The Uganda Martyrs: Singing on the Road to Namugongo

On the morning of 3 June 1886, at a place called Namugongo in the kingdom of Buganda, in what is now Uganda, a large group of young men and boys was brought out to die. Many of them were teenagers. The youngest, Kizito, was about fourteen. They had been marched there a week earlier, many of them bound, and held while the executioners gathered firewood. Now the wood was ready.

They had been offered their lives. All they had to do was give up “praying,” the word the people of the royal court used for following the new faith that missionaries had brought. They would not.

The people who were there remembered something about them that they could not explain. They were not weeping. Many of them were praying. Some were singing. The executioners wrapped them in reed mats and laid them on the great fire. Not one of the men who had been sent to kill them could make them say they were not Christians.

Who were these boys? And why did their own king want them dead?

A Kingdom by the Lake

Buganda was a powerful and highly organized kingdom on the northern shores of Lake Victoria, the great lake of East Africa. It was ruled by a king called the kabaka, whose word was law. Around him was a large court of chiefs, officials and servants. Among the most important of these servants were the pages: boys and young men from families all over the kingdom, sent to serve in the royal household. Being a page was an honour and a path to power. Many future chiefs started out as pages. But a page belonged completely to the kabaka. His life was in the king’s hands.

In the 1870s the kabaka was Mutesa I, a clever and curious ruler who welcomed visitors from the outside world. Arab and Swahili traders from the East African coast had already brought Islam to his court. In 1875 the explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited, and afterwards he wrote a letter to an English newspaper appealing for missionaries to come to Buganda. Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society, an Anglican society from England, arrived in 1877. Among them, from 1878, was a Scottish engineer named Alexander Mackay, who set up a workshop and a printing press and began putting parts of the Bible into Luganda. In 1879 Catholic missionaries arrived too, the White Fathers from France, among them Father Siméon Lourdel, whom the Baganda called “Mapeera.”

So, very quickly, the court of Buganda had three religions competing in it: the traditional religion of the kingdom, Islam, and two kinds of Christianity whose missionaries did not get on well with each other. And it was the young people, above all the pages, who were most eager to learn. They crowded into the missions to learn to read. They copied out lessons and passed them round. Older Christian pages taught the younger ones, often in secret, at night, in the pages’ quarters at the palace. The faith spread from boy to boy, much faster than the missionaries could have spread it themselves.

It is worth saying that the new faith was not the first to cost young people their lives at that court. In the 1870s Mutesa had also turned against Muslim converts among his pages, and a number of them were killed. Uganda remembers them too. The kabakas of that time were not afraid of one religion in particular. They were afraid of anything that put another loyalty above their own.

A Young King

Mutesa died in October 1884. His son Mwanga became kabaka. Mwanga was himself very young, probably about eighteen, and at first he seemed friendly to the Christians. Several of the leading Christian pages had been his companions.

That did not last. Mwanga was unstable and easily frightened, and the men around him, especially his chief minister, the katikkiro, warned him that the Christians were dangerous. Europeans were pushing into East Africa from every side; Germans were taking land to the south. It did not seem foolish to the court to wonder whether the missionaries were the first sign of foreign conquest, and whether the young Christians, who now talked of another King, were still truly loyal.

There was another reason, and it must be said plainly. Mwanga demanded that some of his pages give themselves to him sexually. Christian pages refused. They would not let themselves be abused, and the older ones did what they could to protect the younger boys from him. To a king who believed that his pages belonged to him completely, that refusal was an unbearable defiance. It is one of the reasons his anger fell on them so hard.

The First Three

The first Christians to die under Mwanga were three Anglican boys, pupils of the Protestant mission: Yusufu Lugalama, Makko Kakumba and Nuwa Sserwanga. (Their names are spelled in different ways in different books; Lugalama is sometimes written Rugarama.) On 31 January 1885 they were seized and, on the king’s orders, put to death by burning, after being cruelly wounded. Yusufu was young, perhaps eleven or twelve; accounts differ on the exact ages of all three.

We do not have a reliable record of what they said. What the accounts agree on is that they died because they were Christians, and that they did not save themselves by giving up their faith.

The missionaries were horrified, and so were many at court. For a while there was quiet. But the king had shown what he was prepared to do.

