Book Title: African Holocaust: The Story of Uganda Martyrs
Author: John Francis Faupel
Publishers: Paulines Publications West Africa
Date of Publication: 2024 (Second Revised Edition)
Pagination: 288
Reviewer: Sylvester Odion Akhaine*
African Holocaust on the Ugandan Catholic martyrs was first published in 1962, it is a heart-rending tragic spectacle of death in the precolonial Kingdom of Buganda in the interior of the equator. John Francis Faupel (1906-1985), the author, an ordained priest in 1932 who worked in Uganda as a chaplain of the staff at Kampala Technical Institute, offered the prism to view the Ugandan martyrs, a group of 22 Catholic converts to Christianity who were executed between 31 January 1885 and 27 January 1887 on the orders of King Mwanga II of Buganda.
The book opens with a background of the bureaucratic machinery of the nineteen century Buganda Kingdom and the absolutism of the Kabaka, the king, comparable to those of the Pharaohs before the Common Era, and the French King Louis XIV who once exclaimed, “I am the state, the state is me”. Truly pre-colonial Africa had many absolute monarchs with divergent forms of checks or absences. It was also a period that coincided with aliens’ inroads into the continent. The Omani Arabs who dwelt on the Island of Zanzibar had made contact with the Buganda Kingdom during the reign of Kabaka Mutesa I. They came with their religion of Islam and their vice of sodomy in the pouch in the second half of the nineteenth century.
The Europeans came on the heels of the Arabs. Speke and Grant, both explorers, arrived in 1862, followed by Colonel Chaille Long in 1874; and Henry Morton Stanley in 1875 who introduced Mutesa I into the knowledge of Christianity. His story of this encounter, of a fertile Buganda for evangelism, published in the Daily Telegraph on 15 November 1875, engendered a missionary journey to the Kabaka’s domain under the auspices of the Christion Missionary Society (CMS). Christian’s counter-evangelism deconstructed Arab’s Islamism, in other words, Christian doctrines challenged that Islam with the arrival of Alexander Mackay in 1877. Mackay who led the CMS mission would be joined by the French Catholic Mission led by Pere Lourdel and company who arrived in 1879. This had repercussions, setting off a sectarian feud between Protestantism and Catholicism, woven around doctrinal matters that view Catholicism as “Mariolatry, prayers, to saints, image worship and obedience to the Pope”. The consequence of the sectarian schism was that it eroded Mutesa’s interest in Christianity leading to ultimate faith reversal.
Kabaka Mutesa discerned politics in religion and became distrustful of the intention of the missionaries. These were also exacerbated as revealed in this work by two events. The first is the intractable illness of the Kabaka that inclined him towards paganism hallmarked by an orgy of human sacrifice. The Kabaka was also caught in the dilemma of survival in the political/religious rivalry between the Arabs and the Europeans from which he could read only the sinister design of a take-over of his Kingdom. Indeed the exploit b of the Mahdi in Sudan gave the Arabs an upper hand over the Europeans in Buganda with a consequent, albeit temporal withdrawal of the priests, the White Fathers. The situation equally affected the Christian proselytes, who nevertheless exhibited perseverance of faith in Christianity despite the meddlesomeness of Islam.
Elsewhere in this work (pp. 35-51, 66-85, and 104-118), the author presents to us in detail with a touch of genealogy, the profiles of some of the future martyrs, namely, Joseph Mukasa, Matthias Kalemba (Mulumba), Andrew Kaggwa, Luke Banabakintu, and Noe Mawaggali as well as career growth in the domain of the Kabaka. Kalemba seemed to have been carved out for his role in Christendom. He was inquisitive, humble, and with a heart inclined to the truth about life. However, it should be noted that the vacillation of the Kabaka to espouse one of two contending faiths, Islam and Christianity, birthed an independent quest for faith on the part of his subjects. Demonstrably, they were able to resist the vices of Kabaka Mwanga, a reality that intensified his hatred and persecution of the Christians.
Other future martyrs with an intricate web of genealogy are Jean-Marie Muzeyi, Anatole Kiriggwajjo, Athanasius Bazzekuketta, Aldophous Ludigo, Gonzaga Gonza, and Serekuma-Ngodowe among others. In the intervening period without the white fathers and the uncertain future following the death of Mutesa I, they filled the vacuum with their interdependence on instruction on the faith. As Faupel writes: “With leaders of the calibre of Joseph Mukasa, Andrew Kaggwa, and Mathias Kalemba with numbers of devoted and zealous catechumens, Catholicism in Buganda, far from declining during the absence of the missionaries, grew in strength and self-reliance” (p. 85).
