October 29 2010 will always stand out in the annals of Uganda Christian University.
First it was graduation day, the 11th graduation of the university since its beginning in 1997. That day 1300 students graduated in various disciplines.
Secondly, it was the day the new Vice-Chancellor, the Revd Can. Dr. John Senyonyi was installed as Prof. Stephen Noll’s successor. 

Thirdly it was the day the Revd Can. Elisha Mbonigaba who had taught here at Mukono for three and a half decades, died.
The news of Can. Mbonigaba’s death was withheld from the congregation at the graduation until the very end of the ceremony. The chancellor’s party had received, only minutes to the start of the procession to the venue  -- the new sports arena. This mercifully let everybody at the occasion carry on with the normal joy of graduation. But it was a shock to the university community whom they had known over many years and often seen walking on the campus and around Mukono town.
I had personally walked with him to the university one morning only three weeks earlier from his house in upper Kawuga just below the prison. I had gone to his house to see a copy of a student magazine called Voice that a group of students and I had started here in the Bishop Tucker Theological College days. And Mbonigaba had kept a copy intact all these nearly 40 years.
Born on 25 March 1940, Mbonigaba hailed from Nyakabande village near Seseme, in present-day Kisoro district, not far from the Uganda-Rwanda border. He was the son of Grace and Ernest Gasyabahetse. His father Ernest was a primary school teacher. On the morning I walked with Elisha from his home, he told me, “You could look into Rwanda and see the villages on the hills across the border from our home,” when I asked him where he had been born.
As we crossed Buguju Road onto the campus, he added, “That is where I spent my childhood and went to primary school.” He attended Seseme Integrated Primary School near Nyakabande.
From Seseme, Mbonigaba joined the prestigious Kigezi College Butobere, which the old boys call, ‘senior’. At Butobere, he excelled academically and in athletics and represented Kigezi district.  “He belonged to the national youth athletic team,” says Bishop Eliphaz Maari, former principal of Bishop Tucker Theological College as well as former deputy vice-chancellor of UCU.
After Butobere, Can. Mbonigaba opted to go for theological training and ordination for the ministry in the Church of Uganda. This training came against a backdrop of what Bishop Alfred Tucker had dreamed of, that the Church of Uganda should be led by an educated local leadership.
Furthermore, as a result of an inquiry in 1951 by Bishop Stephen Neill and others into the crisis of ministry in the Native Anglican Church as it was called then, the Diploma in Theology was started in 1960 in Buwalasi Theological College near Mbale in Eastern Uganda. Mbonigaba was among the first five students who pursued the diploma in its initial phase, the very first ones having been Ernest Bagona and Christopher Senyonjo. Mbonigaba’s classmate was Misaeri Kauma who later became principal of Bishop Tucker Theological College and later bishop of Namirembe Diocese.
Between 1964 and 1967, Mbonigaba pursued the Licentiate in Theology at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, Canada. Then he went to Bristol University in the UK where he pursued a BA in Theology. By 1971 he achieved that goal. He pursued that goal with his life-long colleague, the Revd Can. George Noel Enyagu. When the two returned to Bishop Tucker College, Mbonigaba taught the Old Testament while his classmate Enyagu taught the New Testament.
However, Mbonigaba was not yet done. By 1976 he had picked up a Master of Sacred Theology (STM) from Yale Divinity School in US.
Ordained in 1964, Mbonigaba joined the Bishop Tucker Theological College teaching staff in 1971.  By 1980 he had been elevated to head of the Biblical Studies department. As a specialist in the Old Testament for 35 years, he taught most of the new generation of the Church of Uganda bishops. These would include our own Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi.
He was also in charge of campus maintenance and development. He loved the environment. Many of the flowers and trees now on the UCU campus were planted by Canon Mbonigaba.
Mbonigaba loved the Church and took a lot of interest in its worship and liturgy. Canon Kodwo Ankrah, who called him “a true friend of the Ankrah family, ” says he loved the Church and this love made him study the rules and canons of the Church. A faithful traditional Anglican, Mbonigaba took particular interest in liturgical colours and their symbolism. “You can see it in the number of flowers and trees he planted on the campus of Bishop Tucker Theological College, now UCU,” says Ankrah, the proprietor of the Ankrah Foundation which is perched at the top of the hill above UCU. Says Bishop Maari, “He was faithful in his teaching. He devoted his entire teaching career to Bishop Tucker Theological College and later Uganda Christian University.”
Canon Mbonigaba was a quiet and introspective person, but would express his views strongly when need arose. “He stood for the truth, harmony, peace and justice,” emphasises his daughter Susan Twinamatsiko. Because he did not push himself forward, he was often forgotten when it came to promotions in the Church. “We often teased him,” says Ankrah, “if you do not blow your horn, no one will blow it for you.”
Had he a family? Yes, indeed. With his late wife Jessica whom he married on August 23 1967, they raised five children. Bishop Maari says, “He was a family man who cared about his family. He was true to his wife and his children.”  His wife battled collapsed lungs. One late morning in the September semester of 2007 as he and I walked back from break tea at Thelma Hall, I asked about Jessica. He replied stoically, “She is on the life-support machine at home. I buy the gas to keep the machine working when the attacks come,” he said. He was that dedicated.
I wish to end with what Canon Kodwo Ankrah said at Mbonigaba’s funeral at St. Philip and Mark’s Cathedral just on the east of UCU. “Life begins and it comes to an end. In between those times, we thank God for what He allows each of us to do – to praise Him. Our brother and friend has completed his task and we must praise God.”

The writer is a lecturer at the department of Mass Communication and a former student of Rev. Canon Mbonigaba