The Martyrs of Uganda and the Virgin Mary

There was something in the air of Munyonyo that afternoon of May 1886 that witnesses could not describe in words. The young heathen who left the palace of King Mwanga II did not cry. Some were smiling. They carried the Rosary in their hands - that cord of accounts that Cardinal Lavigerie's white missionaries had taught them - and they walked to death singing hymns in luganda. The soldier who was guarding them had to look away.

What happened in the old kingdom of Buganda between 1885 and 1887 shook the history of the Church in Africa in a way that still resounds today. Twenty-two young Catholics - and a similar number of Anglicans - were executed by order of their king because they refused to submit to their abuses. But the history of the Uganda Martyrs is not just a death story. It is, above all, a story about the Virgin Mary: about how the Rosary crossed the Atlantic, crossed the Mediterranean, climbed Lake Victoria and came to the hands of some African boys who embraced it with a faith able to overcome the fire.

The kingdom of Buganda and the arrival of the missionaries

To understand what happened, you have to understand the Buganda of the late 19th century: a sophisticated kingdom, with an elaborate cut, a system of royal pajes and an absolute king whose word was the law of life and death. King Mutesa I had been receptive to the Anglican missionaries arrived in 1877, and when in 1879 the White Fathers arrived - the missionaries founded by Cardinal Lavigerie with special devotion to the Virgin Mary - the kingdom seemed open to the Gospel.

The White Fathers brought with them something that the previous missionaries had not emphasized so much: the Rosary. Marian devotion was the heart of their spirituality. They taught the catecheurs not only the catecheism, but the contemplative prayer that went through the mysteries of Christ's life accompanied by the Virgin. Soon the young heathen of the palace - the most intelligent in the kingdom, chosen among noble families to serve the king and receive education - began to frequent religious instructions.

Mutesa I tolerated them. But in 1884 Mutesa died, and his son Mwanga II, only sixteen years old, went up to the throne. Mwanga was capricious, resentful of foreign influence and given to behaviors that his pajes - already formed in a Christian morality - began to resist.

Conflict: chastity as a testimony

Historians have treated this point with delicacy, but the reality is clear: King Mwanga II demanded of his sexual favors that the tradition of the kingdom became an obligation. When the young catechumens began to refuse, invoking their newly discovered faith, the king entered into cholera. Those boys not only disobeyed him: they embarrassed him before his court.

The first martyr was José Mukasa Balikuddembe, a royal butler and a man of confidence, executed in November 1885 for having reprimanded the king for the death of the Anglican missionary James Hannington. Balikuddembe was beheaded and his body burned. But before he died, he forgave his executioners. The news ran through the palace. The other pajes received it in silence, each by mentally tightening those beads of Rosario.

During the following months, the tension was increasing. Charles Lwanga, the new chief butler and the largest of the catechumens, took the group's informal spiritual direction. He was a man of strong, intelligent complexion, of a quiet and firm character. I knew what was coming.

The night of baptism in the rain

On the night of May 25-26, 1886, inside the palace, as the tropical storm shook the palm trees and the thunder rattled over Lake Victoria, Charles Lwanga brought together the younger catechumens. I knew the king was gonna call them the next day. I knew what would come next.

That night, with rain water collected in his hands, Charles Lwanga baptized his younger companions. The youngest was Kizito, 14, who according to the testimonies laughed during the rite because he was unable to contain joy. "If I have to die," Charles said quietly, "I want you to die Christian."

"I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." The rain water fell on the heads of those boys in the darkness of the royal palace of Buganda. Outside, the storm was still on. Inside, something was born that could not put out any fire.

The next morning, King Mwanga called all the pajes. He asked them one by one if they were still Christians. One by one, starting with the major and ending with the youngest, said yes. The king, furious, ordered his execution. The condemned were taken to Munyonyo, separated from the non-believers, and began the march to Namugongo, 40 kilometres away.

The march to Namugongo

It was eight days on the way. The soldiers tied them with ropes. Some were tortured on the way. Denis Ssebuggwawo, one of the youngest, was executed on the road by order of Chief Mukajanga. But the group kept walking. He kept singing.

