 and January 1887. Anglicans and Catholics died together, and the memory of this unified witness of shared martyrdom would remain an important element of the ecumenical movement of the 1960s.
If the blood of the Uganda Martyrs became fertile seeds for the Ganda church, it also proved to be the high-water mark of early ecumenical witness. Far from stamping out the embryonic Christian missions, Mwanga's halfhearted persecution strengthened the churches, and he ultimately proved unable to withstand the rise of a new generation of Christian chiefs. But after a brief period of anti-Muslim cooperation, Catholic and Anglican chiefs turned on each other in 1891–1892.Footnote 7 The British East Africa Company and its agent Frederick Lugard lent their maxim gun to the Anglican cause, helping Anglican chiefs defeat their Catholic rivals in the famous January 1892 “Battle of Mengo.” Although Lugard supported the Congress of Berlin's decision to allow freedom of religious practice, he also wanted to minimize the proximity of Anglicans and Catholics. Most Ganda Catholic chiefs and thousands of their followers went into exile in the Buddu province southwest of Entebbe and Kampala. In part due to intense CMS lobbying, Great Britain in 1894 established a formal colonial protectorate over Buganda, and this was ratified in the 1900 Buganda Agreement.Footnote 8 Recognizing the shifting political winds, the Catholic Church sent the London-based Mill Hill Fathers to Uganda in the mid-1890s to complement the efforts of the French-speaking White Fathers. Mill Hill came to dominate eastern Uganda, while the White Fathers retained their bases in central and western Uganda. Based in Sudan and northern Uganda, the Italian Verona Fathers (known as “Combonis” in honor of their founder, Daniel Comboni) became the third major Catholic religious community in colonial Uganda in 1910.
Even as the Catholic Church expanded its missionary ranks, the Anglican Church of Uganda became the most politically dominant religious community throughout the colonial period. For example, every kabaka and katikiiro (chief minister) between 1900 and 1960 was a baptized Anglican. Despite having a larger total population,Footnote 9 Ugandan Catholics were perceived as second-class political citizens in comparison to their Anglican brethren; the Protestant epithet “He is not a Muganda, he is a Catholic” captured this sense of inferiority.Footnote 10 In the face of this hostility, Catholic missionary leaders such as the Vicar Apostolic, Henri Streicher, focused on evangelization, education, and indigenization of the priesthood, avoiding any antagonism of the British colonial power.Footnote 11 But although Catholics were not dominant in the highest echelons of power, they were also not excluded from power. For example, Catholic chiefs were appointed in predominantly Catholic provinces, and a Catholic chief regularly served as Buganda's omulamuzi, or chief minister of justice. And at the grassroots, groups like Catholic Action and the Legion of Mary could have a substantial mobilizing impact.Footnote 12 Finally, although Catholics and Anglicans co-existed rather than collaborated on an institutional level, there was little overt religious conflict outside of the Kigezi district of southwestern Uganda, a center for the East African “balokole” revival.Footnote 13 Traditional clans included both Anglicans and Catholics, strengthening interdenominational bonds. In the words of Anglican scholar David Z. Niringiye, “there was no vernacular Luganda word for ‘religion.’ Clan identity is what formed the basis of the distinction ‘self’ and ‘other.’”Footnote 14
However, religio-political tensions rose during the nationalist ferment of the 1950s. The Bataka Revolts of 1949 and the 1953–1955 British deportation of Kabaka Edward Muteesa II sparked the mobilization of political parties demanding greater autonomy and ultimately independence from Britain.Footnote 15 The deportation crisis also weakened the Anglican Church's public reputation due to perceptions that the newly appointed bishop, Leslie Brown, was not a vociferous supporter of Kabaka Muteesa II.Footnote 16 In the midst of these swirling political changes, Catholic leaders did not remain on the sidelines. After Anglican leaders rebuffed Catholic overtures to form an ecumenical, anti-communist “Christian Democratic” party,Footnote 17 Catholic leaders founded the Democratic Party (DP) in 1954 on the twin bases of anti-communism and defending the political and economic interests of Uganda's Catholics.Footnote 18 Under the Luganda motto “amazima n'obwenkanya,” or “truth and justice,” the DP called for greater Catholic representation in the Buganda legislature, known as the Lukiiko.Footnote 19 After briefly consolidating around the Progressive Party in 1955–1956, most Anglican lay politicians ultimately migrated to the Uganda People's Congress (UPC) in 1960–1961.Footnote 20 Even here, one should be careful about exaggerating the confessional dimensions of any late colonial political party in Uganda. Both the UPC and the DP included Protestants and Catholics in leadership, and both Benedicto Kiwanuka (Catholic leader of the DP from 1958) and Milton Obote (Anglican leader of the UPC from 1960) attempted to build national, nonsectarian parties.
But at the grassroots, the DP-UPC political rivalry was often framed in explicitly religious terms, leading to further Protestant-Catholic tensions. For example, in the midst of the 1960–1962 legislative elections, the Luganda nickname for the DP was “Dini ya Papa” (Religion of the Pope), while the UPC was tagged as the “United Protestants of Canterbury.”Footnote 21 Electoral competition boiled over into violence in the Kigezi district of southwestern Uganda in March 1960.Footnote 22 It should be noted, however, that Anglican and Catholic bishops issued an immediate joint denunciation of the Kigezi violence, lamenting the “scandal and disgrace that religion should be the basis of bitter political rivalry.”Footnote 23 And if politicians blamed religion for undermining national unity, religious leaders often blamed politicians for turning Christians against each other. Writing in in the immediate aftermath of Kigezi, Catholic Bishop John M. Ogez posited that “true religion can never exclude love of God and love of neighbour, can never sow the seeds of hatred . . . [religious difference] is being used by unscrupulous politicians as a source of conflict and a hindrance to progress.”Footnote 24 It was within this volatile context that new ecumenical winds began blowing more strongly in the early 1960s. It is to this story that we now turn.
