Tombstones and Banana Trees (10 page)

“I know a thief is to pay for his sins, and I am ready to pay.”

I stopped.

The headmaster had never heard my story in full. My mother had told him much of it, but there were parts she had skipped over. In front of the school I had held nothing back. The headmaster was in tears. The students looked on in shock. None of them knew the truth about me. I had tried to convince the rest of my gang mates that I was rich, but this speech undid all I had told them before. The gang leader was not impressed, and to taunt me he started singing the chorus of “Tukutendereza Yesu.” Most of the eight hundred students sang in unison and made fun of me, the thief who stood in front of them. But to me the name of the Lord had been glorified, even by the Muslim students in the crowd. Their singing made my shaking legs stand firm.

The headmaster spoke first. “If God could arrest everyone who has committed a crime here, there would not be many of us left. I am going to talk to the board of governors and see what can be done.”

And that was it. The students were told to go back to classes and I was expected to do the same. There was no judgment, no beating, but no full reprieve either. I walked down the hill in the crowd, boys talking to me, asking me if it was all true, if I really had done all those things. I do not remember what my answers were. It was my turn to be in shock.

A week later the headmaster told me of the decision of the governors. They had agreed to forgive me. The drum beat again, and the school was assembled and told the news. They were told how I was also appointed school librarian because the governors guessed I would have a good idea how students were stealing books. As a matter of fact I did, and from that moment on I was one of the best librarians the school had ever had. Not many books went missing on my watch.

I also joined the school's Scripture Union group and learned how to read the Bible, how to pray, and how to preach. They asked me to join them in traveling to other schools and to give my testimony. I discovered that, far from being filled with gang members and nothing else, the school was alive with wonderful Christians. Other students took me alongside them, including the son of Mugyenzi, the man I had met on the bus and who had brought such healing to me and my mother on that morning. These students did an incredible work and taught me a lot. They looked out for me, protected me, and nurtured me.

As well as Scripture Union, Campus Crusade for Christ was so gifted at teaching me how to grow as a Christian and how to carry out person-to-person evangelism using the four spiritual laws, things I still find helpful even today. I had never paid it much attention before, but there was a cathedral opposite the school. Lots of the old revivalists would meet there, and I made a habit of spending time with them. They taught us how to repent, how to spot the characteristics of revival, and what part personal holiness played in it all. It was a big movement, and we were united. Slowly but steadily I started to preach.

A little while later, as my life began to settle into its new rhythm, I was at home and knew the time was right to talk to the woman who had fed the killers and shown them to Peninah's house, waiting to hear the shots fired before turning around and returning home. To talk to her about all of this was a painful task, made more painful by the history between us. Before Peninah's murder this woman was my favorite. When I was small she had fed me many times, and I had always liked her more than the other women around. After Peninah's murder she used to come to visit us, to try to cover up her guilt and pretend that all was well between us, but we always disliked her.

It was painful to sit down and talk to her. And it was difficult as well. I had tried on one or two earlier occasions, but it had never worked. She did not want to discuss it and would always pretend she did not know what I was talking about.

But this time, somehow, I knew it was right. Instead of talking about me, I started with the truth about her: “I heard you were in the group of people who murdered Peninah. So I have come to sort things out with you.”

All that happened was this: She cried. And cried. And cried. The tears threatened never to cease. In time, though, as they eased off, she said, “I do not know whether God will ever forgive me. But I want peace with you, my son. I want peace.”

And that is what followed between us. Our reconciliation became one of the most treasured changes in my new life. It did not stop there, either. She became a born-again Christian. Almost twenty years later, I still love to tell the story of how it happened.

Many years later, she got sick. She was admitted into Kisiizi Hospital—the one at the bottom of the waterfall, so close that you can hear the roar as you stand in the compound and almost feel the spray. The hospital was running a mission at the time, and they invited many preachers to come in and speak to the staff and patients. They asked me to join them and give my testimony.

They say that white people teach, while Africans preach. I do not know about that—I have some good
muzungu
friends who preach the Word with passion and zeal. But I also know that if you invite me up to the front of your church to say a few words, I will probably speak for a little longer than you might expect. We say that
muzungu
have the watch but we Africans have the time. This is what happened on the Friday night of the mission in Kisiizi Hospital. I was invited to give my testimony but ended up preaching. There were loudspeakers throughout the hospital, and I know she was listening as I told my story and gave the gospel message. Included in my testimony were a few words about the reconciliation with her. I did not mention her by name, but she knew I was talking about her.

The next day there was another meeting, and I went along. I was surprised to see that she had left her bed and was sitting upstairs on the veranda of the hospital ward. It may not have appeared all that significant to an observer, but to me—as well as her daughter, who was also a born-again Christian—her shift away from her bed to the outside, where she could hear and see the preachers more clearly, was deeply symbolic and profoundly encouraging. Her daughter and I felt inspired to pray for her with even greater determination.

