Tom Marcus suggests the relevance of the story of the early Ugandan and English martyrs for today
To understand the African bishops’ stand on homosexual practice today, it is helpful to remember the heroic early days of the Ugandan church.
While only a chronological sliver of a much larger story, it illumines how what those who have gone before and suffered and died for cannot be brushed aside.
The Court of King Muteesa
In 1877 Protestant missionaries from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) came to the court of the Kabaka in Buganda (part of what is now Uganda). The Kabaka, or King, was Muteesa. He had been influenced for about ten years by Islamic traders from Egypt in the North. Islam’s concept of a revelatory book and literacy had been, in some ways, a helpful intellectual precursor to the message that the CMS missionaries brought.
Spurring the Protestant missionaries on had been a letter sent to the Daily Telegraph by Henry Morton Stanley (he was the American journalist of ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ fame). Stanley painted the rosy picture of a great enlightened despot eager to hear the gospel and encourage its spread among his people.
These CMS missionaries were followed 18 months later by French Catholic White Father missionaries. Unfortunately the factionalism produced by the differences of these two branches of Christianity translated into mirrored rivalries in the Court of the Kabaka. The Kabaka understood political dynamics and power balance and let the theological cut and thrust carry on.
Wave of persecution
After Muteesa’s death, his homosexual son Mwanga succeeded his father as Kabaka in October 1884. Eighteen-year-old Mwanga wanted to stamp his authority, which he did through a wave of persecution. In 1885 he made martyrs of Makko Kakumba, Nuwa Serwanga and Yusuf Lugalama, young men in the Protestant mission household.
Later that year James Hannington, the white, public-school educated, Anglican bishop of East Equatorial Africa, tried to enter the country. He was imprisoned for eight days, then on the Kabaka’s order he was killed. As he lay dying, speared from each side, he said: ‘Tell Mwanga that I have purchased the road to Uganda with my blood’. He was 38.
In a letter home shortly before his death he wrote: ‘If this be the last chapter of my earthly history, then the next will be the first page of the heavenly, no blots and smudges, no incoherence, but sweet converse of the presence of the Lamb’.
In the course of time the grandson of one of his impalers was ordained and became a Christian missionary to Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
Hundreds martyred
Two weeks after Bishop Hannington’s death, Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, a Catholic, was beheaded for criticising the Kabaka for this murder and for his depravity. Soon another 32 young Christians were martyred. Twenty-two of these were Catholics and ten Protestants. As the fiery smelter of persecution continued, probably hundreds of Christians were martyred in the next two years. Christian court pages (bagalagala) and minor chiefs refused, at the cost of their lives, to indulge in homosexual practices. It was a crux issue. They died believing and trusting in Christ as their Saviour, singing hymns as they died, preaching repentance to their enemies, confident of a sure and glorious resurrection in the age to come.
Resonance today
These events have a resonance 130 years or so later and permeate the narrative of faith of the Ugandan church today.
Now let us imagine ourselves as transported by our church history Tardis back not three generations but 11 generations. We are going back a further 320 years: not to Buganda, but to England. We are back in the late 1550s.
Protestant martyrs
We would materialise in a country ruled by ‘Bloody Mary’, now Queen of England, the Roman Catholic daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She was a woman bigoted in her Roman Catholicism. Her personal mission was to extirpate the Protestant faith from this country. Ancient laws on heresy had recently been put back on the statute book. Her clerical Commissioners examined alleged heretics, delivering them to the civil authorities. A favourite killer question they were asked went along the lines of: did they or did they not believe that the body and blood of Christ, were really, that is corporally, literally, locally and materially, present under the forms of bread and wine after the words of consecration were pronounced by the priest – a mystical transubstantiation. The next four years would see nearly 300 Protestants martyred.
Burned to death
Included in this honourable roll were: the Archdeacon of Winchester; a Prebendary of St Paul’s; the Bishops of Gloucester, London and Worcester; the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury; a score of clergymen; and also 55 women and four children. These were publicly burned to death for holding doctrinal views contrary to those of the monarch. The martyrologist, Foxe, documented much of what we know of the heroism of the English Reformers. His works were later widely distributed in literate English households.
The first of these English martyrs of the Marian persecution, John Rogers, walked so steadily and unflinchingly into his fiery demise that the crowd roared with applause. The French ambassador, Noailles, writing home, described him ‘as if he was walking to his wedding’.The Commissioners of the English Inquisition tried to wear down these divines. We see John Philpot, the Archdeacon of Winchester, going through 13 interrogations. On the day of his execution in the depths of winter the road was so muddy that the sheriffs had to carry him. He joked with them: ‘What, will you make a Pope?’ (the Popes were carried in a sedan chair). Coming into Smithfield in London, he kneeled down and said: ‘I will pay my vows in thee, O Smithfield. Shall I disdain to suffer at this stake, seeing my Redeemer did not refuse to suffer a most vile death on the cross for me?’ As the flames consumed him he recited the 106th, 107th and 108th Psalms.
Unlike some self-styled contemporary religious ‘martyrs’, these noble men and women had, on the whole, led exemplary godly lives that culminated in their dying well, in a manner that profoundly stirred the onlookers to seriously repent and believe.
Near Balliol College in Oxford one of these bishops, Nicholas Ridley, prayed before his immolation: ‘Heavenly Father, I give thee most hearty thanks that thou hast called me to a profession of thee even unto death. I beseech thee, Lord God, have mercy on this realm of England, and deliver the same from all her enemies.’ Bishop Hugh Latimer, his co-martyr, said to Bishop Ridley: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall by God’s grace light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put out.’ He needed the encouragement, as his executioners had botched the pyre, making the suffering longer than usual.
Issues of faith and conscience
These public martyrdoms by noble men and woman on issues of faith and conscience make strong resonances even down the years. Seeing these Christian dying well in the face of avoidable excruciating suffering speaks to the deepest parts of the onlookers. The Marian persecutions still have some resonances in this nation 11 generations later. Shall we not honour the resonances of the Mwangan persecutions three generations later and the thousands of Ugandan Christians who followed them ‘of whom the world was not worthy’ (Hebrews 11.38).