II. “A Positive Asset for National Unity”: The Uganda Joint Christian Council and the Politics of Ecumenism in the 1960s
As African nations gained their independence from colonial powers in the early 1960s, Christian churches looked to play constructive roles in consolidating the new nations. In this sense, it was no coincidence that the All Africa Council of Churches (AACC) was founded the same year, 1963, as the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Ecumenism was therefore seen as a key religious dimension of the nation-building project. In the words of the AACC's 1963 statement on nationalism, “The Church is called to witness by her own life and example the love and peace which she commends to the nations. Herein is the challenge to the Church to take seriously the problem of her own disunity.”Footnote 25 These continental dynamics were also found in Uganda. Here the ecumenical seeds of the 1950s blossomed amongst the leaders of Uganda's Christian churches, who looked to institutionalize this newfound solidarity through starting the Uganda Joint Christian Council (UJCC). At the same time, the ecumenical-nationalist project also underwrote a politically quiescent public voice as Christian leaders generally shied away from outward critique of state corruption or abuses of power.
Uganda's growing ecumenical winds in the 1950s and 1960s owed much to the steadfast commitment of Uganda's two most important clerics: Bishop Leslie Brown of the Anglican Church of Uganda and Catholic Archbishop Joseph Kiwanuka. I will begin with Brown. A CMS missionary who had spent most of his early career in India, in 1953 Brown replaced Bishop Cyril Stuart as head of the Church of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.Footnote 26 In India, Brown played an instrumental role in the formation of the ecumenical Church of South India that united various Protestant denominations in one ecclesial body, reflecting a growing sense that the church's evangelical mission had been undermined by internal Christian divisions. In turn, the crisis surrounding the 1953–1955 exile of Kabaka Muteesa II revealed the threat of resurgent religious and political traditionalism in Buganda, the growing political weakness of the Anglican Church of Uganda, and the truth in the missionaries’ lament that “we have created churches more conservative than we are.”Footnote 27 Although some Anglicans continued to fear the political and religious empowerment of Catholics, Brown maintained his commitment to ecumenical rapprochement. For example, in January 1959, Brown reached out to Monsignor Joseph Cabana, White Father missionary and Catholic archbishop of Rubaga (1953–1960), to see if Catholics would join in an octave of prayers for Christian unity. Eight months later, Brown wrote to the Catholic editor of the African Ecclesiastical Review to express his hopes that ecumenical unity could be more deeply grounded in baptismal identity: “It would seem to me that divisions among baptized Christians are a denial of the truth that in fact they are already one in Christ, incorporated into Him in His mystical Body.”Footnote 28
Brown's collaborator on the Catholic side was Bishop Joseph Kiwanuka. Kiwanuka is most famous for being Catholic Africa's first indigenous bishop in modern times. Pope Pius XII is said to have whispered at his 1939 episcopal consecration in Rome, “If you do well other African Bishops will follow. If you don't, you will be the first and the last.”Footnote 29 In fact, Kiwanuka flourished in his role as bishop of Masaka Diocese, the first Catholic diocese in modern Africa to be completely entrusted to indigenous clergy.Footnote 30 He also emerged as the most prominent Ugandan religious leader in the late colonial period, in part due to the Anglican delay in appointing an indigenous African primate.Footnote 31 Kiwanuka participated in the 1954 Hancock Commission that helped pave the way for the return of Kabaka Muteesa II from exile, and he issued a controversial 1961 pastoral letter on “Church and State” that called for the kabaka to stay out of politics and embrace the role of a constitutional monarch.Footnote 32
Not surprisingly, Kiwanuka also broke new ground in ecumenical affairs, seeking international scholarships for Ugandan Muslims and Anglicans in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 33 He also developed a warm personal friendship with Archbishop Brown in the late 1950s. Both men were also shaped by the Second Vatican Council's encouragement of ecumenical and interreligious unity. They also took inspiration from their laity. For example, Anglican and Catholic youth and women's associations were collaborating much more openly in the 1950s and early 1960s. Catholic lay women helped start the Uganda Social Training Center at Rubaga and sent multiple representatives to the All-Africa Leaders’ Meeting of the Lay Apostolate in 1953. By the early 1960s, Anglican and Catholic women's groups were lobbying the government over education, marriage policy, labor, rural development, and other social concerns.Footnote 34
Reflecting and even anticipating this new ecumenical spirit, Kiwanuka and Brown issued an unprecedented joint Catholic-Anglican statement on the eve of Uganda's independence in October 1962.Footnote 35 Here the two church leaders outlined a generally liberal democratic political vision based on a shared commitment to human rights and what they termed the “freedom of the human person,” including rights to freedom from fear of arbitrary arrest, a right to a legitimate political opposition, a free press, free expression, and free association. The statement was also notable for its confession of past interreligious conflict and calls for future ecumenical harmony: “It is time, we think, that the rivalries of the past should be forgotten. We should concentrate on the future in which, instead of magnifying the differences that divide us, we turn to the truths, which all Christians hold in common and which should inspire us to work together to serve our fellow men.”Footnote 36
Brown and Kiwanuka built on this public witness by initiating the Uganda Joint Christian Council.Footnote 37 Founded in 1963, the UJCC was one of the first ecumenical associations in sub-Saharan Africa. It was initiated the same year as both the OAU, the political vehicle for pan-Africanism, and the All Africa Council of Churches, which held its first meeting in Kampala in 1963.Footnote 38 Aiming to institutionalize Brown's and Kiwanuka's personal commitment to improving Uganda's intra-Christian relations, the initiative was strengthened by the unflagging support of expatriate missionaries like Vincent J. McCauley, the American Holy Cross priest and first bishop of Fort Portal (1962–1973).Footnote 39 Yet the founding of the UJCC also reflected a shared sense of an emerging political threat. Namely, Obote's 1963 Education Act called for more direct government oversight of religious schools’ curricula, personnel, and funding, much to the chagrin of Catholics and Anglicans alike.Footnote 40 Reflecting the centrality of the education issue, Brown in June 1963 initially proposed a “Joint Council on Christian Education.” It was Kiwanuka who expanded this vision to that of a “Joint Council of Christians” engaging broader areas of social concern, including health, development, and the media.Footnote 41 The UJCC was dominated by Anglican and Catholic leaders, but ultimately included representatives from several other Christian churches, including Reuben Spartas's Orthodox Church of Uganda.Footnote 42 After Kiwanuka and Brown passed from the scene in the mid-1960s, their episcopal successors in Uganda—Erica Sabiiti (1965–1974) and Dunstan Nsubuga (1966–1985) on the Anglican side, and Emmanuel Nsubuga (1966–1991) on the Catholic side—continued their predecessors’ commitment to Catholic-Anglican collaboration via the UJCC.Footnote 43