On Sunday another man was preaching, and he spoke well. After speaking he said, “Today there are some people God has been speaking to. God brought you to this hospital not to get physical healing but spiritual healing. I want you to come here, and we will pray for you, and you will get physically and spiritually healed. If you want this, come up to stand with me.”

She was in the hospital receiving treatment for various conditions—high blood pressure, severe arthritis, and so on. I watched the cluster of people approach the preacher, who was standing in front of a makeshift altar, and at first did not notice her shuffling up with her two walking sticks guiding her steps.

As she reached the front she threw down both walking sticks. Her hands held aloft, she turned around to face the congregation. Her face was transformed. Gone was the burden of guilt and the lines of pain. She simply shone. I jumped up, ran to her, hugged her, and we both cried for what must have been ten minutes.

Eventually she was given the microphone: “I thank God today. He has healed me physically and spiritually, and today I want to give my life to Christ.”

She was no stranger to Christianity, but her past made her words even more dramatic. Formerly, her husband was a church leader. Because of the problems that had taken root and thrived amid their hatred and anger, he had stopped being a lay preacher and taken a swift descent to becoming a drunkard. He remained as such even after her conversion, but she became an even more significant member of our family. She has done a great deal to bring many of them to Jesus Christ. Now she visits me when she comes to Kampala, she calls me when she is sick, and we have become great, great friends. I want to thank God so much for that.

It has not been easy to reach this point. Even after that weekend in the hospital—for years afterward, in fact—I would often remember her and feel the same old feelings of hatred and anger toward her. I reached a stage where I put her photo in my Bible so that when those old feelings of resentment came to me, I could look at her and forgive her. It was a tool that really helped me, and within three years we were much better.

Within weeks of my becoming a Christian, I could see that God was teaching me about forgiveness. While my own confession and absolution had taken only a matter of hours, the issue of how to forgive others was taught over a far, far longer period of time. Instead of hours, I have spent decades learning why I need to forgive. Through it God has taught me that restoring broken relationships is a vital part of following Jesus. Even as a growing Christian these lessons were so valuable to me.

Today I am no expert on the matter. Instead of a professor I am like a schoolboy with a soccer ball made out of tape, plastic bags, and rags. I am fascinated by forgiveness, drawn to it, compelled by it, and delighted when anyone wants to join me. That is what revolutionary forgiveness becomes after a while—a passion. It draws us in, yet it does not overrule us. We must still make the choice to overcome our reservations.

Back then I still had so many reservations. I may have spoken with many of the people on my list, but there was one more restoration ahead that would cost me far more than the others. One of my aunt's daughters brought this to my attention just a few weeks after her mother's conversion.

“What about your father? Surely your forgiveness must extend to him, eh, Birungi?”

This daughter I was speaking with was dying of HIV/AIDS. I was meeting with her to pray, and the news of her mother's transformation had left an indelible mark of peace and happiness on her emaciated frame. For many, many years she had prayed for her mother, longing that she, too, would know the power of Jesus' love, acceptance, and forgiveness. Now, when she was just a few weeks away from death, her prayer had been answered.

In those few months between the dawn of her mother's new life and the nightfall of her own we often talked and prayed. Before her body lost its battle against relentless infection, she asked me, If God had transformed her mother's life so dramatically, then why could I not expect Him to do the same for my father?

I knew she was right. But that did not make me any less terrified.

Chapter Ten

Take Away the Stone

My father's transformation was a miracle. I did not believe he would ever change. But if God had changed others dramatically, there was a chance the same power could also transform my father.

How do you encourage transformation? We know we are powerless to create and sustain it ourselves, but do we have a part to play in creating the environment in which true revolutionary change can take place? I think we do. I think we can act as midwife to the miraculous transformation God instigates. I think we can play our part and roll away the stone, just as Lazarus's friends did. And all of this, I believe, starts with prayer.

And so, hungry for change in our father's life, we started a prayer movement. For months we prayed, my family and I, pleading with God to break through and change his heart. We prayed for healing, for restoration, for deliverance. We spent many hours in silence and many more in tears. Eventually, after two years, came the first sign that God was clearly at work; we received news that our father was sick.

We did not know it at the time, but he had been abandoned by his wives. He had cancer and was unable to work. His finances had sprung a leak, and his wives had followed the exodus. Yet he was not alone. When he first settled in the area, he had encouraged so many families from our village to migrate with him—coming back and tempting them with huge sweet potatoes. Many of them who had joined him still had connections back in the old village. News of what had happened to his first wife and her children—the ones he had turned his back on—had reached my father's friends.

One of them told him, “Your children are doing well. Something has changed in them. Why don't you try to get in touch with them to see if they might be able to help you?”

