Festo Kivengere — The Man Who Named His Enemy

Who he was

Festo Kivengere (1919–1988) was a Ugandan bishop and the best-known evangelist the East African Revival produced — a man who preached alongside Billy Graham and was called, tiresomely but not inaccurately, the Billy Graham of Africa. His fuller story is told on his author page in this library.

This chapter is about one thing he did, in 1977, which is harder than anything else in this book.

In February of that year Idi Amin's regime murdered Archbishop Janani Luwum. Kivengere, who had stood with Luwum against the regime, fled Uganda on foot over the mountains with his wife. He was a bishop in exile, his friend was dead, and his country was being destroyed by one man.

Within the year he published a book. It was called I Love Idi Amin.

The most offensive title in modern Christian publishing

It is worth letting that land before we spiritualise it.

Amin's regime killed on a scale that is still argued over in hundreds of thousands. It killed Kivengere's archbishop. It drove Kivengere out of his own country. There is no reading of this in which Kivengere is a bystander taking a generous view of a distant villain; he was a direct victim writing about the man responsible, in the same year, from exile.

And the title is not a slogan about forgiveness in the abstract. It uses the man's name.

Kivengere's argument, when you read past the cover, is not that the killing did not matter or that justice was unnecessary. He was clear that Amin's actions were evil and said so. His argument was that hatred would finish in him what Amin had started — that the one thing the regime could not be permitted to take was his capacity to love, and that if he lost that he would have been defeated in the only way that finally counts.

Where that came from

This did not arrive from nowhere. It is the revival's four convictions carried to their end.

If sin must be named specifically, then Amin's sin is named, and so is mine, and they are named in the same room. If the blood of Jesus is what cleanses, then it is sufficient for both of us or it is sufficient for neither. If I walk in the light, I cannot hold a secret hatred and call it justice. And if the song is Tukutendereza — we praise You, Jesus, Your blood has cleansed me — then the only ground I stand on is ground I would have to share with him.

The balokole had been rehearsing that logic in small rooms for forty years, over ordinary quarrels and stolen goods and adulteries. Kivengere applied it to a dictator.

What he teaches us

Forgiveness is not a feeling and it is not a verdict on the offence. Kivengere never said Amin should not be stopped or that the crimes were small. He said he would not hate him. Those are separable, and we usually refuse to separate them.

The grudge you are protecting is doing its damage to you. He understood he was in a fight for his own soul, not for Amin's reputation.

You cannot do this from a standing start. Nobody forgives a murder by deciding to. It is available to a man who has spent decades being forgiven out loud, in company, for things he actually did.

Say the name. Kivengere did not write On Forgiving Our Enemies. He wrote the man's name on the cover. Generalised forgiveness costs nothing.

The text underneath it

“Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44).

The commands are all active verbs, and none of them is a feeling. This is the most quoted and least attempted sentence Jesus ever said, and Kivengere is one of the few people in the twentieth century who can be shown to have tried it against a man who had earned the exception.

A prayer

Lord, I have someone in mind and I did not want to. I am not ready to feel differently and I am not going to pretend. Begin further back: remind me what I have been forgiven, out loud, by people who had every right to hold it. Then let me say the name, and mean the blessing. Amen.