The time witnesses - neighbors of the villages they passed through, slaves who saw them pass through - described the same scene: young people who were praying the Rosary, with the accounts visible in their hands tied. Someone was insulting them from the fields. None of the martyrs responded with violence.

Charles Lwanga was separated from the group when he arrived in Namugongo. Chief Mukajanga wanted a special drawing for the man who had led the resistance. They burned it slowly, from the feet up, to prolong suffering. Charles Lwanga died without shouting. His last words, according to the testimonies collected by the White Fathers years later, were: "Muñungu" - "God" in Luganda.

On June 3, 1886, the others were wrapped in reed rods - one for each martyr - and burned together on the hill. The cries that were heard that morning in Namugongo were not of pain: they were the songs of those who burned.

The Rosary: Why the martyrs carried him with them

It's not a minor detail. The Uganda Martyrs were arrested with the Rosary in their hands. This fact, verified by the testimonies gathered in the process of beatification, says something in depth about the nature of his martyrdom.

The White Fathers had taught the Rosary as the path par excellence to know Christ through Mary. The young pajes, in their brief catechemenate - some had only been in faith for months - had made the Rosary the driving thread of their spiritual life. They prayed together in the palace, secretly when necessary, aloud when they could. The Rosary was his school of prayer and, at the same time, his declaration of belonging.

When the soldiers tied them up and took them along the roads of Buganda, they carried that cord of accounts like others would carry a gun. Not to defend yourself. To pray. To think of the Virgin who accompanied her Son to the foot of the cross. To know that they were also accompanied.

"The Virgin Mary is the mother of those who die for her Son," Father Lourdel, one of the missionaries, explained to the catechumens of Buganda. "When you pray the Rosary with her, you are with her even if you are alone."

The canonization of 1964: the first act of Paul VI in Africa

The process took decades. The testimonies were collected, analyzed, sent to Rome. In 1920, Benedict XV beatified the martyrs. Forty-four years later, on 18 October 1964, Pope Paul VI canonized them in Rome. It was the first canonization of black African martyrs in the history of the Church.

Paul VI chose that moment with a deliberation that has not always been understood in its depth. The Second Vatican Council was in progress. Africa had been politically independent in previous years. The Church needed to tell the continent: you are not passive recipients of faith; you are its founders, its guardians, its saints. The Uganda Martyrs gave Africa what Europe had since the early centuries: own martyrs, own blood, own roots.

In the homily of canonization, Paul VI said: "These African martyrs bring new proof that Christian heroism is not the heritage of any race or people, but of all men and all times."

The Shrine of Namugongo: three million pilgrims

Namugongo today is nothing like the clear forest where those young men burned in 1886. The Basilica of the Martyrs of Uganda - built between 1968 and 1975, consecrated in 1975 by Cardinal Benelli on behalf of Pope Paul VI - dominates the hill with its circular plant that evokes a traditional hut enlarged on a cathedral scale. The walls are decorated with mosaics that narrate the history of martyrdom. On the main altar, on which the light of the lucernaries falls, there is an image of the Virgin Mary that the faithful call the Virgin of Namugongo.

Every June 3 - the feast of the Uganda Martyrs - the Namugongo hill becomes the most massive pilgrimage place in East Africa. The figures vary by year, but recent records speak of between two and three million pilgrims. Many of them come on foot from neighbouring countries: Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some walk for weeks.

Namugongo's type pilgrim is not a tourist. It is someone who comes to keep a promise, to ask for a miracle, to thank one already received. Most of them wear the Rosary. They have inherited it from the mothers and grandmothers who learned it from the first generations of catechumens. A string of accounts that traveled from Europe to Uganda in the late 19th century and today is reproduced in millions of hands that inherited it from those who died for it.

The influence in East Africa

The Uganda Martyrs are not just calendar saints. They're names of living people. In Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it is extremely common to find men named Charles - by Charles Lwanga -, Kizito, Bruno, Gonzaga, Matthias. Catholic mothers throughout East Africa baptize their children with these names not as an archaeological gesture but as an act of faith: "I want my son to have the spirit of those who died for Christ."

