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| Adventist Missionaries Magdalon Eugen Lind, his wife Kezia (Norwegians) and locals of Rwenzori region in Uganda |
Uganda, occupied by the British colonialists in 1894, is a landlocked country bordered by Kenya in the east, South Sudan in the north, the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the west, Rwanda in the southwest, and Tanzania in the south.
The East
African country with a long history of influxes of refugees from Burundi, Rwanda,
DR Congo and Sudan, has an area of 241,559 km2 and is the second smallest among
its neighbours after Rwanda which is almost nine times smaller than Uganda.
According
to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics population estimates of 2018, Uganda’s
population stands at 40 million people with almost half of them young people
between 0-14 years of age.
The Seventh-day
Adventist church and other churches in Uganda
According
to the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, the decision to establish the
Seventh-day Adventist work in Uganda was made in South Africa in March 1903 by Brother
Booth from Nyasaland (Malawi) Mission, Brother Freeman of Basutoland (Lesotho)
Mission, and Brother Anderson of the Matabeleland (Zimbabwe) Mission.
The “Brethren
of Experience”, as they were called, wanted to establish six great missions in
both South and East Africa and Brother Booth personally wanted to establish a mission in Uganda.
In the same
year 1903, Brother Booth visited Uganda via Mombasa, Crossed Lake Victoria and
landed at Uganda’s Entebbe (today is an international airport) with a mission to
assess the possibility of establishing a mission in Uganda.
The ESDA
notes that Booth reported that the authorities were hospitable, offered him a
place for mission station and schools on agreeable terms and Brother Booth left
Uganda for England via Cape Town to raise funds to begin the work in Uganda.
One can
relate this entertainment of Brother Booth to the fact that the Buganda Kingdom
was at loggerheads with the French Catholics and probably were delighted to see
new missionaries who would be “rivalries” to the infamous Catholic Church.
In 1906,
another SDA German missionary E. C. Enns from Tanzania entered Uganda and made
contact with Bishop Tucker of the Church Missionary Society, the Buganda King who urged him to establish a medical facility in his Kingdom but was unable to do
so.
The rivalry
between kingdom authorities and religions such as Catholics and Muslims who competed
to win favour of or defeats the king was such a power struggle which many SDA
missionaries always avoided in most of their missions as we shall see in other
stories.
Adventist
missionaries were admitted in Uganda in 1927 and designated to Nchwanga (current
day Fortportal), far away from the capital Kampala as a British colonialists’
policy was to assign religious parties to different parts of the country to
avoid contentions of influence.
Nchwanga
people were so resistant to strangers and Adventists were expected to fail but
fortunately, the mission was established although the first converts came from 70kms
away, at Mityana, unexpectedly as missionaries were on their way.
Missionaries
S. G. Maxwell and Petero Risasi were travelling from Kampala back to Nchwanga but
because there were no lodges, they spent a night in the kitchen of one Ananias
Gugwa at Mityana.
Petero
Risasi shared the word of God with people in Mityana and eventually, three
people including blind man Joshua Kidawalime and brothers Henry Guwedeko and
Simeon Golola accepted the message and got baptized at Nchwanga.
Moving to Kampala, the first boom and political
instability
In 1930, as
political rivalries were getting contained by the British, the missionaries bought
land at Kireka Hill, four miles off Kampala-Jinja Road, which became Central Uganda
Mission, coordinating Adventist missionary work in Buganda, Bunyoro, and Tooro
regions.
From then, the church rapidly grew, establishing Kakoro Mission Station (East) in 1934, Katikamu Mission Station (Central) in 1943, Rwenzori Mission Station (West) in (1945) and Ankole Mission Hospital (Southwest) in 1950.
After the 1962 political independence, Uganda experience grave power struggles and suppression of freedoms and on Sept. 21, 1977, President Idi Amini Dada declared a ban on all religions save Islam, Roman Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox.
“Included in the ban are the Seventh-day Adventist church, the Salvation Army, the Uganda Baptist mission … on the ground that they are a security risk" The New York Times reported the ban that lasted until 1979.
The ban
saw some of the Church’s land was confiscated, believers and pastors hiding, taking
over of schools and Bugema Adventist College had started offering a degree in
theology was moved to Kenya.
Worship
and fellowship meetings would be done from one home to another to avoid notice
and pastors conducted baptism at night until Amini was toppled but political
unrest remained rampant until 1986 when grieved rebel leader Museveni who had
some grim Rwandan refugees captured power.
The General
Conference Annual Council of 1987 in Brazil took a decision to organized mission
work in Uganda into a Union Mission which had 44,358 members who had increased
during the two-year persecution.
The
church has grown since then to have over 430,000 members among the 40
million Ugandans and 1,241 churches.
The
church also operates Bugema University and six other tertiary institutions of
learning, 30 secondary schools, and 195 primary schools, Ishaka Adventist
Hospital, Kyaka Adventist Hospital, constructing Kireka Adventist Hospital in
Kampala, The Church also operates over 20 health centers and four FM radio
stations.
Not mentioning
thousands of private schools, hospitals and other facilities owned by Seventh-day
Adventists where the Word of God is proclaimed.
May God bless his work
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