Festo Kivengere and the East African Revival
A Ugandan bishop who fled Idi Amin's death squads in 1977, Festo Kivengere returned and published I Love Idi Amin — a small book that became a manifesto of African Christian forgiveness.
Festo Kivengere was born in 1919 in the kingdom of Ankole in south-western Uganda. Converted in 1935 during the East African Revival — the Balokole ("saved ones") movement that swept Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya from the 1930s onward — he became a schoolteacher, then a translator for the American evangelist Billy Graham on his African tours.
Consecrated Bishop of Kigezi in 1972, he led the Anglican Church in southern Uganda through the worst years of Idi Amin's regime. After his friend Archbishop Janani Luwum was murdered on 16 February 1977, Kivengere fled across the mountains into Rwanda on foot, hiding by day. From exile he wrote I Love Idi Amin (1977), in which he insisted that the gospel required him to forgive the dictator who wanted him dead.
He returned after Amin's fall and rebuilt his diocese, founding African Evangelistic Enterprise alongside the South African Michael Cassidy. He died of leukaemia in Nairobi on 18 May 1988.