So my father put a series of announcements on the radio. There were seven of them in all, repeating the same message: “I am terribly sick, in a very critical condition. Please, my children, come and take me to the hospital.”

He was frustrated at having to do this, but he called for our help despite the humiliation. People in our village heard the broadcast and told us about it. It left us in an awkward situation; we had prayed so long for restoration, but to hear that he was “in a critical condition” was not something we had anticipated. Although we had spent two years praying for change, we had spent two decades before that longing for news of his death. We met at home to talk about it, and at first the general feeling was that he deserved to die. We slipped back into the old way of things, and most of us felt that we should let him die. After all, he had rejected us. At first I felt that way. But not for long.

In time I remembered the words of Jesus on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

I knew we had to help, so my sisters, my mother, and I talked. We would never have another father again. This man, Boniface, was our only one, despite all the pain and shame he had handed out to us. We had prayed for transformation, so was this not God giving us an opportunity to meet with him, to help him, and possibly to be reconciled? Why could we not try?

My mother had some money, so we hired a car to drive us to see him. I had not seen him for many years—more than ten. I had been a teenager when we had last met, a year before Peninah was murdered. He had made two trips back to the village after he had abandoned us, and neither of them had gone well. He was there simply to recruit more people to move with him to Queen Elizabeth National Park, and on the first trip he would come back to our house only at night, when he was drunk. We did not fight him, and we did not talk. He forced himself on my mother when he returned home, leaving her pregnant on both occasions.

Cancer had changed him. Or perhaps it was that he, too, had tasted the bitterness of abandonment now that his wives had gone. He looked ill and weak, but there was something else about him; he was
less
than he used to be. Perhaps it was because I was larger now, but he seemed so small that I wondered how such a man had ever caused us such devastation.

We did not talk. He was too ill for conversation, as the cancer had spread throughout his intestines, leaving him almost in a coma. At this stage we were not there for reconciliation, merely rescue. We brought him back to the village, but not to our home. We took him to the hospital at Kisiizi, the same place where I had tried to commit suicide on the waterfalls, and the same hospital where my aunt had met with God dramatically. Perhaps the same thing would happen for him?

The doctors removed large parts of his intestines, and he gradually started to improve. I had no idea what was going on; was this God's plan? Things were changing so slowly that it was hard to know what to do. My mother knew, though. She was good to him, kinder, I think, than any person I have ever witnessed. She fed him, nursed him, bathed him, and offered all sorts of acts of mercy despite what he did when he rejected, abandoned, and cursed her to be blown away like dust. My sisters and brothers—whom he had also rejected, cursed, abandoned, and disowned—would walk the ten miles every day from home to the hospital to bring him food despite the wicked things he did to us. The reconciliation between my father and mother took place over these months, through meals and kindness and sacrifice.

In time he was stronger and was told he would be discharged from the hospital. Today it is clear that his period of recovery after the surgery was vital for our renewal as well. We grew accustomed to the idea of having him around, and we got used to the idea that he was someone to whom we should show kindness. We found ourselves in the habit of believing we had a father again.

All that slow restoration came to fulfillment on the day he left the hospital and returned home with us. It was the greatest day in my life. I never thought our father would ever come back and settle at home. But he did, and that moment started when he stepped out of the car—with my mother—at the tree by the main road where he had abandoned us.

I do not know what he was thinking at that moment. Did he remember the day when he beat us, tipped out that bucket of ash, and cursed us? I do not know. Perhaps he did not remember that day at all. It does not matter really, for what followed when he eventually arrived at our house was as clear a sign as we could ever have wished for that he was sorry for what had happened.

We were all waiting at home to greet him. But the journey was not yet over. We had gathered for his arrival, none of us with any idea of how things would progress. As his undersized frame appeared in the doorway, some of my sisters screamed. And then there were the tears. For twenty minutes we cried, every one of us. I had never seen an old man crying—never—but my father wept like a child. Breath escaped him, and, like the psalmist said, his tears were his only food.

My mind was full of questions about these tears. What were they—tears of sorrow, of fear, of pain? I knew he was stronger than when we had taken him to the hospital, but was he able to cope with this experience? Would all this prove to be too much for his refugee body?

Eventually, fittingly, it was my father who broke the silence. In a voice every bit as fragile as his physique, he spoke softly.

“My children, please, I want you to forgive me. I brought pain to you. I rejected you. I abandoned you. I never knew that you would be the ones to save my life.”

Then he said a proverb in our local language:

“A fool hates somebody who loves him.”

We were sitting in the main room of my mother's house, with a low table in the middle and chairs all around. He sat on one side, while my sisters, brothers, and I were opposite. After he recited the proverb he stood up and moved from his side over to us. He stood in front of Peace, my elder sister, who looks so beautiful, so much like my mother. She was the one who was abducted and defiled at a young age and forced to marry a man who continues to mistreat her to this day.