The schools, hospitals, parishes and neighborhoods that bear the name of the martyrs are counted for hundreds throughout the continent. In Kigali, in Kampala, in Nairobi, in Dar es Salaam: the presence of the Uganda Martyrs in the spiritual geography of East Africa is comparable to that of Santiago de Compostela in the European one.

There's something deeper. The Uganda Martyrs died from a faith that had been for just months. They were neither priests nor religious. They were young employees of a royal palace who had found in the Gospel - and in the Marian devotion that the White Fathers had taught them - a truth for which it was worth dying. This secular dimension of their martyrdom is what gives them their symbolic power in contemporary Africa: it is not necessary to be cleric to be holy. We must not carry centuries of faith. Just get the Rosary, learn it, live it, and not let go even if your hands are tied.

The Virgin in the heart of martyrdom

There is a question that historians do not usually ask but that tradition of faith keeps alive: what role did the Virgin Mary play in the martyrdom of Ugandan youth?

The answer given by popular devotion - which the White Fathers recorded in their memoirs - is clear: the Rosary was not an amulet. It was a school. Through the mysteries of the Rosary, the heathen had contemplated the Passion of Christ. They had seen, over and over again, the suffering of the innocent. They had seen the Virgin standing at the foot of the cross, without running away, without reneging her Son. When the time came for them to be the innocent who suffered, they knew how to do it: with their eyes fixed on Christ, accompanied by Mary.

Charles Lwanga, in the days before his arrest, did not teach his fellow escape tactics. He taught them to pray the Rosary more carefully. "If they call us to bear witness," he said, "we want to know the mysteries of Jesus well. And if the Virgin was with Him until the end, she will be with us too."

At the time of the fire, when Charles Lwanga's body began to burn and the executioner was waiting for the screams, only a quiet voice was heard murmuring something. Those who were closer said after that it was the name of God, or perhaps the name of Mary. Maybe they were the same name.

A legacy that does not cease

In 2015, Pope Francis visited Namugongo. In the face of a crowd estimated by the organizers by more than two million people, the Pope said: "The martyrs of Uganda teach us that faith is not just an idea. It is a force that transforms life and, if necessary, gives life." Then he prayed the Rosary before the image of the Virgin of Namugongo.

Today, in Uganda where the Catholic Church has a robust and growing presence - about 40% of the population - the Martyrs are the backbone of the Catholic identity. Each parish school teaches its history. Every co-fraternity of the Rosary bears its patronage. Every mother who gives her son the name of Kizito or Charles is transmitting a memory that is one hundred and forty years old and that, judging by the generations that continue to pilgrim Namugongo, seems to have no intention of going out.

The blood of the martyrs is seed, Tertulian said in the second century. In East Africa, that seed sprang in the form of millions of Rosaries, millions of names of baptism, millions of pilgrims who go up to the hill every year where young people with the Rosary sang in their hands as they burned and showed that faith - when it is true - is not afraid of any king.

• 1879The White Fathers arrive in the kingdom of Buganda and begin the catechesis of the royal heaps. They introduce the Rosary as a column of spiritual formation.
• 1884Mwanga II happens to his father Mutesa I. Tensions begin with the pajes that refuse their demands.
• November 1885Execution of José Mukasa Balikuddembe, first martyr. The palace catechumens understand that conflict can reach the end.
• 25-26 May 1886Charles Lwanga baptizes his younger companions with rain water at night. The next day, the king orders his execution.
• 3 June 1886Namugongo fire: martyrs are burned alive. Charles Lwanga dies apart, in a particularly cruel execution. They die singing.
• 1920Beatification of the Uganda Martyrs by Benedict XV.
• 18 October 1964Canonization by Paul VI: First canonization of Black African martyrs in the history of the Church.
• 1975Consecration of the Namugongo Basilica. The image of the Virgin of Namugongo presides over the sanctuary.
• 3 June 2015Pope Francis visits Namugongo to more than two million pilgrims. Pray the Rosary before the image of the Virgin.
• Every 3 JuneBetween 2 and 3 million pilgrims go up to Namugongo from all over East Africa.

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