The UJCC first met in August 1963 and continued to meet semiannually throughout the 1960s. Steering clear of both thorny doctrinal divisions as well as risky political critiques, the UJCC focused on social questions of education, media, social welfare, and marriage. In McCauley's words, “the aim of the Council was cooperation of Christians in helping one another in Christian social activities in the establishment of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, Our Saviour, while respecting other people's consciences and religious convictions.”Footnote 44 With the notable exception of the education issue, UJCC leaders presented a positive, constructive tone toward the UPC government, publicly expressing their hopes for “cooperating with the Government for the good of the whole country” and privately noting the “danger that the UJCC might otherwise earn a name as a missionary-inspired piece of ‘neo-colonialism.’”Footnote 45 Tellingly, there was little focus on explicitly political education; the UJCC did not become actively involved in either civic education or electoral monitoring until the 1990s.Footnote 46
For its part, the Obote government was generally supportive of the ecumenical movement, praising the UJCC as a “positive asset for national unity.”Footnote 47 As Louise Pirouet has noted, this support could cut both ways, as the government's continual critiques of “religious divisionism” helped silence church critiques of the state. After independence, missionary bishops like Brown and McCauley were especially reluctant to speak out for fear of fomenting accusations of neocolonialism.Footnote 48 In turn, the growing centralization of power in an Obote-dominated UPC contributed to what Adrian Hastings called the “collapse of denominational rivalry politics” in Uganda.Footnote 49 By the late 1960s, the political opposition had been largely emasculated as multiple leaders crossed the line to the UPC, including prominent Catholic politicians like Basil Bataringaya who repeated the Obote government's determination to abolish Uganda's plagues of “tribalism, religionism, and Bugandaism.”Footnote 50
This general church-state rapprochement was tested on several occasions in the late 1960s. After the Obote government expelled ten Catholic missionaries from northern Uganda in February 1967, the UJCC described this “mass expulsion” as “an act seriously injuring religion” and demanded government assurance of the “exercise of religious freedom.”Footnote 51 In the aftermath of Obote's centralization of power following the 1966 exile of Kabaka Muteesa II,Footnote 52 Anglican and Catholic bishops mildly protested several of the clauses of Obote's revised 1967 constitution, expressing concern that these could “produce fear and prevent the expression of opinions honestly held.”Footnote 53 But ultimately the UJCC retreated from any direct public confrontation with Obote's regime. In November 1968, a proposal to create a UJCC commission for justice and peace was scuttled in favor of what was termed a more “collaborative” church-state vision. In McCauley's revealing words, “it was unfortunate that such a Committee was qualified with such words as ‘Justice’ and ‘Peace’ which might arouse some suspicion in some quarters.”Footnote 54
In July-August 1969, Uganda welcomed the first-ever papal visit to sub-Saharan Africa as Pope Paul VI spent three days in Kampala. Recognizing the public relations potential, the nominally Anglican Obote lent notable public and rhetorical support to the visit. However, behind the scenes the visit provoked considerable tension between Catholic and Anglican leaders. In response to Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Nsubuga's public claims that “all non-Catholics” welcomed the Pope's visit, Archbishop Sabiiti wrote a personal letter to Nsubuga in which he chastised his Catholic counterpart for presenting himself as the “sole mouthpiece” of all Ugandan Christians.Footnote 55 In April 1969, the Church of Uganda's House of Bishops expressed “the fear of people in their Dioceses that the Pope was coming with the intention of uniting all Protestants and Roman Catholics.”Footnote 56 Interestingly, however, the Obote government did not try to exploit these intra-ecclesial tensions. If anything, the nation-building project required ecclesial unity and cooperation. In the words of one expatriate Anglican bishop, “we want to be friendly towards the Catholics and to cooperate with them in ways which we can, and the Government also looks to us to do so for the sake of uniting the country.”Footnote 57 As one of the original leaders of the balokole revival in the 1930s–1940s, Sabiiti ultimately faced down revivalist Anglican critics and hosted Paul VI at the Anglican martyr site at Namugongo. Speaking on the occasion, Sabiiti grounded the churches’ growing ecumenical ties in the original ecumenical witness of the Uganda Martyrs: “All the things which might have divided them were melted in the flames, as they gave their lives in obedience to Jesus Christ who alone is Lord of our lives, our hearts and minds, and wills.”Footnote 58
Whatever the strains caused by Pope Paul VI's visit, the 1960s saw Anglican and Catholic leaders publicly collaborating in an unprecedented way. The Uganda Joint Christian Council was the most prominent institutional expression of this partnership, reflecting the two churches’ commitment to cooperation in areas of social development. Although church differences with the government over religious schools’ policy helped give rise to the UJCC, Anglican and Catholic leaders adopted a more passive posture with the Obote government as the 1960s progressed. Church leaders did not protest the abuses of Obote's growing authoritarian state, the suspension of civil liberties in Buganda, and the persecution of political opponents. Church leaders did speak up if their own personnel were affected, and neither Catholic nor Anglican bishops formally endorsed Obote's “Move to the Left,” as embodied in the 1969 Common Man's Charter or the 1970 Nakivubo Pronouncements.Footnote 59 But in terms of the politics of ecumenism, one could describe the 1960s as a socially active but politically quiescent decade, emphasizing the churches’ roles as “team players” in the construction of the postcolonial nation. More prophetic ecclesial voices would not emerge until well into the subsequent Amin regime.
