Fr Luzindana’s journey to priesthood

I’m attending Mass in Nsambya, and as I enter the gates, my mood is lifted by sounds of Yesu wange, a worship song comes from the centre. 

The un-uniformed choir with very beautiful voices; the half empty hall and loud instruments evoke images of a Pentecostal church. Those images are quickly dispersed when the Reverend Father Joseph Luzindana gestures for us to make the sign of the cross. As youth chaplain, Kampala Archdioceses, Fr Luzindana caught the attention of the nation at Kololo Independence Grounds during Pope Francis’ visit in November last year. 

It is not every day that you see a priest rapping. And true to his character, there is nothing boring about the mass in which the keyboard player is Muslim and the drummer Anglican. The priest weaves anecdotes about his youth into the homily, bringing the audience alive with laughter.

Streetwise preaching
The first reading is from Sirach, a book in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Blending Luganda and English, he uses street slang to bring out his message of the Feast of the Holy Family. He talks about how, “Adam was only happy when his chick (Eve) was around.”

Decrying gold-diggers, he sings a bit of Yvette Seguya’s Ngenda mu Kyaalo. The congregation, of mainly young people, joins in. However, there are a few middle-aged people. “Maama wo olina omulabawo! Just chill your bizibu naye until ofunye amaka go,” he advises the youth to respect their mothers. Suddenly, he launches into a discordant rendition of Maywood’s Mother How Are You Today. We sing along for about five minutes before Holy Communion.

A naughty youth
Rev Fr Luzindana, 49, has been in the priesthood for 13 years, having joined St Mbaaga Major Seminary Ggaba while still at Namasagali University. “My father was a catechist and I admired the priests who visited him,” he says, after a sumptuous lunch in the priest’s common room.
“I wanted to be like them but after my Senior Two, the feeling vanished.” In Senior One, at Our Lady of Good Counsel, Luzindana joined a group of boys who used to smoke and drink. In Senior Three, they were involved in a strike and expelled.

“I could not go back to the village, so I found a place to sleep at the railway station (on Station Road). I was not a street kid but a street boy.” Fr Luzindana goes on to enumerate the merits of streetwise boys, some of which taught him life lessons such as self-reliance, he follows today. “If I ask someone to do something and they dilly-dally or refuse, I do it myself. Street boys have solida (solidarity). The problem is that getting out of that life is tough.”
He is evasive about his activities as a ‘street boy’ only wanting to discuss the present. However, he concedes that a woman helped him to leave that life of depravity. “I had lied to her three times but when she got me again, I begged her not to take me to the police. She was kindhearted and she counselled me.”

This woman took wayward boy to a priest in Nsambya who took him back to school at St Peter’s Busubizi Senior Secondary School in Mityana. “If given a chance, street children can leave the streets. There is no bad person. Look at me – a priest now! Even President Bashar al Assad may not be bad. He was probably a good and peaceful leader before the war.”

To demonstrate the possibility of change, Fr Luzindana brings out a sorry-looking packet of Rex cigarettes; he kept the packet as a souvenir. He pulls out a stained cigarette, lights it, and draws a puff. I’m shocked. As he puffs it, he says, “I smoked for 14 years; even when I joined the seminary. I also drunk but God changed me. When He calls you to serve him you do not have to be a saint.”
Indeed Fr Luzindana was no saint. In his A-Level vacation, he made Shs 49m in nine months. “Jackets in Kampala were sold at Shs 20,000. I would buy 300 and take them to Kabale and Kisoro, where I sold each at Shs60,000.”
With a profit of Shs 12m, he crossed to Zaire (DR Congo) and bought bitengi and bed sheets to sell in Kampala. “The Zaire journey was dangerous in 1993 because there was instability. You were lucky if you survived a trip.”
On smuggling goods, traders never paid import duty. Knowing that they were transporting smugglers, bus drivers drove at a breakneck speed through checkpoints. Border guards emptied magazines of bullets aimed at the buses.
At the end of his vacation, Luzindana rented a house in Nakulabye with intentions of getting married. “Makerere was the only university and I missed it by one point. I was bitter. I continued with my business. I even had plans to go to America with my girlfriend, but when Namasagali University opened in 1998, I paid tuition and joined.”

The call to priesthood
Life at university was fun but Fr Luzindana somehow, found time to say the rosary in hiding. “My friends did not consider being spiritual as fun. So, I would go to the bushes on River Nile to pray. One day, as I was praying I suddenly got a strong call from Mother Mary.”

He ignored the call, but it came back a second time. That time, he prayed in the bushes until midnight. “I escaped from the university and went to an old woman in Old Kampala parish and I told her I wanted to join the seminary. I did not even know where it was, though I often went to Ggaba to dance at the disco in KK Beach.”

Abandoning his studies, he joined St Mbaaga Major Seminary. Life was hard for the young man, who had never had a quiet moment to himself before. He compares it to putting a local chicken among broilers. “A local chicken is jumpy and in second year, I wanted to leave. I just could not handle the pressure living like a saint. That was not me.” However, an old priest, Monsignor Mpuuga, counselled him to be himself – just as God had called him – and calm down. “Besides teaching me that silence was a virtue, seminary taught me the background of our beliefs, and to let go; life is not only about having fun. I also became submissive.”
The youth are at the heart of Fr Luzindana’s ministry because they are held up in a conflict between modernity and culture which hurts him. “They are overwhelmed with information. There used to be things that people would not know until they reached a certain age. Those distinctions no longer exist.”

He says religious leaders add to this confusion. “We call each other names in their presence so they fail to know what is right. A child might come for advice but it has been ingrained in him that you are illuminati. He will call you a devil and say that your words are from the devil.”

The priest calls on policy makers to remedy the conflict between the youth and the older generation before it erupts. “The revolutions in France, Libya, Egypt and Syria were led by the youth.”
As we conclude the interview, he asks why I became born-again. I tell him I was seeking God. “The Balokole were youth who were disgruntled with the way the Church run things,” he says quietly.  “Now, they have revolutionalised the way we worship and brought discos into the cathedrals!”

He calls on parents to find time to talk with their children about worldly and spiritual matters.