Knights of St Mulumba: Patron Saint’s Day (1)
On Sunday, June 7, 2015,
members of the Order of the Knights of St Mulumba, of the
The story of Matthias Kelemba
Mulumba, born in 1836, is by and large the story of the martyrs of Uganda;
twenty two of them. Bob French, in an article in the August, 2008, edition of
The Word Among Us (a Catholic Devotional Magazine) recounts the arrival of the
White Fathers – a missionary group of catholic priests presently known as the
Missionaries of Africa – to the Kingdom of Buganda in 1879 during the reign of
King Mutessa. The king welcomed them as he did the protestant missionaries and
muslims before them. As time went on, Mutessa, an astute king, would favour one
group now and the other another time depending on political expediency. Many
Bugandans came to accept Christianity but because of the erratic nature of the
king, they often found themselves in grave danger. Yet the missionaries took
advantage of the favourable periods to catechize their converts so well that a
hunger was soon ignited for the living word of God, and not just the historical
facts of salvation, as Lwanga Mpoza, a Ugandan historian, put it. Thus, when King
Mutessa became hostile to, and expelled the White Fathers from his kingdom, the
converts continued to win more converts into the faith.
King Mutessa died in 1884 and
was succeeded by his son, Mwanga who proved to be even more unstable. Mwanga
perceived the Christian coverts to be more loyal to another king, “the God of
the Christians”, than to him. The evidence of this, for him, was the effrontery
of Joseph Mukassa, his personal attendant and head page, himself a Christian. First,
Mukassa “dared” to dissuade the king from putting to death the newly arrived
Anglican Bishop, and then he taught the younger pages – boys – not to let
themselves be sodomized by the king. This enraged the king and he went after
them first by ordering them renounce their faiths and stop further
proselytization.
These Christians would not
renounce their faith. King Mwanga began to put them to death, first Joseph
Mukassa, then Charles Lwanga and then others followed, among them Kizito who
was only fourteen years of age and Mulumba, the more advanced. Some of them
were chopped to death while others were burnt alive. They valiantly accepted
death for their faith. They were canonized saints of the church in 1964.
Knighthood in the Catholic
Church dates back to the middle ages when the faithful had to form themselves
into small armies to protect pilgrims enroute the Holy Land from persecution
and molestation in the hands of Muslim Arabs and Saracens. Ultimately, the
knights would fight fierce battles to repel incursions by jihadists into
Europe. They fought in defense of the faith.
Today, knights in the church
have assumed a different type of “fight”: that against evil by promoting good
wherever they find themselves. They are at the service not just of people of
the catholic faith but also of the larger society wherever they find
themselves. They are called to uphold in a very special way the light of the
gospel of Christ: justice, fairness mercy and compassion. The documents of the Knights
of St Mulumba specifically note that knights “set themselves the necessary task
of uprooting the systemic and structural evil in the society.”
The Order of the Knights of St
Mulumba was founded in June, 1953, by the late Anselm Isidahomeh Ojefua, a Nigerian
priest and monk. It was a response to the prevalence of groups and fraternities
outside of the Church whose activities the Church could not vouch for, and were
at best clandestine. The move was to arrest any attraction such groups offered
by providing an alternative, since life abhors vacuum. It is open to all practicing
catholic men and their wives. In a reflection on the occasion of the
thirty-fifth anniversary of his initiation into the Order this year, the Deputy
Supreme Knight, Brother Mike Mary-Nwosu noted that “a member of KSM Nigeria is
expected to turn from a life of selfishness and sin - a 'Me First'
life - to a life of Spirit-filled generosity and love. He becomes a
man full of discipline and obedience, a man ready and willing to serve the
Church, the Order and others, a man whose integrity and conduct are beyond
dispute, a man of peace, and a man always ready to forgive, a man full of zeal
and the Holy Spirit.”
Another core dimension of the
Christian knighthood is what Lou Whitsworth, in a 1997 essay, refers to as True
Manliness, a biblical model of Christian manhood lived in Christ as examples of
godly men. Whitworth’s essay identified Roberts Lewis’ three ideals of a modern
day knight. The first is A Vision for Manhood, which is that real men reject
passivity, accept responsibility, lead courageously, and expect the greater
reward.
BLUEPRINT Newspaper; Thur. June 11, 2015; p2
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