DALLAS (ABP) — Rose Nanyonga's faith pilgrimage has been a journey of transformation — from an African witch doctor-in-training to a nursing student in Dallas.
She now attends nursing classes and works as intensive-care nurse, a striking departure from her beginnings as a witch doctor's acolyte in Uganda.
She still is uncertain how her father was able to get her approved for witchcraft training, which usually is restricted to males. But she knows a witch doctor's prophecy before she was conceived played a part.
“My mother had four sons and no daughters, so she was taken to the witch doctor. My father was on the verge of turning her out because daughters were valued for the dowry they would bring at marriage. The witch doctor told my mother she would have a girl, and she would be significant to the family,” Nanyonga recalled.
Her training as a witch doctor began when she was about 8 years old, just after her mother died. Nanyonga's family went to great expense, but they knew if she succeeded in training, as a female witch doctor she would have celebrity status and could command top price for her services.
“The family had risked a lot, but they would soon be seeing a lot of gain for that,” she explained. “I would become a witch doctor and a famous witch doctor that people would come from across the country to see. They would have to pay a lot to see me, and my family would gain ultimately and become very rich.”
Every training session began with cleansing rituals in which she was covered with animal blood. Her training was about two things — learning about plants with healing properties and learning self-discipline.
“There was a great deal of focus on discipline. That was the reason for the cleansing process, to make you a good medium and a conduit for the spirits,” she said.
The spiritual turning point in her life began when she was about 15 years old. She was reading alone in a class when, she believes, she heard a voice distinctly saying: “You must be born again.”
“I had been trained to hear voices as a witch doctor, so the first time I thought it must be the spirits. That didn't feel right, though,” she recalled.
After hearing the voice again, she told her father about it and asked what the message meant. He referred her to witchcraft instructors, who adamantly told her not to listen to such voices.
A month later, a Christian evangelistic crusade came to the village, and the message the evangelists were preaching was familiar: “You must be born again.”
She initially resisted the message but accepted the gift of a Bible, which she read from cover to cover in three days. And she began attending worship services at the Christian church in the village.
Her father said it was fine for her to attend church services, as long as it didn't interfere with her witch-doctor training. For two years, it didn't. Each week, Nanyonga entered the church, sat in the back and did not speak to anyone.
“Looking back, I am so glad I went to those church services. I think hearing that teaching for those two years — something was getting through. Even though I was not offering any challenges to my teachers, a change was taking place inside me,” she said.
“During that second year, I became aware that the two worlds I was trying to live in were a total opposite and I could not be a part of those two worlds. I had to choose between them.”
Leaving witchcraft was a difficult decision.
“I was passionate about my role as a witch doctor. I had learned a lot,” she said. “I had mastered the discipline. I was a person of stature. I was the hope of my family. I was the person who was going to make everything all right.”
Finally, she decided to embrace Christianity openly. She told the pastor of the village church that if he would stay and pray with her, she would skip the upcoming family gathering to celebrate her training as a witch doctor.
“When we had these large gatherings, the family would travel many miles to be there, but nothing would begin until I entered the shrine,” she recalled. “Then the alarm would sound, letting everyone know that the ceremony would begin. This time my family met and waited and waited and waited. I didn't show up.”
When she returned home, her father was furious.
“I've never seen a man so angry. I was frightened,” she said. “He threatened to kill everybody — the pastor, other Christians, anyone who was influencing me. He threatened to close the church. In the end, he locked me up.”
One of Nanyonga's brothers was foreman at a remote cotton gin. She was taken there and locked in a storage room with only a mattress, a blanket and just enough food to keep her alive.
Her father and brothers threatened every Christian in the village with death if they ever spoke to Nanyonga again. But one Christian found out where she had been taken. He came and slipped her pieces of paper with Bible verses on them. She read them, meditated on them and then ate them to keep her family from discovering the evidence, she said.
After 30 days of isolation, she was brought before a disciplinary committee made up of her family and the village elders. Her father made a lengthy speech, stating his reasons why his daughter should obey his wishes. Then he told the assembled gathering that she should be given three days to decide. If she followed the path of Christianity, she was told, she would no longer be a part of the family or village.
“I don't think I've ever felt as lost as I did those three days,” she said. “I was so angry at whoever this God was, whoever this Jesus Christ was. When you first hear the gospel, it's always about the hope and the joy. They don't tell you about the sacrifice and the struggle that can be involved. I didn't know if this Christianity was worth it.”
Making matters worse, Nanyonga had always been taught that if she ever turned her back on witchcraft, the spirits would kill her. And she felt sure if the spirits didn't, her father and brothers would.
“I thought I was going to die, and I begin to realize that I wanted to die for something more liberating than enslaving. So I went on faith. … I finally decided that if God was who he said he was, he was worth dying for,” she said.
After three days, she appeared before the assembly. She told them she wanted to remain in the village as a Christian. Her father said that would not be allowed. She was not killed, but she was cast out.
“I became a disgrace. As I left, everyone spit on me. I walked out of there not knowing where I was going,” she remembered.
She did not go to the other Christians in the village for fear she would bring reprisals on them. She simply started walking. She walked for a week. Finally, on the verge of collapse many miles from home, she stopped at a hut to beg for food and water. She recognized the woman who answered the door as the mother of a Christian in her home village.
The woman took her in for a month. Then a Christian she had known in school told her about a missionary from Belfast, Ireland, who was looking for help to set up a clinic about 60 kilometers away.
The woman gave her money for transportation, and Nanyonga met the people who she now refers to as her Irish parents, Ian and Ruby Clarke.
“It was so far away from my family and people who would know me. It was a place to start over,” she said.
She worked with them for the next few years, and their relationship evolved into much more than co-workers. They became the family she had lost, she said.
“My Irish family recognized I had potential and enrolled me in nursing school in Uganda,” she said.
After graduating in 1995, she returned to what had grown to be a hospital and also began working at a nearby orphanage. In 1998, she came to the United States with a performing group of children from the orphanage who came to spread awareness about the AIDS epidemic.
During that trip, she met a congressman. He helped her make connections that ultimately resulted in a scholarship to a nursing school in Arkansas.
Nanyonga's desire is to return to Uganda and make changes in public health-care policy. To be heard, she will need at least a master's degree, she explained.
She learned about the family nurse practitioner program at Baylor University's Louise Herrington School of Nursing. She knew it was what she had been looking for. After financial aid was established, she enrolled and is set to graduate in about a year.
Nanyonga sees the hand of God evident in her life. “This is not my own doing. I couldn't really have played any part of it,” she said.
She still is estranged from much of her African family, although she reconciled with her father three days before his death.
“There was no anger left in his eyes, just a lot of sadness. On his death bed, he reached out and said, 'Rose, I'm sorry.' That was more liberating than a hundred 'I love yous.'”
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— Photo available from Associated Baptist Press.