Dr. Ruby Dunlap’s Uganda Fulbright Blog
“Do not,” warned Ben, the security specialist at the U.S. embassy, “go toward a crowd of people. Move away as quickly as you can when a crowd starts to gather.” Uganda is among those countries distinguished by regular occurrences of mob justice within its borders.

A couple of U.S. college students in their study abroad semester at Uganda Christian University, perhaps motivated by curiosity mixed with the natural tendency to behave in ways opposite from what one has been told, went towards a crowd instead of away from it and witnessed the beating to death of a man by a mob.

The day after we arrived, the local paper had a story about a landlord who was first hacked and then burned to death by irate tenants who had heard he was thinking of selling his property. It happens here regularly enough, “mob justice,” a category of justice within this society. Litigation is rare among those Ugandans who have cheaper and more effective ways of retribution at their disposal.

The Anglican cathedral of Mukono is a few buildings down from our house just outside one of the gates into UCU. (See photo) It has three Sunday morning services, the first from 6-8:30 AM, the second from 8:30-11:00 AM, and the third from 11:00-1:30. The first and last services are in the local language, Luganda. The 8:30 service is in the English language. Each service is packed with people, the most at the third service where the attendance is so large, they put up a tent and show the service by video to those who did not arrive early enough to get seats inside. Services of some kind seem to go on almost continually in this church; it is not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night and have singing or preaching from the cathedral come floating through the window.

The cathedral seats at least 500 people. When we attended the 8:30 service this past Sunday, people were packed in practically every available inch of the building including the aisle where extra chairs were placed beside narrow wooden pews. A U.S. fire marshal would not have approved. I’ve observed two worship services in Uganda now and the Ugandans did the same things in each (both Anglican, also called the Church of Uganda). They walked in silently, sat and then bowed their heads in silent reverence for a few minutes, and, in silent attention, waited for the service to begin. At the end of the last song, they did the same thing: bowed their heads silently for a few minutes of reverence, and then just as silently, walked out. I looked over a sea of bowed African heads, as quiet as the calmed waters of Galilee, and something in me hushed in reverence with them.

The Ugandan rector delivered a powerful homily from texts in Isaiah 1 and Luke 19, laments by God over the blind wickedness of His people, Israel and Jerusalem specifically. And in his sermon, I heard clues as to why Ugandans resort to mob justice. He blasted the corruption of the police and legal system of the country which renders them largely impotent to address justice issues for the people of Uganda. At the same time, the preacher, in blistering terms, told the congregation that mob justice had no place among serious Christians. He was equally emphatic that witchcraft and child sacrifice should not be part of Christian society, both of which occur locally as well as in other parts of Uganda.

“The police are paid hardly anything,” said Brian, a U.S. attorney from Savannah, Georgia, serving as associate dean and instructor in UCU’s law school. “They can’t live on what they are paid so naturally, for survival, they take bribes. The people feel they have no options for justice. I certainly don’t condone mob justice but I can see why it happens.”

Life in next door Rwanda has taken a dramatic turn in the direction of social order (they have traffic rules which are enforced and generally obeyed, for example) and prosperity. I asked Brian if Rick Warren, whose purpose driven ministry has focused on Rwanda, had anything to do with this. “I think it’s because their leader makes autocratic decisions for the benefit of the country which simply have to be followed,” said Brian. “For example, he decided that English rather than French was what all their school children needed to learn and so English rather than French is now being taught in their schools. His reasoning was that English was more practical.”

“What would you do for Uganda if you would have five years as a benevolent dictator here?” I persisted.

“I would invest heavily in improving agriculture,” he said, “and reducing the birth rate. The population growth is threatening the future of this country.”
At the front of this campus is a new, large, brightly designed and well equipped building which houses the newly founded “Save the Mothers” MPH program. A Canadian obstetrician, motivated by the high infant and maternal mortality rates in Uganda, has put her considerable social muscle behind a funding organization and a master’s degree in infant and maternal public health at UCU. Organizations whose missions involve rescue of mothers and children abound but even so, they are a drop in the ocean of need. The nascent nursing program at UCU, meanwhile, struggles from semester to semester with high hopes and dedicated instructors but with nothing like the financial or social capital of the STM program.

It is an open air market of contradictions: mobs acting in murderous dispensation of justice, a church packed beyond capacity to hear about a lamenting God Who, in Lewis’ words, wants to pay them the “intolerable compliment” of loving them*, a population multiplying itself towards catastrophe of sword, plague or famine, and compassionate ministries of rescue towards mothers and infants.

*Lewis, CS. (1996) The Problem of Pain, p. 47. New York: HarperCollins. First published in 1940 by Macmillan.