East African Christianity & the Uganda Martyrs

Christianity came back to East Africa along the coast first — Johann Ludwig Krapf landed at Mombasa in 1844 and began the language and mapping work later missions relied on — and then inland to the kingdom of Buganda, where Anglican missionaries arrived in 1877 and French Catholic White Fathers in 1879. Their converts were largely young men of the royal court, and when the kabaka Mwanga II turned on them between 1885 and 1887 he killed both kinds together: Anglican and Catholic pages executed side by side, the largest group burned alive at Namugongo on 3 June 1886 under the leadership of Charles Lwanga, who is said to have arranged his own pyre. Persecution did what it often does. The church grew, and Baganda converts carried it outward as evangelists into the surrounding kingdoms faster than any mission society could have, so that by the agreement of 1900 that settled Buganda's relations with Britain, it was a Christian kingdom.