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{19th century Uganda was a flourishing nation governed by an absolute monarch called the Kabaka. From 1856 to 1884 the Kabaka was Mutesa, a despot who punished miscreants by cutting away all of a wrongdoerÕs face except the eyes, leaving only the bare jaw with two rows of teeth exposed.
Missionaries were slow to come to Uganda. Before the railroad from Mombasa was completed in 1902 it could take up to a year and a vast number of porters to reach Uganda, and there were not enough missionaries to go around. Arab slave traders, and with them Islam, preceeded the coming of Christianity and had made significant inroads when two groups of Christian missionaries, coming from opposite sides, came to Uganda.
From the east came Alexander MacKay, a Scottish Anglican employed by the Church Missionary Society. He arrived in Kampala in 1878, and immediately made an impression with his mechanical skills and marvelous technological wonders.
The following year the Catholic White Fathers came from the north and began to preach and teach as well. Uganda had been prepared for the new gospel by several decades of Islamic contact and it was not long before both missions had sizeable collections of adherents, Mutesa among them.
Mutesa, for political reasons, played off Catholic, Protestant and Muslim, and played all three new religions off against the traditional priests., working them all to his own advantage. MacKay and the White Fathers played directly into MutesaÕs hand, spending more time maligning one another than they did working cooperatively. Mutesa was an intelligent, curious man, genuinely interested in the ideas both MacKay and the White Fathers were presenting him.
In March of 1882, MacKay baptised his first five converts. They were followed by a steady trickle of new believers.
Mutesa died in 1884, succeeded by his son Mwanga, the first Ugandan Kabaka to observe his own ascension without executing anyone. This promising beginning was short-lived. While Mutesa had been erratic and two faced, Mwanga was brutal, sadistic, and paranoid, though crafty, with flashes of keen intelligence. He had roasted three Christians alive by the end of the first year of his reign. Late in 1885 Mwanga had a visiting bishop assassinated at the border of his lands, perceiving the bishop to be a threat to his rule.
At this point MwangaÕs madness and paranoia led him to become totally unhinged. He turned on the Christian communities, both Catholic and Protestant. Part of his rage was brought to a head by the fact that many of his court pages had embraced the new faith, and as a result were resisting his amorous advances towards them. These young men became a special focus for his wrath.
Charles Miller in his account of the building of the Uganda Railway, describes the events of 1886 and 1887 in the following words:
" On May 25, 1886, Mackay wrote: 'What we have been in daily expectation of for a long time has now taken placeÑan order for the arrest of all the Christians.ÉThe Lord look mercifully on the agony of these poor black children.É'
The witch hunt was carried out with an efficiency matched only by the courage of the victims. Ashe describes the typical behavior of one Christian during the roundup. 'When Munyaga was captured he was in his house.ÉThe executioners came cautiously up. They saw a gun leaning against the reed lintel of the door and stopped, hesitating, believing it was the possession of a loaded gun that gave Munyaga such confidence. He, seeing their evident fear, told them they need not be afraid of the gun for he did not mean to use it. So they came up to apprehend him. He begged to be allowed to put on his ÔkansuÕ (white gown), which they agreed to, and then they led him away. His trial was a cruel mockery, and he was ordered to be hacked in pieces and burned. His torturers cut off one of his arms and flung it into the fire before him, then they cut off a leg, and that too, was flung into the flame, and lastly, the poor mutilated body was laid on the framework to be consumed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead.' At about this time, thirty-two other converts died over a slow fire. The executioner later gave Mwanga a full account of the proceeding, and marveled that all the victims had gone to their deaths calling on God. Mwanga shrugged his shoulders and remarked that God could not have been paying much attention.
And so it went. For nearly a year, as Mwanga blew his mind on hemp and fermented banana juice and continued to bugger his unconverted pages, more than two hundred Catholics and Protestants had their limbs severed and were then broiled alive. It was, in OliverÕs words, "a martyrdom as terrible as any in Christian history. Yet conversions outpaced executions as the church went underground. A steadily increasing number of catechumens made stealthy visits to the missions at night. At the very peak of the terror, congregations of fifty and more attended services. More elders were elected, more baptisms performed. "Kiwobe came to me," wrote Ashe of one such occasion, "and said, ÔMunange njagala kubatizibwaÕÑÔMy friend, I wish to be baptisedÕÉÔDo you know what you are asking,Õ I said to him. ÔMmanyi munangeÕÑÔI know, my friend,Õ he repliedÉÔBut,Õ I said, Ôsuppose people ask you if you were a reader, would you tell a lie and deny it and say no?Õ He replied, ÔNdiyatula munangeÕÑÔI shall confess, my friend.Õ Mackay and I both thought he was worthy of the riteÉso he was baptised there and then." The growth of the movement was phenomenal. Barely two months after the purge order, the CMS baptismal register carried two hundred and twenty-seven names; the number of Catholics may have been greater. Even prominent members of the KabakaÕs court (including the admiral of the fleet) became converts. Europeans, learning of the pogrom and the resistance, began to look at simple African savages in a new light. 'Men asked what kind of people these were," wrote Lugard, "who would thus brave death for their belief.'"
These Ugandan martyrs became the last officially recognized Christian marytrs. Twenty two of the Catholic pages were canonized in 1964. Assisting Pope Paul VI at the rites of canonization was Archbishop Joseph Kiwanuka, Metropolitan of Uganda. Four of the twenty-two saints had been his cousins. [Miller 167n]
MwangaÕs violent dementia proved to be his own downfall. Word leaked out in 1888 that he was about to round up all those who were Catholic, Protestant or Muslim, maroon them on an island in Lake Victoria and restore traditional religion to Uganda. Adherents of the three communities sank their differences, stormed MwangaÕs palace and deposed him. Mwanga spent the next ten years struggling to regain his throne, sometimes in alliance with the Christians against the Muslims, sometimes in allinace with the Catholics (called Bafranza, since the White Fathers were predominantly French) against the Protestants (called Bangereza or English). He was finaly hunted down by the British and deported to the Seychelles in 1899, where he died.
Meanwhile the British annexed Uganda as part of the African Scramble, largely on the strength of the CMS presence there, though the Bangereza community was never as large as that of the Bafranza. The Catholic Church brought in a number of English Mill Hill Fathers to show that Catholicism could be as British as Protestantism. With the coming of the Uganda Railway, the British policy of tolerating missionaries of all stripes lead to a large influx of new missionaries, who found the two-day rail journey from the coast much easier than the year-long trek of the pioneer generation.
But the missionaries converted only a small minority of UgandaÕs Christians. In the 1890s revival swept the Ugandan Protestant community, which then sent out large numbers of missionary catechists and evangelists. Their work was so successful that Baganda was 40% Christian and the rest of Uganda 7% Christian by 1911. [Baur 240]
The 20th century Ugandan church has become very diverse, with strong Anglican and Catholic communities, large numbers of various protestant mission denomination and a significant number of prophetic churches and other kinds of African initiated churches.
This page was based on the following sources, which you can consult for more detailed information:
Adrian Hastings, The Church in Africa: 1450-1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. pp. 371-84
Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present. London: SPCK, 1995. pp. 145-50
Charles Miller, The Lunatic Express: The Building of an Impossible 600 mile Railroad across East Africa. London: MacMillan, 1971. pp. 130-171
John Bauer, 2000 Years of Christianity in Africa (Nairobi: Paulines, 1994) pp. 233-44.