The Pages of Mwanga's Court and a Kingdom Between Three Faiths

By the 1880s the Buganda court under Kabaka Mwanga II had become a meeting ground for three religious claims at once, the balubaale tradition his predecessors had presided over, Islam introduced by Arab traders decades earlier, and Christianity carried in by Anglican and Catholic missions that had each converted young pages serving in the royal household. Mwanga came to see the converts' first loyalty to a foreign teaching as a threat to his own authority, and between 1885 and 1887 he ordered the execution of a number of the Christian pages who refused to renounce their new faith, twenty two of whom Catholic tradition names and the Church later canonized as the Uganda Martyrs.

The killings did not settle the contest they were meant to end. Mwanga was deposed in 1888 by a coalition of his converted subjects, and the kingdom passed through a rapid sequence of religious conflict among Muslim, Catholic and Protestant factions before a British administered settlement in the 1890s left Buganda formally Christian, with Anglicanism holding the closest ties to the colonial administration. The balubaale priesthood that had once advised the kabaka directly lost its place at court in the same years, surviving afterward as private and community practice rather than as state religion.