Ghosts of Kampala City

Two forces converge in the warm, busy Kampala night. People rush by, walking or in taxis or on boda bodas. Some stop curiously before the fence and peer inside, glimpsing the action of the crowd and taking in the words of the impassioned speaker. Not all the curious ones step inside, but some do.

Those who do have a date with destiny.

Pan African Square is a park that lies in downtown Kampala, Uganda. It bears a parking lot, a walking path, a small octagonal building, and a South African monument. But this is no ordinary park. In history and in stigma, this is a feared place, avoided ground. Twelve men were shot dead in this park during the reign of Idi Amin: the man who held power in Uganda throughout the 1970’s, and arguably Africa’s most brutal post-independence dictator.

This fact was brought to memory by many different speakers on many different nights. “It was under that tree,” they would point to the site and the audience would feel a chill – a harrowing reminder of the city’s brutal, terrifying political past. An estimated 300.000 people died under Amin’s hand, but these particular 12 haunt this square for all the town to see.

Many nights, it is that very connotation that keeps the bulging crowds away from the crusade grounds each night. Africa Harvest Mission is used to swells of people grouped before their stage, but hundreds, instead of thousands, gather at this particular location.

But those who do come are the Chosen: picked to seek God with a fiery intensity that makes passerby stop, and neighboring businesses complain. Picked to receive a blessing and revelation from God that they’ve never before thought possible. Picked to be healed and delivered from whatever dark forces lie within them, waiting to devour their whole lives.

And you can be sure these dark forces exist.

I didn’t know much about the city of Kampala before I arrived. I had heard it called “The New York City of Africa,” and been informed that it’s something of a constant party. Both of which I have found extremely true. By many counts, it is the most stable, advanced, and economically burgeoning city I’ve visited in Africa, and has been called an “African success story” by countless journalists, who most likely point to the 50% of Uganda’s budget that comes from foreign aid as the culprit.

But there were some things about the city of Kampala that I was simply, blindly unaware of.

The rare skyscrapers downtown certainly seem an against-all-odds success, but did you know that the foundation of many of these economic marvels contain the bones of sacrificed children?

Sacrificed. Children. In the foundation of your office building.

It is chilling, harrowing, and unthinkable. It makes me sick to my stomach.

But it is but a small symptom of the Spiritual oppression this city is under, thanks to the cultural reliance on witchcraft and ancestral worship.

These false religions, declared harmless by curious tourists and righteous anthropologists, have more of an effect on the people of Uganda than it seems.

And, as I’m coming to learn more and more in my weeks here, by “effect,” I really mean “bond.”

I have personally never known the fear of having demonic oppressors visit me in the night so that I dream the same dream of being killed by strange men every single night.

Nor do I know the horror of realizing after you’ve turned out the light that you forgot to make a sacrifice to the spirit home you keep in your backyard, so you will go throughout the night without protection, and with the risk of ancestral wrath.

I’ve never known what it’s like to be travelling home from primary school in my wrinkled uniform, getting to the part in the path where I split from my friends, and being terrified that every set of headlights and every dark movement on the curbside is a bloodthirsty witch doctor, waiting to snatch me up for a sacrifice on behalf of a businessman who just broke ground for a parcel of buildings downtown.

This is the context in which I will be spending my summer and fall. This is the Kampala Harvest Crusade, the setting for every night in June.

This is the front lines of spiritual warfare; the place where two forces converge in the city night…one dark, and one light.

And, as you’ll see in these stories I have the privilege of telling, light always wins.

Where once was death, there will be life.