III. “I Fear No Man but God”: Ecumenical Political Responses during the Amin Era, 1971–1979
In the early 1970s, Idi Amin Dada showed particular interest in cultivating religious leaders, especially in comparison to his predecessor, the secular nationalist Obote. In this sense, Amin continued and in many ways deepened Obote's emphasis on ecumenism as a state-supported political project of nation building. But as Amin's regime became increasingly erratic, repressive, and violent, Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Nsubuga and Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum became more recalcitrant. If the 1960s was marked by a spirit of church-state collaboration in the name of national development, the 1970s saw a suffering church adopt a more silent, distanced witness vis-à-vis the state. As the decade progressed, church leaders’ veiled critiques gave way to more pointed criticisms, foreshadowing the bold, prophetic denunciations that became hallmarks of ecumenical political discourse in the early 1980s.
Amin came to power in January 1971 by leading a military coup that rode a wave of anti-Obote discontent in Buganda. Much more than Obote, the Muslim Amin understood the political power of religious rhetoric and the public importance of Uganda's religious leaders. He wasted no time in courting them. Within a month of the coup, he had met with key representatives of Uganda's religious bodies and attended Sunday church services, including Catholic Mass at Rubaga Cathedral in Kampala.Footnote 60 Later in 1971, he established Uganda's first “inter-religious council,” backing down from his initial plan to establish a “Ministry of Religious Affairs” after the UJCC contested potential government interference in their own internal affairs.Footnote 61 Amin paid an official visit to Pope Paul VI in Rome in September 1971, and Muslim, Anglican, and Catholic leaders accompanied Amin to the Organization of African Unity meeting in June 1972.Footnote 62 Amin also rehabilitated the former prime minister, DP leader, and Catholic stalwart Benedicto Kiwanuka, naming him as the first indigenous Chief Justice of Uganda's Supreme Court.Footnote 63 One of Amin's favorite phrases was his repeated claim that “I fear no man but God,” a line designed to reinforce both his authoritarian tendencies and his purported religious convictions.Footnote 64 The latter was reflected in the gushing words of Sabiiti welcoming Amin to the Anglican cathedral in Mbarara in August 1971: “We live in days when the World is turning its back on God and your coming out with emphasis on God, at a time when religious leaders are in despair, is a great encouragement. . . . I feel that God has called you to be His instrument, to use you to bring back people to God.”Footnote 65
Although most Catholic and Anglican leaders publicly welcomed the new Amin regime, there were contrary voices. In particular, Anglican bishops in northern Uganda had received accounts of tremendous retaliatory violence against Acholi and Langi soldiers. Hundreds of these soldiers, suspected of loyalty to Obote, were killed during the first week after the coup, leading the Provincial Assembly of the Anglican Church of Uganda on February 2 to request that “more restraint on the part of the civilian population and the armed forces . . . be exercised in order to avoid any further damage to properties and unnecessary loss of life.”Footnote 66 In a confidential April 1971 letter to Amin, bishops from Northern Uganda, including Janani Luwum, again protested human rights violations: “We are writing at a time when many have been killed; many are missing . . . many are in fear of death; and many others are in detention . . . we beg you to consider what is happening in the country and to use your authority to put a stop to what we believe to be an evil in the sight of God.”Footnote 67 These voices failed to carry the broader community of religious leaders, however. There were no joint ecumenical condemnations or UJCC protests of the Amin regime's violence during the early 1970s.