“I Have Purchased the Road”

Later that year, news reached Mwanga that a party of Europeans was approaching Buganda from the east, through the neighbouring land of Busoga. It was led by James Hannington, the newly appointed Anglican bishop for East Africa. In Buganda there was a saying that the kingdom’s conquerors would come from the east, and the court was alarmed. Mwanga ordered that the travellers be stopped and killed.

In October 1885, in Busoga, Hannington was seized, held for several days, and then put to death along with most of the African porters who had come with him. According to the account later reported by survivors, among his last words was a message for the king: “Tell Mwanga I have purchased the road to Uganda with my blood.” Hannington was thirty-eight.

Joseph Mukasa

At the heart of the royal household stood a Catholic Christian named Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe. He was a trusted senior servant who had charge of the pages, and he was one of the most respected Christians at court. He had served Mwanga for years and was close to him. He had also done his best to keep the boys in his care away from the king’s demands.

When Mukasa heard that the king had ordered the bishop killed, he did something very dangerous. He went to Mwanga and told him that he had done wrong: that to kill a man who came in peace was a crime. He was already in trouble with the king’s advisers for protecting the pages, and now he had rebuked the kabaka himself.

On 15 November 1885 Mwanga had him put to death. Joseph Mukasa was beheaded, and his body was burned. He was about twenty-five. Witnesses later reported that before he died he sent the king a message: he had been condemned unjustly, he said, but he forgave Mwanga with all his heart. He is honoured as the first Catholic martyr of Uganda.

Charles Lwanga

That same night, Father Lourdel baptized a group of young men, among them a man named Charles Lwanga. Lwanga was in his twenties, a strong and steady young man from the household’s staff, and he now took up much of Mukasa’s role. He became the leader of the Christian pages in the royal audience hall, and he took on Mukasa’s work of protecting them, especially the youngest.

For six months he and the others lived under the threat. They knew that the king might strike again at any time. They kept praying, kept meeting, kept teaching one another. More boys asked to be baptized, and their teachers, both Catholic and Anglican, began to baptize them sooner, knowing there might not be much time.

Among the boys in Lwanga’s care was Kizito. He was about fourteen, cheerful, and the youngest of the group. He had wanted to be baptized for a long time, but he had been asked to wait, because of his age. Lwanga had kept a protective eye on him, and Kizito trusted him completely.

The Day of Choosing

In late May 1886, the storm broke. Mwanga came back to his lakeside palace at Munyonyo from a hunting trip. When he discovered that one of his young attendants, Denis Ssebuggwawo, had been teaching the Christian faith to another boy, he flew into a rage and attacked Denis with a spear. Denis was put to death that same night.

That night, 25 May, believing that the end had come, Charles Lwanga gathered the Catholic catechumens among the pages and baptized several of them himself. One was Kizito.

The next morning, 26 May 1886, Mwanga called his pages together and divided them. Those who did not pray, he told them in effect, should stand on one side, near him; those who prayed should go to the other side. The accounts disagree on his exact words, so we will not pretend to give them. But the meaning was plain to everyone. One side was life. The other side was death.

Charles Lwanga and Kizito walked across. So did many others, Catholic and Anglican. They did not do it in a group with their eyes shut, swept along. Each one crossed by himself.

Mwanga asked them whether they meant to keep praying. They said they did. He condemned them to death, and they were handed over to the chief executioner, Mukajanga, to be taken to Namugongo, the traditional place of execution, a long walk away. Some of the condemned were killed on the road. Gonzaga Gonza could not keep up because of his chains, and was put to death on the way. Matthias Kalemba Mulumba, an older chief who had long been a seeker after God, was taken away and killed separately near the capital. Over those days other Christians who were not pages were hunted down and killed in other places, among them Andrew Kaggwa, the leader of the royal drummers, and Noe Mawaggali.

At Namugongo the prisoners were kept for a week while the great pyre was built.

Namugongo

One of the condemned was Mbaga Tuzinde, a young page who was a son in the household of Mukajanga, the chief executioner himself. His family begged him to give up his faith, or at least to hide until the danger passed. He would not. In the end he was put to death separately, shortly before the others, killed with a blow before his body was burned.

Charles Lwanga was also taken aside and burned separately, on the morning of 3 June, a little before the rest. Catholic tradition, drawn from people who were there, remembers him speaking calmly to his executioner as he died and urging him to repent and believe. We do not have a record of his exact words that historians can be sure of, so we will leave them there.

