Yona Kanamuzeyi — “We Are Going to Heaven”

Who he was

Yona Kanamuzeyi was a Rwandan deacon and a man of the revival. On 24 January 1964, during the violence that followed Rwanda's independence, he was taken by soldiers, driven to a river, and shot.

What is remembered about that night is remembered because there were witnesses.

As he was led to the river he sang. The hymn was “There Is a Happy Land”. Before he was killed he asked permission to write in his journal, and he wrote: We are going to heaven. He asked that the journal be given to his wife.

His name is on the roll of modern martyrs at St Paul's Cathedral in London.

The two sentences

Almost everything about Kanamuzeyi's death is beyond our reach. We do not know what he felt, and the accounts do not agree on every detail of the night. What we have is two acts, and they are enough to think about for a long time.

He sang. Not a lament and not a protest — a children's hymn about heaven, sung on the way to a river by a man who knew what was at the river. Whatever else that is, it is not a performance; there was no congregation to impress and the soldiers were not an audience he had any reason to court.

And he wrote a note to his wife. Four words, in the last minutes available to him, and they are not about the soldiers, or the injustice, or even really about himself. We are going to heaven. A plural. He was telling her where they were both going.

What the revival had done to him

It is worth asking what produces a man who behaves like that, because it was not courage in the ordinary sense — there was nothing to be brave about by then, no fight left to make.

The revival had spent thirty years teaching a very small number of things very insistently. That sin must be named. That the blood of Jesus is sufficient. That you walk in the light with other people, holding nothing back. That the song is about Him and not about you.

A man formed by those convictions for a lifetime has, in a certain sense, already done the hard part before the soldiers arrive. He has no unfinished business with God, no hidden thing to be afraid of being found out about, and no habit of pretending. What is left is a man who can sing.

That is not a technique for facing death. It is what a particular kind of ordinary Christian life turns out to have been preparing all along.

What he teaches us

You will meet your crisis with the habits you already have. Nobody assembles a faith like that in the back of a truck. Kanamuzeyi's last night was the outworking of thirty years of unremarkable Wednesdays.

Think about who your last words are for. He used his to comfort his wife. Not to accuse, not to explain himself, not to be quoted.

The martyrs of the twentieth century are mostly African, and mostly unnamed to us. Kanamuzeyi is on a wall in London because someone wrote it down. Most were not.

The text underneath it

“For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21).

Paul wrote it from prison, weighing the two and finding he could not lose. It is a sentence that is easy to quote and almost impossible to test. Kanamuzeyi's journal is the same sentence in four words, written at the one moment when nobody could suspect the writer of not meaning it.

A prayer

Lord, I do not know what I will face, and I am not asking to know. Build in me now the habits I will need then: nothing hidden, nothing unconfessed, no argument left with You. And if my last words are to somebody I love, let them be about where we are going. Amen.