Looking to conciliate potential opposition, Amin also took an interest in the internal operations of the churches. He came to power in the midst of a near schism within the Anglican Church of Uganda that stemmed from tensions between Ganda Anglicans and their coreligionists outside the province; Sabiiti's non-Baganda ethnic identity and perceived support for Milton Obote became the tipping point.Footnote 68 Two days prior to Amin's coup on January 25, 1971, the Anglican Diocese of Namirembe in Buganda voted to secede from the rest of the Church of Uganda, and on the next Sunday, a mob of Ganda Anglicans blocked Sabiiti from entering Namirembe Cathedral. In November 1971, Amin refused to let the Baganda faction and its non-Baganda rivals leave their conference meeting place until they resolved their split. After four days of negotiations and prayer, Anglican leaders reached a compromise by carving out a new Diocese of Kampala from the Diocese of Namirembe. Archbishop Sabiiti was now transferred from his see in western Uganda to become bishop of Kampala. Namirembe Diocese remained the diocese of Bishop Dunstan Nsubuga. Baganda fears that their diocese would become the permanent seat of the archbishop, and therefore likely to be held by a non-Muganda bishop, were (at least partially) removed.Footnote 69 Two years later, Sabiiti resigned, replaced in 1974 by the Acholi Bishop Janani Luwum. Far from an Amin sycophant, however, Luwum ultimately proved to be the Thomas Becket of his era.Footnote 70
Amin's early rapprochement with the churches began to show strains in 1972–1973. A key turning point came in August 1972. Claiming divine inspiration in a dream, Amin announced the expulsion of all 90,000 noncitizen Asians, a decree that he quickly expanded to include Asian citizens of Uganda as well. Emmanuel Nsubuga, Sabiiti, and Muslim Chief Kahdi Matovu limited their public comments in August to expressing “concern that humanitarian considerations be taken into account in carrying out the expulsion order.”Footnote 71 This lack of a forthright condemnation reflected church leaders’ desire to stay neutral amidst widespread popular support for the expulsion that stemmed from resentment toward exclusivist Asian ethnic communities and their monopolistic business practices.Footnote 72
As the expulsion proceeded and international outrage grew, church leaders became more critical. For example, in late August 1972, Bishop Luwum, then based in the Diocese of Northern Uganda, helped draft a WCC Central Committee resolution that “called upon the Government of Uganda to refrain from any actions which impair or deny the citizenship of Ugandans of Asian origin.”Footnote 73 Church-state controversy broke out on the Catholic side in September. After a lunch meeting between Emmanuel Nsubuga and President Amin on September 6, 1972, the government mouthpiece Uganda Argus claimed that Nsubuga had thanked Amin for “the steps he had taken on the economy of Uganda which is to be handed over to Ugandans.”Footnote 74 Nsubuga immediately denounced this report as a calumny on BBC radio, publicly distancing himself from Amin's expulsion of the Asians. By September 9, unnamed military sources in Uganda Argus were warning Roman Catholic leaders to “never interfere in the internal affairs of Uganda” and castigating Nsubuga for “openly disassociating himself with the rest of Ugandans in fighting the economic war.”Footnote 75
In the aftermath of Nsubuga's BBC interview, Amin's attitudes hardened toward Catholic leaders in particular. In late September, Amin's security agents arrested, tortured, and killed Benedicto Kiwanuka, devout Catholic, former prime minister, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, after a dispute over the prosecution of a prominent British expatriate named Dennis Hills.Footnote 76 In November, Amin expelled fifty-three Catholic missionaries from the country. In January 1973, Amin's agents assassinated Father Clement Kiggundu, the crusading editor of the Catholic daily newspaper Munno, who had worked with military widows to help publicize the ongoing ethnic purges within the army.Footnote 77 This crackdown on Catholics was part of a broader persecution of perceived political enemies which followed the failed September 1972 invasion by Milton Obote's exile forces.
In the mid-1970s, tensions grew over Amin's public favoritism toward Islam, as well as the widening persecution of perceived political opponents. In 1972–1973, Amin cultivated closer financial and military relations with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and increasingly spoke of Uganda as a “Muslim country” despite Uganda's 7 percent Muslim population. His “quasi-establishment” of Islam included the creation of the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, a national parallel to the Uganda Joint Christian Council.Footnote 78 Uganda's economic performance began to lag in the mid-1970s, and Amin lost significant international and local political credibility after the Israeli “Entebbe Raid” incident of June-July 1976. As the political and economic situation deteriorated, Amin's persecution spread from its early focus on Acholi and Langi military factions to a broader repression of any perceived civil opposition to the regime.Footnote 79
In the midst of this growing repression, Catholic and Anglican leaders worked behind the scenes to lobby Amin to ameliorate the situation. In 1973, Sabiiti, Dunstan Nsubuga, and Emmanuel Nsubuga scheduled semi-regular meetings with Amin to “point out to him important issues facing the Churches.”Footnote 80 Wary of the danger of a united Christian opposition, Amin in March 1974 looked to divide the churches by ordering Anglicans to rejoin their Catholic brethren and then banning most other Christian denominations.Footnote 81 To their credit, church leaders resisted Amin's divisionism. In May 1975, Emmanuel Nsubuga and Janani Luwum issued a joint memorandum on behalf of the UJCC executive committee in which they expressed their “anxieties and grave concerns” over recent measures taken by the Amin government. Here they criticized the growing abrogation of human rights and the severe punishments meted out regardless of the severity of the abuse, such as the institution of the death penalty for smuggling. They also critiqued the government's takeover of land, an issue that had affected the churches themselves.Footnote 82 Nsubuga and Luwum followed this statement with another critical letter to Amin in July 1975, protesting the government's ban on their own travel outside Uganda, as well as its recent deportation of twenty Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries on the purported grounds of the government's commitment to indigenize the churches.Footnote 83 Catholic and Anglican leaders also organized a joint Good Friday procession in 1975 that drew upwards of 8,000 participants.Footnote 84
This more critical ecclesial voice grew stronger in 1976. In August 1976, now Cardinal Nsubuga and Archbishop Luwum visited Makerere University to demonstrate their solidarity with a student strike that followed the murder of Catholic residence hall warden Theresa Nanzire Mukasa-Bukenya.Footnote 85 On August 26, Nsubuga and Luwum called together Anglican, Catholic, and Muslim leaders to discuss the state of the nation. Although no official statements emerged from this gathering, the assembled leaders condemned the growing killings, looting, and abuses of state security services, and leaked minutes from this meeting angered Amin.Footnote 86 Inflamed at this growing ecumenical opposition, Amin in December 1976 took Archbishop Luwum's and Cardinal Nsubuga's Christmas sermons off the radio and publicly threatened Christian leaders who “preach[ed] bloodshed rather than peace.”Footnote 87 After an assassination attempt on Amin on January 25, 1977, Luwum's house was ransacked on February 5, and Luwum himself was held at gunpoint. The government claimed to find a large cache of weapons on the premises of the archbishop's residence, although Luwum and the Church of Uganda (COU) quickly denied this.Footnote 88 In the days following this incident, Luwum collaborated with Anglican bishops to issue a disparaging condemnation of the regime, lambasting the government's pro-Muslim favoritism, attacks on educated elites, and the abuses of the security forces:
