Faith in Uganda: Martyrs, Rival Missions and the Born-Again Boom

Uganda is a Christian-majority country with a substantial Muslim minority. In the 2014 national census, Catholics were about 39 percent of the population and Anglicans about 32 percent, Pentecostal and other born-again churches accounted for roughly 11 percent, and Muslims for roughly 14 percent.

Uganda by the Numbers

Unlike several of its neighbours, Uganda does count religion, and it has done so consistently. The 2014 census, the enumeration whose religious figures are still the most widely quoted, produced a picture like this:

• Roman Catholic: about 39 percent
• Anglican (Church of Uganda): about 32 percent
• Pentecostal, evangelical and born-again churches: about 11 percent
• Muslim: about 14 percent, almost entirely Sunni
• Seventh-day Adventist, Orthodox, Baha'i, traditional belief and others: the remaining few percent

Two things stand out. Catholics and Anglicans split the Christian majority almost evenly, which is no accident of drift but the legacy of a nineteenth-century contest at a single royal court. And the born-again share, a rounding error in the 1980s, is the fastest-moving number in Ugandan religious life.

Three Faiths Arrive at One Royal Court

Almost everything about Uganda's religious map traces back to Buganda, the powerful kingdom on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, and specifically to the court of its kabaka, or king. Muslim traders from the Indian Ocean coast reached Buganda in the 1840s, and Kabaka Mutesa I took an interest in Islam serious enough that he observed Ramadan for a period and had Arabic taught at court. Then, within two years of each other, two Christian missions arrived: Anglicans of the Church Missionary Society in 1877, and French Catholic White Fathers in 1879.

What made Uganda unusual is that all three arrived at the top rather than the bottom, competing for the favour of a monarch and, through him, for the loyalty of the pages and young officials who ran the kingdom. Conversion at court was not a private decision; it was a realignment of the state. Within a decade Buganda had three organised religious factions inside its own government, each with foreign patrons, each convinced the others threatened the throne.

The Killings at Namugongo

What happened in 1886

Mutesa I died in 1884 and was succeeded by his son Mwanga II, who saw the converts' new loyalties as insubordination. Between 1885 and 1887 a series of executions swept the court. The best known took place on 3 June 1886 at Namugongo, where a group of Christian pages, including Charles Lwanga, were burned to death. Roughly 45 people are counted among the Uganda Martyrs, and a detail Ugandans stress is that they were not all of one church: 22 were Catholic and the rest Anglican. The Anglican missionary bishop James Hannington had been killed the previous year on the eastern approach to the kingdom.

The pilgrimage it created

The killings did not suppress Christianity; they accelerated it. The Catholic martyrs were canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1964, and he visited Uganda in 1969 in the first papal trip to sub-Saharan Africa. Pope John Paul II came in 1993 and Pope Francis in 2015. Namugongo now holds a Catholic basilica and, a short distance away, an Anglican shrine and museum. Every 3 June, Martyrs' Day, is a national public holiday, and pilgrims converge on the site from across Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan, many of them walking for days. Crowd estimates run into the hundreds of thousands and in some years above a million, which makes it one of the largest annual religious gatherings on the African continent.

Bafransa and Bangereza: When Churches Became Parties

The factions at Mwanga's court acquired names that say everything about how Ugandans understood them. Catholics were the Bafransa, the French party, after the nationality of the White Fathers. Anglicans were the Bangereza, the English party. These were religious labels doing the work of political ones. Between 1888 and 1892 Buganda fought a sequence of civil wars along exactly these lines, including a period in 1888 when the Muslim faction drove both Christian groups out of the kingdom. The fighting ended at the Battle of Mengo in 1892, when Captain Frederick Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company intervened on the Protestant side with a Maxim gun. Buganda was then carved up by faction, with Catholics concentrated in the county of Buddu.

The settlement outlasted the kingdom's independence. Protestant families dominated colonial administration and the chieftaincies, an advantage Catholics resented for decades. When party politics arrived in the 1950s, the split reappeared in new clothes: the Democratic Party, founded in 1954, drew its base from Catholics, while the Uganda People's Congress under Milton Obote was broadly Protestant.

Muslim Uganda and the Amin Decade

Uganda's Muslim community, concentrated historically in Buganda and in the east and northwest, spent the colonial period at a structural disadvantage: mission schools were the route into the civil service, and they were Christian. The Uganda Muslim Supreme Council was created in 1972 to unify Muslim leadership, though rival factions have contested it ever since.

That date is not coincidental. Idi Amin, a Muslim from the northwest, seized power in 1971 and ruled until 1979, and he promoted Muslim institutions and pursued closer ties with Libya and Saudi Arabia. Uganda joined the Organisation of the Islamic Conference during his rule, and the long-unfinished national mosque on Kampala's Old Kampala hill was begun in his era, eventually completed with Libyan funding and known today as the Uganda National Mosque. His government also expelled Uganda's Asian population in 1972, removing most of the country's Hindu, Sikh and Ismaili Muslim communities, and in 1977 it banned most religious organisations, leaving only the Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Muslim bodies recognised. In February of that year Janani Luwum, Archbishop of the Church of Uganda, was killed after publicly criticising state violence; 16 February is now a Ugandan public holiday in his name. The Amin period left Ugandan Muslims with an association they have spent decades pointing out is unfair, since the regime persecuted Muslim critics too.

The Born-Again Boom

Uganda has a revival tradition older than modern Pentecostalism. The East African Revival, which began around Gahini in the 1930s and spread rapidly through Uganda, produced the balokole, literally the saved ones, a movement of public confession and strict personal conduct that operated inside the Anglican church rather than outside it. Balokole is still the everyday Luganda word for a born-again Christian.

The modern wave arrived after 1986, when the restrictions of the previous decade lifted and independent churches could register freely. Growth since then has been extraordinary, taking the movement to more than one Ugandan in ten. Kampala's church billboards, its Christian radio and television stations, and the crusades that fill stadiums are the visible edge of it. These churches recruit heavily from Anglican and Catholic congregations rather than from the unaffiliated, which is why the older denominations watch them closely, and they have become a constituency that candidates court directly.

Faith in Public Life Now

The state is formally secular and the constitution guarantees freedom of worship, but religious institutions are woven into ordinary infrastructure. A large share of Uganda's schools and hospitals were founded by missions and remain church-affiliated, from Mengo Hospital in Kampala, opened in 1897, to dense networks of Catholic and Anglican secondary schools, and universities exist under Catholic, Anglican, Muslim and Adventist sponsorship. Kampala also hosts the first Baha'i House of Worship built in Africa, opened on Kikaya Hill in 1961, its nine-sided green dome visible from a long way off.

Traditional belief persists alongside all of this, particularly the Baganda reverence for the balubaale spirits and the shrines and diviners consulted for healing and misfortune. It rarely appears as a census category, since most people who consult a shrine also name a church or a mosque. In Uganda, as across much of the region, religious identity is a matter of layers rather than either-or.