Christian Persecution in Buganda 1885-1887

Anglican missionaries arrived in Buganda during 1877 and the Roman Catholic White Fathers in 1879. Whereas missionaries elsewhere in Africa had won adherents chiefly among marginal people, in Buganda teaching was confined to the court. Kabaka (king) Mutesa rejected conversion to Christianity seeking to patronize all religions but some ambitious young courtiers showed unprecedented eagerness for the literacy, enlightenment, and moral support that missionaries offered. When Mutesa died in 1884 these forces of innovation intertwined with the generational and factional conflict normal at accession. The young Kabaka Mwanga at first sympathized with his Christian contemporaries in hostility to the older pagan chiefs and especially the Katikiro (prime minister), Mukasa, whom he had inherited from his father, their clear dependence on an authority other than his own and their willingness even to speak in criticism of his behavior quickly led him to turn back to seek the support of the Katikiro, a man increasingly worried by the Christian phenomenon and particularly by the influence of his namesake, Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe.

At that point the Anglican Bishop Hannington was on his way to Buganda, approaching it not from across the lake as all the missionaries had done hitherto but overland from the east. It was regarded by the Baganada as dangerous to allow anyone to enter the kingdom that way while an English bishop sounded powerful and dangerous in himself. Mwanga was frightened and, at the end of October 1885, gave orders to kill Hannington and massacre his party. Once it was done, however, Mwanga was alarmed that his responsibility for the deed should be known by Europeans. Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe (later canonized as St. Joseph Mukasa), an important member of the royal household, reproached the kabaka for the massacre and for his homosexual debauchery. On November 15, 1885, Mukasa Balikuddembe was beheaded.

In the following months, Mwanga became furious that his Christian menservants refused to go to bed with him, and other members of his court, and were even attempting to subvert those of his pages still willing to commit sodomy. For their refusal to satisfy his sexual demands, Mwanga, ordered that all the youths be arrested. There was also anger that the newly baptized Princess Nalumansi, a daughter of Mutesa, on being appointed guardian of the tomb of Kabaka Jjunju, made a bonfire of all the pagan charms she found in the custodian's house. Such behavior appeared outrageous to Gandan (or Bagandan) society. Large-scale persecution of Christians began in June 1886. On June 3, 1886, thirty-one Christians -- both Catholic and Protestant -- were burnt together in a great holocaust at Namugongo. Others were speared, hacked to pieces, or left to die by the roadside in agony. The process was sudden, arbitrary, unsystematic. The violence continued into at least until the end of January 1887. Some 100 Christians were killed.

The effect of the persecution was less to intimidate the Christians than to destabilize the state. Mwanga did not want to crush the young in favor of the old. He disliked the conservative chiefs who had been his allies in attacking the Christians, and soon veered back to favoring both Muslims and Christians. The persecution of Christians came to an end. Meanwhile, a group of twenty-two African Roman Catholics executed during the persecution of Christians became known as the Martyrs of Uganda. Collectively, the martyrs were solemnly beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920 and canonized by Pope Paul VI on Oct. 18, 1964. Their feast day is June 3.

References

Military History, 936; The Church in Africa, 378-9, 381; Africans: The History of a Continent, 183; Colonialism and Homosexuality, 211; Martyrs of Uganda.

Category

TBD

Region

TBD

State(s)

TBD

Belligerents

TBD

Dispute

TBD

Initiation Date

TBD

Termination Date

TBD

Duration

TBD

Outcome

TBD

Fatalities

TBD

Magnitude

TBD