Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Martyrs
June 3 · d. 1886, 1977
also known as Martyrs of Uganda, Ugandan Martyrs
The Martyrs of Uganda were the Christian converts and court pages of the kingdom of Buganda, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, put to death by the Kabaka Mwanga II between 1885 and 1887 for refusing to give up their faith. The first were killed early in 1885; the greatest number, led by the Catholic page Charles Lwanga, were burned alive at Namugongo on 3 June 1886. Their feast joins them to a second generation of Ugandan martyrs killed under Idi Amin in 1977.
The first martyrs of Uganda were the readers and pages of the kingdom of Buganda, on the north shore of Lake Victoria, today south-central Uganda. The court was at Mengo, near modern Kampala, and the king there was the Kabaka Mwanga II, a young man who had inherited his father's throne and his father's fear of the foreigners drawing near his borders.
Christian teachers had come to that court only a few years before. Anglican missionaries of the Church Missionary Society came first, and Roman Catholic priests, the White Fathers, soon after. The boys who served at court began to learn to read, and what they learned to read was the Bible and the catechism. They were baptized. They prayed together. Some of the king's own pages became Christians, Anglican and Catholic alike, and they would not do everything the king demanded of them.
The first to die were three young Anglican readers, burned early in 1885. Then the king's anger grew. When an English bishop, James Hannington, was killed on the road from the east that autumn, a Catholic chief named Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe dared to reproach the king for it. He was beheaded in November. He was the first of the Catholic martyrs, and he died forgiving the king.
Charles Lwanga took his place as keeper of the pages. He was their leader and their protector. On the night the persecution broke open, knowing what the morning would bring, he gathered the youngest boys who were still only catechumens and baptized them himself. One of them was Kizito, the youngest of all, a boy of about fourteen, laughing and unafraid.
The king called the Christian pages before him and gave them their choice. Those who would give up Christ could step aside and live. Those who would not were bound and marched the long road to Namugongo. They walked singing. Along the way some were killed where they fell, but most were kept for the burning ground.
At Namugongo they were wrapped in reed mats and laid on the pyre. Charles Lwanga was burned apart from the rest, slowly, his feet first. The men who killed him told him he could still be spared if he would deny his Lord. He would not. The church remembers that as the fire took him he called out the name of God, Katonda, and that he told his killers their fire was nothing to him, as if they were only pouring water over his body.
The rest were burned together on 3 June 1886, Anglican and Catholic in one fire, praying and singing until their voices stopped. They were young men, most of them, and boys. They had been Christians for a handful of years, some for only a handful of days.
The blood did not end the faith in Buganda. It planted it. Within a generation the church in Uganda had grown beyond anything the missionaries had dared to hope.
Nearly a century later the testing came again. In the 1970s the dictator Idi Amin seized Uganda and turned his soldiers loose on his own people, and the churches would not stay silent. The man who stood most plainly in his way was the Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum. Luwum kept speaking of the killings and the people who vanished in the night, and he would not stop when he was warned to. In February 1977 he was summoned to the president's lodge, accused of treason, and shot; the government said he had died in a car crash, and almost no one believed it. He had said, not long before, that he did not know how long he would be allowed to live, but that while he lived he would speak for those who could not speak for themselves.
The feast keeps both generations together: the pages of the old king, burned at Namugongo, and the archbishop shot by the new tyrant, ninety years apart and one company. They are not counted among the lost. The church remembers them as the living, with Christ now and awaiting the resurrection of the body, and on their day it prays for grace to stand as they stood.
The Uganda martyrdoms are unusually well documented for an event in the African interior in the 1880s, because Christian missionaries were present at Mwanga's court and recorded what they saw and heard. The Anglican side rests on the journals and letters of the Church Missionary Society, especially Alexander Mackay, whose accounts reached England within months and were printed in the society's Intelligencer. The Catholic side rests on the records of the White Fathers (the Missionaries of Africa) and on depositions gathered for the canonical process. J. F. Faupel's African Holocaust (1962) collated these sources into the standard narrative; the earlier study by J. P. Thoonen worked the same documentary base. The sources are close to the events, but they are missionary sources, and they were written by men who already understood the deaths as martyrdom.
The persecution ran from 1885 to 1887. The first to be killed were three young Anglican readers, executed on 31 January 1885; among them the names of Mark Kakumba and Yusufu Rugarama are firmly remembered. In October 1885 the Anglican bishop James Hannington was killed as he approached Buganda from the east, where local fear held that danger would come; Hannington is commemorated separately on 29 October. His death sharpened the crisis at court. When the Catholic majordomo Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe reproached the king over it, he was beheaded on 15 November 1885, the first of the Catholic martyrs.
The largest group died the following spring. Charles Lwanga, who had succeeded Mukasa as master of the pages, was burned at Namugongo, and a company of Catholic and Anglican pages and converts was burned there on 3 June 1886. The youngest, Kizito, was about fourteen. The records count roughly forty-five named martyrs across the persecution, Anglican and Roman together, with others unnamed; the exact tally varies by source because the killings were scattered across two years and several sites.
What can be said. The motive is contested only in emphasis. The missionary sources and the canonical record stress the converts' refusal of the king's demands on his pages and their refusal to abandon Christ; later historians add the political frame, a young king's fear of a foreign religion that answered to authorities beyond his own and of the European powers then partitioning the continent. The two readings are not exclusive. What the sources agree on is that the pages were given the chance to live by renouncing their faith and that they refused it.