My father had always treated her with contempt. None of us ever knew why, but it was clear he thought even less of her than he did the rest of us.

“My daughter,” he said, “even from the moment you were born, I never liked you. Please forgive me.”

They hugged, and gradually, one by one, we started to talk. We confessed the things we had hated him for. We told him the truth, holding nothing back. We talked about feeling like we were enemies, about wishing him dead. He spoke of the humiliation of our beating him, of the way he and his wives celebrated when they heard that Peninah had been murdered. He did not know why, but his hatred of us had been so great that his own daughter's murder sparked joy. Their plan had been to cripple us financially, to make us social misfits, so Peninah's death was cause for celebration, even though he was clear that he had nothing to do with it.

People started to come to our house, to see Boniface back with his first wife and children. They came and saw us forgive each other, saw us crying tears of joy, holding on to each other without fear of violence.

And we waited to see whether he had really changed.

He started coming home early, not drunk either. We started eating together, and he and my mother worked in the garden together, went to the market together, went to church together. In just a few weeks we started to regain our self-esteem as children. Finally we had someone we could call father. It is hard to find the words to quite describe what a difference that made to us.

The change started to affect more than my mother, sisters, brothers, and me. My father went to apologize to Eric, Peninah's husband, for not coming to help bury her. Then he brought some of the relatives with whom we had had misunderstandings for many years. These were the people who had been complicit in his crimes, the ones who had taken his side. He brought along to our house his sisters who had spent so many years defending their brother. These were the relatives who had hurt, embarrassed, and humiliated us terribly. He made a big step, calling his relatives to our home and trying to be an instrument of peace.

In those days people in the village ate communally, and it was not uncommon for folk to arrive with food to share with our father, mother, and us. They would come, we would eat, and we would talk over the issues, going back over all the past hurts and putting them right. We fed on food and forgiveness, and it made us stronger.

For two or three years we had a great time with him. He talked to us and went to church with us; he went to weddings together with our mother. That was their honeymoon.

All along I have spoken about my sisters, but I have not told you so very much about my brothers. I had three—James, Robert, and Fred—although two of them are not alive today. Robert and James were born before our father abandoned us and are no longer living, while Fred, who is a twin with Jennifer, is still alive. He and Jennifer are the last born in our family and were conceived during my father's second return after our abandonment.

I remember the first time my father returned to us. It was five years since he had left us weeping by the side of the road. He had come back to recruit more people to move with him to his new home. He was ashamed of coming to our house and first stayed at my uncle's place, fearing the taboos that say that after abandoning your home and vowing never to return, you will die if you go back. He first took traditional medicine before he entered our house and then spent five days with us.

Those days were not good days. We did not talk to him. We would go to school very early in the morning and leave him in bed. At night he would come home late and drunk. I wonder how my mother slept with him with the hatred in her heart, but because of cultural laws she could not lock him out. She had also taken traditional cleansing medicine, so I suppose she felt in some way protected.

She got pregnant in those five days and later gave birth to Grace Ankunda, whose name means “God loves me.” My father left, having convinced four families to move with him.

Four years later he returned, looking for more people to join him. This time he stayed for twelve days, again leaving my mother pregnant—this time with the twins, Fred and Jennifer.

Our father had always rejected Fred, Grace, and Jennifer. My mother had been clear that he was their father, but many people believed him when he said he was not. He accused her of infidelity, but the timing was such that they really only could have been his. As my mother said, why would she become sexually immoral when he was around? Would she not have done it while he was away?

These children grew up in a poisonous environment. People in the village told them that their father was the lay preacher, a good man who had stood by us through thick and thin. The rumors wounded Fred, Grace, and Jennifer, and they grew to be consumed by bitterness. They were greatly traumatized by the slander, and my mother was humiliated. They had been doubly abandoned—by their father and by their village.

One of the greatest acts of my father was his public acceptance of these children as his own. It solved so many problems that had divided the family and scarred three innocent young children so deeply.

My father's return brought so much healing, but it did not change things for us financially. He was bankrupt, and we were the ones who had to look after him. His illness had drained the last of his resources, as an earlier tragedy had used up so much of his money. He had lost a child while living in Queen Elizabeth National Park. His little boy was just five years old when my father stepped out of the compound to check on his cows. When he came back the little boy was gone. The boy had been alone for only a quarter of an hour, but that had been enough time for him to disappear. Living in the national park meant there were wild animals around. My father and his wife Lodah went to see many witch doctors in an attempt to find their missing son and in the process spent so much money that they had to sell most of their cattle and goats. The loss of this son crippled the family, as the witch doctors continued to hold out the prospect of a safe return, if only the anxious parents would spend just a little more money and a few more animals.