Bhante Buddharakkhita

Born Steven Kabogozza into a Christian family in Kampala in 1966, he was a young man studying in India when he stumbled onto the Buddha's teachings in 1990 — and never looked back. Today Bhante Buddharakkhita is the first Ugandan-born Buddhist monk, founder of the Uganda Buddhist Centre, and a teacher who has carried meditation across six continents while insisting that the dharma can wear an African face. His message, distilled from decades of practice and even a brush with death, is disarmingly plain: "Meditation is a reality check," and suffering can always be transformed into freedom.

That first encounter in India unsettled everything he thought he knew. The Catholic boy from Kampala found in the Buddha's path something that answered the suffering he saw all around him. It would be twelve more years before he took robes — ordained as a Theravada monk by the late Sayadaw U Silananda in 2002, in San Jose, California.

Then came eight years of quiet apprenticeship under the renowned Bhante Henepola Gunaratana at the Bhavana Society in the forests of West Virginia — a long, patient grounding in meditation before he would carry it home.

Returning to Uganda was its own trial. In maroon robes and carrying an alms bowl, he was mistaken for a Maasai, a traditional medicine man, even a fashionista. When he tried to buy land for a centre, neighbours refused to speak to him, certain he was a wizard. He persisted, and in 2005 founded the Uganda Buddhist Centre in Garuga — the seed of Buddhism on the continent.

His resolve was tested even more sharply when he was shot at, at close range, and narrowly survived. Rather than retreat into fear, he turned the wound into teaching, speaking of how to transform trauma into dhamma — and offering, with a smile, his own homegrown motto: more dharma, less drama.

From that ground he has grown an improbable harvest: a Buddhist Peace School, an African Buddhist High School, clean-water and medical projects, and a stack of accessible books including Planting Dhamma Seeds: The Emergence of Buddhism in Africa. He now teaches Theravada Buddhism at Union Theological Seminary, sits on Buddhist Global Relief's advisory council, and offers talks to students worldwide. His quiet ambition: to train 54 novices, one for every nation in Africa. "I'm teaching Theravada Buddhism with African flavour," he says, "a paradigm shift from suffering to happiness in Africa."

Join us in conversation with this gentle pioneer who is planting dhamma seeds in unlikely soil — and showing that even a bullet can be composted into peace.