The accession to the throne of Buganda by Kabaka Mwanga meant path-dependence in terms of the faith that awaited the Christians. Mwanga’s character was highly uncomplimentary. T B. Fletcher of the C.M.S cited by Faupel notes:
“(T)o steer a straight course through a time when such radical changes were taking place needed a man of a strong character, a firm will and wide vision. These characteristics Mwanga did not possess…He was nervous, suspicious, fickle, passionate—a man whose one desire and object was to live his own life to the full. Self in all its many and varied aspects was his guide…” (p. 87).
The famous Princess of Buganda in those days gone by
Both Mackay and Archdeacon Walker‘s impression of the new Kabaka reinforce Fletcher’s. Mackay observed that none could “fail to see that he is fitful, and fickle, and I fear, revengeful. One vice to which he is addicted is the smoking of bhang (hemp)…” (p. 88). For Walker, the King “looked a young and frivolous sort of man, very weak and easily led; passionate and, if provoked, petulant” (p. 88).
The new King presided over Buganda amidst the seething rivalry between faiths, namely, Paganism, Islam and Christianity. Given the perseverance of faith by the Christian converts, it was a matter of time before they would come under the combined hatred by traditionalists and the Moslem Arabs, a likelihood given the fact that Joseph Mukasa had foiled an assassination attempt against the King by the Chancellor. The fear of losing his sovereignty which had always lurked in the background given the activities of the European powers in Equatorial Africa, the British protestant priest, Bishop Hannington was murdered in cold blood, an incident that underlines the precarity of the lives of the priests in Buganda. Joseph Mukasa would follow as the Mwanga wished to remove the moral protest to his many vices that the presence of Mukasa in the palace posed to him.
Truly Mukasa’s martyrdom would open the floodgate of martyrs, the purge of Christians with arbitrary conviction, and the stoic acceptance of the cruel fate that befell them continued. We savour a sense of unflinching faith in the Almighty from Mbaka Tuzinde, when asked to renounce his faith, intoned: “My true father, whom I must obey before all, is in Heaven. I am a truly Christian, so leave me alone” (p.190). Noe who was martyred and fed to the dogs, had exhorted his sister, later named Maria-Mathilda, to persevere in faith and said, “To be a Christian implies a readiness to follow Our Lord to Calvary and even, if need be, to a painful death. As for myself I am convinced that there is a life after death, and I am not afraid of losing this one” (p.225).
The hounding and rounding of the Christians, the sufferings in detention bonded like chattels, in stocks, slave-yokes and rings, and the stream of faith in their ordeal is best left to the imagination. While men were slaughtered in varied non-descript manners of rituals, the multitude faced the great pyre at Namugongo executive site. The courage shown by the condemned had few if any in modern history. Faupel offers a glimpse through the account of Denis Kamyuka:
When all the victims had been laid on the pyre, the executioners brought more wood, which the piled on the pyre, the executioners brought wood, which they piled on top of them. While this was being done, I heard the Christians, each reciting the prayers which came to his mind at that supreme moment (p. 245).
As it were, Faupel notes:
Thirty-one, excluding Charles Lwanga, were burnt in the great holocaust at Namugongo on Ascension Thursday, 3 June 1886. Of these, twelve are officially recognized as Catholic martyrs, and nine are officially recognized as Protestants, their names being inscribed on the Memorial Tablet in Namirembe Cathedral. It has generally been assumed that the remaining ten were pagans, who had been in prison and are under sentence of death for offences other than religion.
The persecution and the supreme price paid by the Uganda martyrs on account of loyalty to Christ exemplified martyrdom. As Pope Paul VI said during the canonisation of the martyrs on 18 October 1964:
The martyrdom of the saints is fraught with drama: it is something which distresses us but at the same time stirs our imagination; the injustice and violence which led to it tend to fade from human memory, while before the eyes of succeeding generations there remain ever-present the shining example of a meekness which has transformed the laying down of life into a propitiatory sacrifice, an example which never loses its appeal. It is an act of the most sublime love of God, an act of the highest loyalty to Christ.
It is for this reason that Pope Benedict XV proclaimed them blessed in a beatification exercise in June of 1920 discerning in the martyrdom a “mysterious design” of Africa as the “new homeland of Christ”. Their canonisation would follow in 1964 with the papal declaration: “We decree and define as Holy, and inscribe in the Rolls of Saints, the Blessed Charles Lwanga, Matthias Mulumba Kalemba and their twenty companions” (p.279).
I end with a poser: given the wanton killings of Christians in Nigeria on account of their faith, especially in the Middle Belt and Northern Nigeria, are there none worthy of sainthood?
*Professor Sylvester Odion Akhaine is a Professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University (LASU) in Nigeria