Rome beatified the twenty-two Catholic martyrs in 1920 under Benedict XV and canonized them under Paul VI on 18 October 1964. In his canonization homily Paul VI did not pass over the others who had died in the same fire, remembering before the church the Anglican martyrs who had likewise met death for the name of Christ. The Anglican Communion keeps the whole company, Catholic and Anglican, on 3 June.
The feast falls on 3 June, the date of the great burning at Namugongo in 1886, and it is kept that day across the Western calendar: by Rome as the memorial of Charles Lwanga and Companions, by the Anglican Communion as the Martyrs of Uganda, and as a national holiday, Martyrs' Day, in Uganda itself.
The shrine at Namugongo, near Kampala, stands on the killing ground. The Roman Catholic basilica there, its roof built in the round shape of a traditional Bugandan hut and rising over a pool, was dedicated in the 1970s; an Anglican shrine stands nearby, remembering the Anglican martyrs among the company. Each year the pilgrimage to Namugongo draws enormous crowds, walking from across Uganda and from neighboring countries; it is among the largest Christian pilgrimages in Africa, and it is genuinely ecumenical, Anglicans and Catholics on the same roads to the same site. Two popes have come as pilgrims: Paul VI in 1969, the first reigning pope to visit Africa, and later John Paul II and Francis.
In Ugandan churches the martyrs are everywhere in the iconography, young men in the dress of the court, often shown in the flames or carrying the palm of martyrdom. They are patrons of Uganda and of African Catholic youth and of the catechists who first carried the faith into the kingdom. Their witness is read as the seed-time of the modern Ugandan church, which is among the most vigorous in the Anglican Communion and in African Catholicism alike.
The Story of the Life of Mackay of Uganda (Church Missionary Society journals and letters)(English, journals 1878-1887; memoir published 1890)
The Anglican eyewitness base for the 1886 martyrdoms: Mackay's CMS journals and letters, readable in full at Wikisource in the Victorian memoir compiled from them.
Public domain: Wikisource (full memoir)
Tertullian, Apology, chapter 50 (the blood of Christians is seed)(Latin, c. 197)
The source of the line the feast's collect echoes; the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation is free at CCEL.
Public domain: CCEL (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Apology ch. 50)
African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs(English, 1962)
The standard connected narrative of both the Catholic and Anglican deaths of 1886, built from the missionary and canonical sources; in print from Paulines Africa and borrowable at the Internet Archive (Amazon carries only print-on-demand reprints, so no Amazon link).
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Even Unto Death: The Story of Uganda Martyr Janani Luwum(English, 1979)
Margaret Ford was Archbishop Luwum's secretary; her short eyewitness life is the closest account of the 1977 martyrdom. Out of print, borrowable at the Internet Archive; no in-print Amazon listing.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Primary sources. The Anglican record comes chiefly from the Church Missionary Society, above all the journals and letters of Alexander Mackay, printed in the Church Missionary Intelligencer of 1886 and gathered in the Victorian memoir The Story of the Life of Mackay of Uganda (1890), readable in full at Wikisource. The Catholic record rests on the contemporary accounts of the White Fathers and on the depositions taken for the beatification process.
Principal account. J. F. Faupel, African Holocaust: The Story of the Uganda Martyrs (1962), is the standard narrative, the work that assembled the missionary and canonical sources into a single connected history of both the Catholic and the Anglican deaths. It remains in print from Paulines Publications Africa and is borrowable in its original edition at the Internet Archive. The available Amazon listings are later print-on-demand reprints rather than the publisher's edition, so none is linked here.
The modern martyrs (1977). For the second generation folded into the ACNA feast, the eyewitness account is Margaret Ford's Even Unto Death: The Story of Uganda Martyr Janani Luwum (1979), written by Luwum's own secretary and borrowable at the Internet Archive. A more recent study is Olara A. Otunnu's Archbishop Janani Luwum: The Life and Witness of a 20th Century Martyr (Fountain Publishers, Kampala, 2015), available from Fountain Publishers; Mary Craig's Candles in the Dark (1984) sets him among six modern martyrs. See also the Commontide commemoration of Janani Luwum on 17 February.
Further reading. J. P. Thoonen's Black Martyrs (Sheed and Ward, 1941) is an earlier full study of the 1886 martyrdoms. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography carries concise, sourced lives of Charles Lwanga and other named martyrs.
The second generation. The Anglican Church in North America titles the commemoration The Martyrs of Uganda, 1886, 1977, and the second date is not incidental. In the 1970s Uganda fell under the dictatorship of Idi Amin, whose forces killed great numbers, churchmen among them. The Anglican archbishop Janani Luwum became the most prominent Christian voice against the regime's violence. On 16 February 1977 he was arrested with two government ministers on a charge of treason; the next day the state announced that the three had died in a car accident, a claim almost no one believed, and it is now generally accepted that Luwum was shot. He is kept across the Anglican Communion on his own day, 17 February, and his figure stands among the ten twentieth-century martyrs carved above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey. The eyewitness account of his death is Margaret Ford's Even Unto Death (1979), written by his secretary; see also the Commontide commemoration of Janani Luwum.
On the wider tradition. The phrase the feast's collect echoes, that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, descends from Tertullian, who wrote in the closing chapter of his Apology (c. 197), in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation, that the blood of Christians is seed. The Uganda martyrs of both centuries are among the clearest later vindications of the line.
Online resources. The Anglican Church in North America commemoration gives the collect and appointed readings for 3 June.
British (Received Pronunciation): Balikuddembe /ˌbɑːlɪkuːˈdɛmbeɪ/
Almighty God, you gave your servants the Martyrs of Uganda boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12