The gun whose muzzle has been pressed against the Archbishop's stomach, the gun which has been used to search the Bishop of Bukedi's houses, is a gun which is being pointed at every Christian in the Church. . . . We have buried many who have died as a result of being shot and there are many more whose bodies have not been found, yet their disappearance is connected with the activities of some members of the Security Forces. . . . The gun which was meant to protect Uganda as a nation, the Ugandan as a citizen and his property is increasingly being used against the Ugandan to take away his life and his property.Footnote 89
For their part, Catholic bishops, including Emmanuel Nsubuga, met with Luwum and other Anglican leaders throughout the week of February 7, encouraging them to remain steadfast in their witness.Footnote 90 But they ultimately chose not to sign the Anglican protest, claiming that the document concerned internal Anglican issues and that the Anglicans lacked incontrovertible evidence for some of their claims concerning government assassinations.Footnote 91 While Catholics typically praise Nsubuga for his political courage and prudence, he has been critiqued for failing to stand more publicly with Luwum at his most vulnerable moment.Footnote 92 On the other hand, many observers continue to suspect Luwum's involvement in early 1977 assassination plots against Amin, a theory opposed by Ward, but supported by Niringiye.Footnote 93 It should be noted that government-sponsored Uganda Radio also attempted to stir up religious and ethnic discord on February 14–15, claiming that the assassination plot had targeted not just Amin, but also Catholics and Baganda.Footnote 94 After being called to a morning meeting of military and religious leaders at Nile Mansion Hotel on February 16, Luwum was detained while Emmanuel Nsubuga and other Anglican bishops were sent home. Luwum was likely tortured and killed that night; his death and the deaths of two Acholi cabinet ministers were framed as a “car accident” in subsequent government news reports. Luwum remains the most prominent twentieth-century martyr for the Church of Uganda and an Oscar Romero-like figure for the worldwide Anglican Communion.Footnote 95
Over 4,000 mourners gathered for Luwum's funeral at Namirembe Cathedral despite government threats, the banning of foreign visitors, and the government's refusal to turn over Luwum's body. The service itself made little mention of Luwum. But as congregants filed out of Namirembe to an empty grave outside the church, they began singing the original Uganda Martyrs’ song “Bulijjo Tutendereza” (“Daily, Daily Sing the Praises”), and Sabiiti promised the crowd that Luwum was with the Risen Lord and that all should be ready to die for their faith.Footnote 96 In the weeks following Luwum's death, five other Anglican bishops fled into exile. On the Catholic side, Nsubuga stayed in Kampala under virtual house arrest amidst rumors that his days were numbered. Close confidants think Nsubuga only survived because of Amin's fears of the international Catholic Church.Footnote 97 The negative publicity from Luwum's death further damaged Amin's international reputation, and the Ugandan economy continued its free fall. In many ways, the assassination of Luwum proved to be the beginning of the end of Amin's regime.Footnote 98
Overall, ecumenical political engagement underwent a significant shift during the 1970s. The decade began with most church leaders welcoming Amin, a jovial populist who presented himself as a God-fearer collaborating with religious leaders to reknit Uganda's social and political fabric. By 1972–1973, relations frayed as Amin expanded his purges from the military to civilian opponents, including Catholic priests like Father Clement Kiggundu. Although they did not issue the joint pastoral letters that would become their hallmark in the early 1980s, Anglican and Catholic leaders remonstrated with Amin in 1975–1976 concerning Uganda's deteriorating human rights situation, and Archbishop Luwum became the most prominent Ugandan martyr of this era in 1977. In the words of Kevin Ward, “a unity in oppression and misery was forged—between Buganda and the rest of Uganda, between Catholic and Protestant, and within the Church of Uganda itself.”Footnote 99 In the even more violent years that followed the Amin regime, church leaders would build on this unity, providing shelter and speaking out much more publicly on behalf of their suffering people.
IV. A Ministry of Prophetic Presence: Ecumenical Responses during Uganda's Civil War and the Obote II regime, 1979–1986
The denouement of the Amin regime came after an ill-advised invasion of Tanzania in October 1978. Six months later, Amin fled Kampala in front of the United National Liberation Front (UNLF), a coalition of Ugandan exiles backed by Julius Nyerere's Tanzanian army. In May 1980, Milton Obote returned from exile, and his UPC won rigged elections over the Democratic Party in December 1980. In the face of this electoral fraud, Yoweri Museveni and other dissidents associated with the National Resistance Movement (NRM) went to the bush, and Uganda descended into a scorched earth civil war that would prove even more violent than the blood-soaked Amin years.Footnote 100
After the political quiescence of Obote I and the veiled protests of the Amin era, Catholic and Anglican leaders spoke out much more publicly during the post-Amin transition period. In a series of joint statements in 1979–1981, Anglican, Catholic, Muslim, and Orthodox leaders condemned Uganda's political climate of endemic corruption, political intolerance, and violent bloodlust.Footnote 101 Writing in July 1979, just weeks after the forced resignation of Amin's successor, President Yusuf Lule, these religious leaders lambasted Uganda's worsening climate of political insecurity and violence:
For the last eight years this country has suffered soul-searing insecurity. People were kidnapped, murdered in cold blood, robbed of their property and denied their human rights. . . .The criminals of the former regime who made life a nightmare in Uganda have been treated with undeserved lenience which as a result has encouraged the activities of thugs and “Bayaye” and has demoralized innocent civilians. . . . The situation is getting worse than before.Footnote 102
In a follow-up letter in April 1980, Uganda's religious leaders moved beyond platitudes, naming specific incidents, such as the recent murders of Anglican priests Enoch Olinda and James Mukasa and the White Father Catholic priest Father Lepine. They continued to lambast Uganda's political class, lamenting the “immorality and spirit of self-aggrandizement among certain people in positions of authority” and calling on Uganda's political class to fully embrace the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Footnote 103 Writing in the midst of the presidential campaign in September 1980, these leaders presented a list of demands to Tanzanian President and devout Catholic Julius Nyerere, seen as the power behind the UNLF and the occupying Tanzanian army. Here they wrote of their “witnessing injustice against the poor, the ordinary people, the handicapped, the workers, and the politicians.”Footnote 104 The religious leaders’ demands included calling for the implementation of a UN or OAU peacekeeping force, prohibiting electoral favoritism of one presidential candidate, and apprehending politicians and military officials who abuse their people.
