The Uganda Martyrs and the Persecution at Mwanga's Court

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Most of those killed in the persecution Kabaka Mwanga the Second ordered at his Buganda court between 1885 and 1887 were young royal pages who had converted to Catholicism or Anglicanism through the mission stations the White Fathers and the Church Missionary Society had established there in the early 1880s. Historians read Mwanga's motives as mixed rather than singly religious: alarm at Christianity's spread among the pages who staffed his own court, wider anxiety about the political loyalties a foreign faith might carry, and, by several accounts, the immediate provocation of the pages' refusal to submit to him sexually.

The largest single group of the condemned, most of them Catholic, were marched to Namugongo and burned alive on 3 June 1886, the persecution's single worst day; others across the two years of killing were speared or beheaded. The killings continued until Mwanga was himself overthrown in 1888, at which point they stopped, and Christianity went on spreading in Buganda in the decades that followed rather than being suppressed by the persecution that had tried to root it out.