Anglican Commemoration
Archbishop of Uganda & Martyr
February 17 · d. 1977
also known as Janani Jaona Luwum
Janani Luwum was Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Boga-Zaire, killed in February 1977 after he and his fellow bishops delivered a written protest to President Idi Amin over killings and disappearances. The government announced that he had died in a car accident; his body, when it was seen, was full of bullet wounds. He is commemorated across the Anglican Communion as a martyr.
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.
Notice how much of Janani Luwum's courage was procedural. He did not shout at the President; he chaired a meeting, put grievances in writing, signed the letter, and delivered it by hand. The bravest thing in his life is a document filed in an archive. You will probably not face soldiers in your bedroom, but you will face the moment when the honest sentence can still be softened, the memo that could be written or quietly not written, the meeting where naming the thing plainly will cost you something and saying nothing will cost you nothing today. He also refused to go to the summons alone, and refused to go secretly. When you next know exactly what ought to be said, and to whom, what is actually keeping you from writing it down and signing your name?
Almost everything known about Janani Luwum comes from within a few years of his death, and from people who were in the room or near it. He left no book of his own. The earliest full account is Margaret Ford's biography, published in 1978 by his own secretary at a bishop's request, about a year after the killing; most later summaries appear to rest on it. Henry Kyemba, Amin's Minister of Health, defected and published A State of Blood in 1977, and it preserves both Luwum's own narration of the night search of his house and the condition of his body. Festo Kivengere, who was at the summons of 16 February, published I Love Idi Amin the same year. One contemporary document survives in an archive: the pastoral letter of the House of Bishops to Amin, held at the Church of Uganda Archives, Uganda Christian University, Mukono, and quoted in the Dictionary of African Christian Biography. Olara Otunnu published a further biography at Kampala in 2015. Neither Ford, Kyemba, nor Otunnu was read directly for this account, and the Time report of 28 February 1977 is known here only at second hand.
The spine of the life is firm and the details around it are not. Reference works agree on the 1922 birth (one gives 1924), the conversion of 6 January 1948, the consecration as Bishop of Northern Uganda on 25 January 1969, the archiepiscopate from 1974, the summons of 16 February 1977, and the announcement of a road accident on the 17th. Three points are genuinely unsettled and should not be stated flatly. The ordination years appear in three combinations, 1953/1954, 1955/1956, and a mixed 1953/1955; the pairs are internally coherent and look like two traditions rather than three, with Westminster Abbey's very specific "deacon on St Thomas's Day, 21 December 1955" the most likely to descend from a register. The date of the bishops' memorandum is variously given as 5, 10, or 12 February 1977; what is not in doubt is the week, the content, or that Luwum delivered it. And the burial is dated 19 February by Ugandan accounts, while the Episcopal Church's A Great Cloud of Witnesses says only that the body was released to the family after some weeks; the Ugandan version is more specific and independently corroborated, and the liturgical volume appears to be compressing. The number of his children is given as nine by three sources and five by one.
The killing itself is better documented than most modern martyrdoms, and the state's own account was the first thing to collapse. That he was murdered rather than killed in a crash rests on the testimony of a hostile insider (Kyemba, who had every reason to know and none to invent bullet wounds), on the villagers who opened the coffin, and on the family. Who fired is another matter. Time reported rumours that Amin shot him personally, along with Amin's angry denial and the fact that there were no first-hand witnesses; later accounts, citing Vice-President Mustafa Adrisi and a Ugandan human-rights commission, name Amin's aide Isaac Maliyamungu. A retired officer, Lt Col Yefusa Bananuka, told a Ugandan paper in 2017 that he was assigned to oversee the burial and that the body was taken from its coffin and wrapped in goat skins. "Murdered by the state" is very well attested; "Amin pulled the trigger" is not.
There was no slow-growing devotion here and no canonization process: the church read the killing as martyrdom within weeks and acted on that reading, beginning with a memorial service at Westminster Abbey on 30 March 1977. Luwum entered Anglican calendars by synod and convention, and they do not agree on the day. The Church of England, the Episcopal Church, Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia, and Brazil keep 17 February; Australia, Canada, the Scottish Episcopal Church, and Wales keep 3 June, which is also the feast of the Uganda Martyrs of the 1880s. Uganda's own state holiday, established in 2015 and first kept in 2016, falls on 16 February. So the Anglican Communion largely keeps as his feast the day the government announced he had died in an accident, while his country keeps the day he was actually killed.
He lies where the soldiers left him, in the churchyard at Wii Gweng, Mucwini, with his wife Mary beside him since 2019. In 2017 the Church of Uganda proposed exhuming him for a primate's burial at Namirembe Cathedral in Kampala, and the family refused; the institutional church's preferred resting place and the family's are still not the same place. A pilgrimage walk retraces his last journey from Namirembe to Mucwini, a reported five hundred kilometres, passing the place where he was tried.
The three sayings quoted here are all reported rather than autograph, and their apparatus is uneven. "They are going to kill me. I am not afraid," and the words about occupying his chair, are quoted verbatim from the entry for 17 February, page 93, of A Great Cloud of Witnesses (Church Publishing, 2016), the Episcopal Church's authorised commemorative volume, which gives no source of its own; the same page places the summons at "his palace" and gives the charge as complicity in a plot to murder the President. The tradition that Festo Kivengere was the hearer of the first is common but is not in that text. "I can see the hand of the Lord in this" is transmitted by Dan Graves for the Christian History Institute, without citation and with a setting (a crowded stadium) that no other account supports; it is a second remembered saying from the same hours, not part of the first. The bishops' pastoral letter to Amin, including "the gun, which was meant to protect Uganda as a nation," is quoted from the entry by the Rev. Canon John Kateeba Tumwine (2010) in the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, which cites the original in the Church of Uganda Archives at Uganda Christian University, Mukono; the letter is a joint episcopal document, not Luwum's words alone. Luwum's account of the night search of his house, "Our house was the house of God," is his own, recorded by Henry Kyemba in A State of Blood (1977) and quoted here by way of Carol Natukunda's report in New Vision; note that the book's title is A State of Blood, not "The State of Blood" as that report gives it. His daughter Julie Luwum Adriko's recollection of the same night, "My only weapon is the Bible," was given to Moses Walubiri in New Vision in 2015, thirty-eight years after the event. The conversion of 6 January 1948 is narrated, not quoted, from Margaret Ford's Janani: The Making of a Martyr (Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1978; published in the United States as Even Unto Death) at pages 21 to 22, by way of the same Dictionary of African Christian Biography entry. Kivengere's sermon title, the hour of the raid, and the empty grave beside Bishop Hannington's come from the lectionary biography at missionstclare.com. Olara Otunnu's Archbishop Janani Luwum: The Life and Witness of a 20th Century Martyr (Fountain Publishers, Kampala, 2015) is the other book-length treatment.
The charge against him, arms-smuggling for a coup on behalf of the exiled Milton Obote, was never tried anywhere. The "trial" was a staged rally, not a proceeding in which evidence was tested, and no court or commission of the period ever adjudicated it; the accusation is reported to have originated in a name given under torture. That is not the same as a document proving fabrication, and the difference is worth keeping.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Janani Luwum boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12