In addition to their public statements, Uganda's religious leaders also collaborated to lobby the Obote II government privately to end military violence against innocent civilians. Meeting with Obote in September 1981, these leaders called for disciplined police forces to replace army soldiers, noting that the “lack of [army] discipline has caused rampant torture, robbery, killing, and raping” and lamenting how Uganda was “bleeding to death.” They again named specific massacres in places like Bombo, Matuuga, Kapeeza, Semuto, Wakiso, Kakiri, Matugga, Namanve, Luweero, and Wobulenzi. They concluded with a veiled warning concerning the potential for further civil uprisings: “If army operations continue to take place without thorough investigations, if life continues to be cheap in Uganda, then the people cannot recognize the difference, and it is hard to sit on the people forever.”Footnote 105
Parishes also served as ecumenical refuges during the violence, especially in the war's epicenters in central and northwestern Uganda. In Kampala, Cardinal Nsubuga opened St. Mary's Rubaga Cathedral to over 1,000 internally displaced people in 1981–1982. After NRM rebels shelled Lubiri government barracks from the grounds of Rubaga Cathedral in February 1982, the cathedral and Nsubuga's personal residence were ransacked by UNLF soldiers on Ash Wednesday. This led Nsubuga to publicly denounce the Obote regime's transgression of the principle of sanctuary.Footnote 106 Throughout this period, Catholic parishes also sheltered Catholics, Anglicans, and even Muslims, including a famous May 1980 incident in which Catholic Comboni missionaries intervened to stop a UNLF massacre of internally displaced Muslims taking refuge at Ombaci mission in northwestern Arua province.Footnote 107 Ministering in one of the geographic epicenters of the civil war, Catholic bishop of Mityana and future Cardinal Emmanuel Wamala consulted closely with his Anglican counterpart Bishop Yokanna Mukasa, praying together and sharing supplies and humanitarian aid. Wamala personally sheltered an Anglican refugee at the cathedral parish, working with Catholic sisters to disguise him and shepherd him across the border. For Wamala, ecumenical solidarity grew out of a shared experience of suffering. As he explained to me in a recent interview: “We were all suffering in the same way, and we needed each other. . . . We held retreats together; this was a very ecumenical time and we became brothers.”Footnote 108
Just as Ganda Anglicans and Ganda Catholics had suffered together during Mwanga's persecution in the 1880s, a century later they faced the wrath of the Obote II government. This suffering was especially acute on the Catholic side in light of perceived sympathies between the Catholic Church, the DP and the NRM. In Kasozi's estimation, “the Catholic church bore the brunt of government violence in this period.”Footnote 109 Yet Anglicans also suffered under Obote II, especially in Buganda. In particular, the May 1984 massacre of the rector Godfrey Bazira and 100 pilgrims at the Anglican Namugongo Seminary and martyrs’ shrine was a turning point in galvanizing both Anglican and international outrage against Obote.Footnote 110 Namugongo, of course, had been the place where the largest group of Anglican and Catholic martyrs were killed together in May-June 1886. Uganda's “ecumenism of blood” had come full circle in a century.
And yet ambiguities lingered within this narrative of solidarity forged through suffering. The 1980 elections had seen Anglicans split between pro-DP Baganda and pro-UPC non-Baganda, but the UPC was still largely seen as a Protestant party. In turn, the DP still drew predominantly on Catholic voters, and the perception that the pro-UPC/pro-Obote military regime stole the election did nothing to heal Anglican-Catholic divisions at the grassroots. Nor did Obote attempt to incorporate more Catholics into his cabinet; only seven of his fifty cabinet ministers in the early 1980s were Catholic.Footnote 111 And if Anglican Archbishop Silvanus Wani had been critical of Obote, his successor, Archbishop Yona Okoth, elected in September 1983, was widely perceived as a close ally of Obote. Okoth never spoke out against the abuses of the Obote II government in 1984–1985, and the NRM actually raided his residence in July 1985. In May 1986, Okoth publicly accused Roman Catholic and DP “rumormongers” of trying to eliminate him and other Protestant leaders and “to come to power through the bloodshed of innocent people, mainly the Protestants.”Footnote 112 On the other hand, Emmanuel Nsubuga has been viewed as a clandestine supporter of the NRM, reportedly even sending emissaries to make contact with NRM leaders in exile in the early 1980s.Footnote 113 So although Anglican-Catholic solidarity in Buganda province grew out of a shared antipathy toward Obote II and the UPC, broader national ecumenical efforts were undermined in part due to the contrasting political sympathies of each church's primate. This likely explains the sudden dearth of joint Anglican-Catholic political statements between 1983–1986 after the passionate, prophetic collaborations of the 1979–1982 period.
