Maria Prean

Maria Luise Bruni was born on 21 February 1939 in Innsbruck, Tyrol, and grew up in a Catholic family. Wikipedia notes that she wanted to place her life under God's guidance as early as her First Communion.

She attended a commercial academy, where she trained in business and passed her school leaving exam (Matura). She then taught business studies, shorthand and typing for three years, spent a year as an au pair in London, and in 1961 qualified as an English teacher for secondary schools, taking a post in Innsbruck.

Wanting to become a mother herself, she worked as a house mother at the SOS Children's Village in Dornbirn. After four years she returned to Innsbruck in 1966, ill and exhausted, and worked for some years in a tax advisory office. In 1972 she emigrated to the United States, where she stayed for almost fourteen years. She worked first as a hotel manager, then ran a Christian bookshop, then worked as a secretary at a pastoral counselling training centre, and for her last two years there practised as an independent pastoral counsellor.

Back in Austria she married Herbert Prean in 1986. After his retirement in 1987 the couple founded a congregation in central Innsbruck and the mission society Leben in Jesus Christus e.V., and later bought houses in Hoch-Imst in Tyrol for seminars, talks and training courses. She continued this work after his death in 1992.

A journey to Uganda in 1995 led her to found Vision for Africa in 2001, when she was over sixty. Nile Post reported that the organisation was set up in Germany in 2001, began work in Uganda in August that year and opened an administrative base in Kampala in 2002. In 2003 she was given a large plot of land, on which she built children's homes and schools. The compound near Mukono, often called the African Village, came to include two kindergartens, a school, vocational training for several trades, a hotel whose income funded schools and medical care, and farmland. Partner associations were set up in Austria, Switzerland, the United States and Uganda. In a Livenet interview about ten years before her death she said the work had given about 11,000 children an education and employed almost 600 people. Later institutions included Vision for Africa International Christian College in Mukono (2012) and Vision for Africa High School in Nakifuma (2019). The ministry also ran a prayer mountain at Tongolo for conferences with leaders from politics, business and the church.

She spent more than half of each year in Uganda, toured Germany, Austria and Switzerland with the children's Vision Choir, and was a sought after speaker at Christian seminars. She wrote more than ten books with SCM R.Brockhaus and SCM Collection, among them Gott spielt in meinem Leben keine Rolle, er ist der Regisseur (2006), Lola Gola (2008) and Komm in deine Bestimmung (2018). A documentary, Maria Prean: Das Leben wird immer schöner, was released in 2014, and a Ugandan biography, Maama Africa: A Biography of a Black Woman in White Skin, appeared in 2024.

She married Herbert Prean in 1986, and he died in 1992. Her Christian faith shaped every stage of her life, from her early wish to serve God to the mission she began in her sixties. She said of her adopted country that she loved Ugandans and had truly become one with them, and that they called her their black mother with a white skin.

Maria Prean died on Thursday 15 October 2026, aged 87. Her team announced the death the same day in a video on her YouTube channel, saying that the Lord had called her home, and promised to share the place and time of the burial later. The cause of death was not made public.

Nile Post, Jesus.de, IDEA and Livenet reported the death on 16 October. Dr Patrick Bruni of Vision for Africa International said: "We lost a mother, a friend, a pipeline of God's blessing to people." The Ugandan musician Eddy Kenzo wrote that she had been more than a mother, an angel in human form, and the Ugandan minister Phiona Nyamutoro also paid tribute. Nile Post reported that she was expected to be laid to rest in Uganda, with arrangements still to be announced.

Prean is remembered for starting her life's work at an age when others retire. Vision for Africa grew from a single gift of land into a network of kindergartens, schools, a college, vocational training and farms in Uganda, supported by associations in Europe and the United States. In July 2024 Uganda's First Lady Janet Museveni commended her work for vulnerable children, and in the same year Tyrol awarded her its Decoration of Honour. Livenet wrote that she left a rich and lasting legacy in the hearts of thousands of people in Africa and Europe.