Then the others were wrapped in mats of reeds and laid on the fire. Witnesses remembered that they prayed and sang. One account says that the dying called on the name of God and that the executioners were astonished that none of them begged for mercy. It was Ascension Day, the day when the church remembers Jesus rising into heaven.

How many died that day? The honest answer is that the sources differ. The Catholic Church counts thirteen of its own members burned at Namugongo on 3 June, with Charles Lwanga burned separately, and Anglican martyrs died there too. In all, more than two dozen people were killed at Namugongo that day, and some accounts give more, because not everyone who died was recorded by name, and some of those burned may not have been Christians at all but people caught up in the same purge. Across the whole persecution, from January 1885 to January 1887, the Catholic Church honours twenty-two martyrs by name and the Church of Uganda honours twenty-three Anglican martyrs; many historians think the total number of people killed was higher still.

Why would boys do this? It is the question the king himself could not answer. Some of them were very new believers. Most of them could read only a little, and they had only parts of the Bible in their own language. But they had understood enough. They had understood that Jesus was a King above every king, including the kabaka, and that he had died and risen for them. They believed that he had made them his own, and that death could not take them out of his hands. The words of Jesus that they had learned from their teachers were not complicated: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28). They simply believed them.

What Came After

The persecution did not destroy the church in Buganda. It did the opposite. Those who had seen the young men die did not forget how they died, and many began to ask what kind of faith could make boys sing on a fire. People went on learning in secret. Within a few years the political world of Buganda had turned upside down. In 1888 Mwanga was driven from his throne by an alliance of Christian and Muslim chiefs; there followed years of civil war, with Mwanga restored and then, in the end, exiled. In 1903 he died in exile in the Seychelles, having been baptized there as an Anglican Christian, an end very few would have predicted.

The church in Uganda grew with remarkable speed. The whole Bible was translated into Luganda, and Baganda Christians carried the gospel to other peoples across the region, often going where no foreign missionary had gone. Within a generation the faith was no longer a foreign mission but the church of a whole people. In the 1930s it would be the birthplace of the East African Revival, which spread across Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania and beyond. And Uganda’s Christians would be tested again. In 1977, Archbishop Janani Luwum was murdered for standing up to the dictator Idi Amin, and Bishop Festo Kivengere had to flee the country.

In 1920 the Catholic martyrs were beatified, and in 1964 Pope Paul VI declared the twenty-two Catholic martyrs saints, among the first modern saints from sub-Saharan Africa. In 1969 he visited Uganda himself and prayed at Namugongo. Today there is a Catholic shrine and an Anglican shrine there, close to the place where the fires were lit. Every year on 3 June, Martyrs’ Day, a public holiday in Uganda, huge crowds of pilgrims, Catholic and Anglican, gather at Namugongo. Many of them walk there for days, from all over Uganda and from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and further away. They come to remember boys who were no older than many of the pilgrims themselves.

Kizito was fourteen. He had been baptized for about a week.

In Their Own Words

“Tell Mwanga that he has condemned me unjustly, but I forgive him with all my heart.”

— Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, message to the kabaka as reported by witnesses (1885)

Think It Through

1. The Christian pages learned their faith mostly from one another: older boys teaching younger ones, often in secret. Who has passed the faith on to you, and who might you be passing it on to?
2. The pages refused to let a powerful man abuse them, and the older ones protected the younger. What does their story say about the worth and dignity of every young person’s body and life, and about standing up for others who are vulnerable?
3. On 26 May 1886 each page had to cross the floor alone. Faith can be shared in a group, but in the end each person decides for themselves. What does “crossing the floor” look like for a teenager today?
4. Joseph Mukasa forgave the king who condemned him, and Mwanga himself was baptized years later. What does that say about how far God’s mercy can reach, and about whom we should pray for?

Read More on Ochorus

The church these young martyrs planted is the church of Tukutendereza: Lives from the East African Revival, which tells the stories of the men and women who carried the faith on in Uganda and its neighbours, among them Festo Kivengere and Janani Luwum, both of whom have author pages with full biographies. A Hidden Fire follows Simeon Nsibambi, born in Buganda a decade after Namugongo, whose question to a missionary in 1929 helped spark that revival.