When we announced our intentions to go to South Africa, Ed- ward Muhima, a confidante, said, “But South Africa is a time bomb waiting to explode”. We argued that many people were praying for South Africa. Edward too was praying that God would intervene in the political tension that spelt ‘holocaust’ in the sto- ries about the South Africa of the 1980s and 1990s that hit the headlines. This is what Webster recorded in a book entitled Des- mond Tutu Crying in the wilderness concerning the state of af- fairs in South Africa at the time:
The South African Council of Churches (SACC) has issued a seri- ous warning that unless fundamental change occurs in the Re- public reasonably quickly, then those who are working for peace- ful change will rapidly become discredited. Many people, in des- peration, will want to use violence as a last desperate resort. At this stage we in the SACC are striving for a peaceful solution of the crisis in our land. But time is not on our side. Something must be done, and done urgently. 1
Like Edward, we did not know the answer to this dilemma; we prayed that God would change this situation because we had a strange desire to be with South Africans, black and white at the birth of their new nation. We prayed that by our Christian witness and service we might be part of reconciliatory efforts. Edward re-
luctantly released us, encouraging us to limit our stay to a specific period of perhaps two years.
The Lambeth Conference of All Anglican Bishops of 1988 de- clared 1990s a Decade of Evangelism and at its launching a call was made for those who wished to go for missionary service from Uganda to other parts of the world. It was during this event that we felt that we had been duly commissioned to go to South Africa as missionaries. Apart from this general commissioning, there was no other send-off arrangement. We would learn later that a formal commissioning was important for eventual financial sup- port. It seemed as though only our families and close friends knew we were going for missionary service in South Africa. It felt as though we were out there on our own. This anomaly to the conventional manner of commissioning missionaries was going to haunt us. We now appreciate the importance of a sending church, and how this is biblically supported especially in Paul’s missionary journeys “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’ So after they had fasted and prayed, they placed their hands on them and sent them off” (Acts 13:2-3). Such commissioning was a col- lective recognition of a call to missionary field. Matters of ac- countability and redeployment come into question once mission- ary service was over.
After completing our pastoral training Diana and I desired to work in a parish setting. Instead our Bishop posted us in a Theo- logical school to train pastoral workers. It was ironical that we would train people to go where we had never been. Whenever we raised the need for us to have pastoral experience, our Bishop would find it difficult to post us sighting the fact that both my wife and I were pastors who could not be put in the same pastor- ate. School was a better setting for our work. However, it was our deep desire to have pastoral experience that led to seek missionary service. This was possible though in a small way. In the mission- ary field, I would receive posting in 3 parishes. Diana planted and pastured a chaplaincy at University level and had pastoral experi- ence in a hospice, including administration experience of an HIV
and AIDS project for rejected children and adults. We would re- turn to Uganda as a couple with 24 combined years of pastoral experience for the benefit of the church of Uganda. She now serves as a Vicar Pastoring a church of over 4000 persons and I have continued the task of training pastors for parish work with confidence.
We thank United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) who adopted us. We were not quite their type of mission- aries since we had not been selected, trained and sent by them from Britain. The situation became even more controversial when the phrase “South-to-South missionaries” was thrown into the fray. We were from the south and had gone further south for mis- sionary work. South-to-South sounded better than calling us Afri- can missionaries to Africa. This term, though understood by some leaders in South Africa at the beginning, was to later cause difficulties. What did it mean? In the process of trying to define our relationship with the USPG and the hosting Diocese some mixed interpretation of the Memorandum of Understanding caused a lot of pain and precipitated the end of our Missionary service in South Africa. Nonetheless, we now believe that from the divine arrangement of things our time in missionary service was up.