V. Conclusions and Further Reflections
This essay has synthesized the political contexts and attitudes that emerged from improved Anglican-Catholic relations in Uganda, focusing in particular on church leaders’ engagement with the state in the twenty-five years following Uganda's independence in 1962. I have argued that the political quietism and nation-building cooperation that marked church-state relations in the 1960s gave way to an ecclesial attitude of prudent recalcitrance in the 1970s before shifting to a stance of prophetic presence in the early 1980s. This analysis has broken new historiographical ground in terms of the broad historical scope, more extensive engagement with Catholic sources, and deeper analysis of the archival documents from the early years of the Uganda Joint Christian Council.Footnote 114
Several questions linger. First, to what extent did political and ethnic “tribalism” undergird or undermine ecumenical cooperation? For example, the relations between the two preeminent Baganda leaders, the Anglican Dunstan Nsubuga and the Catholic Emmanuel Nsubuga, were far closer than those between Emmanuel Nsubuga and Erica Sabiiti (a native of Ankole) or Janani Luwum (an Acholi native). Likewise, the Nsubugas shared much closer relations than those between Dunstan Nsubuga and his fellow Anglican leaders. Not surprisingly, ecumenical contacts were strongest in Buganda, a region in which Catholic and Anglican leaders shared a common antipathy toward Obote. In the words of one Anglican bishop, “I think that Bugandaship with Cardinal Nsubuga and Bishop Nsubuga was higher than the Roman Catholic thing. . . . It was stronger than just the Catholic and Anglican divide.”Footnote 115 Clearly new ecumenical winds were blowing in the 1960s and 1970s, supported by Africa's growing engagement with international ecumenism throughout this period.Footnote 116 But they found a fertile harvest in Uganda based on binding ties beyond baptism, especially shared connections of family, clan, ethnicity, and common political interests.
Second, it seems evident that Uganda's nascent ecumenical movement had definite nationalist overtones. As discussed previously, both Obote and Amin saw ecumenism as a key building block in their own nation-building projects. At the same time, Anglican and Catholic leaders were attempting themselves to build “national churches” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the “Buganda question” could loom as large in religious matters as political (as evidenced by the near-schism in the Church of Uganda in 1970–1971). In turn, there were rival cultural nationalisms and international religious networks playing out among Ugandan Christians throughout this period, or what Derek Peterson has described as the contrasting “multiplication of nativisms,” “ethnic patriotisms,” and “cosmopolitan, multilingual” Christian identities developing within the East African Revival.Footnote 117 The national ambitions of both Catholic and Protestant leaders thus dovetailed throughout this period, especially as leaders faced rival identity formation movements within their own churches. In general, the Catholic Church was more successful in transcending regional and ethnic divisions. Joseph Kiwanuka and then Emmanuel Nsubuga were the undisputed Catholic primates of their eras, and they could also draw on a large international network and Vatican backing (seen, for example, when Pope Paul VI gave Nsubuga the cardinal's hat in April 1976). Nsubuga also developed a national network of seminaries during this period that brought seminarians together across regional and ethnic lines.Footnote 118 In contrast, an internal power struggle within the Anglican hierarchy continued to play out throughout this era, largely based on Baganda/non-Baganda and balokole/non-balokole divisions. With the possible exception of Luwum, no Anglican leader really stood above this factional squabbling.Footnote 119
Third, the period of 1962–1986 demonstrates a gradual blurring of the churches’ social and political engagement. The 1960s saw an ideological effort to distinguish the two (classifying medicine, development, and education as “social” issues and justice, peace, and corruption as “political”). By the 1980s, this distinction had collapsed, as church leaders moved from seeing themselves as state chaplains to seeing themselves as public prophets. This melding only deepened in the post-1986 period—one thinks of Catholic Father John Mary Waliggo's chairing of the committee that drafted the 1996 Constitution, or the UJCC's extensive electoral education and civic monitoring as Uganda returned to multiparty politics in the late 1990s and 2000s. Even today, however, church leaders remain uncomfortable with any descriptions of their work as explicitly “political.” This study raises the question of the merits (if any) of continuing to distinguish between the “social” and “political” dimensions of the church's public witness, not to mention the need to more closely analyze the connections between postcolonial nation building and Christian ecumenism in Africa and beyond.
Finally, church-state analyses are often framed within the standard tropes of “prophetic distance” and “cohabitation.” In other words, the church leader is either a public prophet within society, calling the state to account like Archbishop Luwum or Oscar Romero in El Salvador, or the church is a junior partner with the ruling regime, acquiescing in state abuses as in pre-genocide Rwanda. One intriguing dimension of Uganda's story is the role of “official silence” in periods of social violence and government repression. Ugandan Catholic theologians have lamented the “period of great silence” between 1962 and 1979 when the Catholic hierarchy did not issue a single public pastoral letter.Footnote 120 Likewise, the most forceful ecumenical political statements were not issued until after 1979. But as this study has shown, church leaders were not simply silent during the 1960s and 1970s, and it is also a mischaracterization to describe their public reticence as simple acquiescence to the state. Survival and even effective critique often entailed multiple forms of engagement, both behind the scenes and in public.Footnote 121 Official silence can reflect fear, intimidation, connivance, and acquiescence, but silence can also reflect prudence, nonviolence, resistance, and patience. In evaluating church leaders’ public witness, scholars would do well to consider both sides of the ledger.
