Monday, February 07 2011
The Tales that Bind: How an African Oral tradition Resonates with the Gospel
Our first Sunday in Uganda I watched Brother Onyango Odongo, the uncle of our soon to be Patriarch, reverently sit as he was confirmed a member of our little branch, now a ward. His beautiful face read like an epic. Each line told a story of great hope and great tragedy and I knew I had to learn his story.
Brother Onyango
Brother Onyango is “80 something” years old, as he told us. No one knows the exact date of his birth or even the exact year, and the closest he can get is he was born sometime in the 1920s. He has witnessed events we can only imagine in our worst nightmares. He lived through the corruption of Milton Obote, the madness of Idi Amin, and more recently the savagery of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This last tragedy seems to have affected Brother Onyango the most, understandably as Kony is a member of Brother Onyango’s tribe, the Acholi in Northern Uganda. …