Between 1885 and 1887 Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda had a number of Christian pages of his court put to death, most of them burned at Namugongo in June 1886. Twenty two Catholics were canonised in 1964 and are commemorated together with the Anglican dead, and the shrine at Namugongo has become one of the largest pilgrimage destinations in Africa, with pilgrims walking from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and beyond.
The events are not in dispute. Their explanation is, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly because the atlas records where camps exist rather than choosing between them.
The traditional account, and the one the canonisation rests on, holds that the pages refused the Kabaka's sexual demands on religious grounds and were killed for that refusal, with Charles Lwanga acting to protect the younger pages.
A body of historical scholarship reads the confrontation primarily as political. On this account the missions had created, for the first time, a group of court retainers whose ultimate loyalty lay outside the kingdom, at a moment when Mwanga was watching European powers annex his neighbours and had just had an Anglican bishop killed for approaching from the east. The executions on this reading were about allegiance and sovereignty, with the pages' disobedience the occasion rather than the cause.
The two readings are not wholly exclusive and neither is fringe. What makes the difference consequential is that the first has been mobilised in contemporary Ugandan politics, cited in support of anti homosexuality legislation, which gives a nineteenth century argument about a king's court a present political charge that historians on both sides have noted.