Uganda Martyrs Shrine at Namugongo

1. What Happened at Namugongo

Namugongo was the traditional execution ground of the kingdom of Buganda, a wooded rise north-east of the royal capital where condemned men were taken to be killed by the kabaka's executioners. On 3 June 1886 a group of Christian pages and servants of the royal household, arrested at Munyonyo in the last week of May, were burned alive there on the orders of Kabaka Mwanga II. Charles Lwanga, who had charge of the pages, was burned first and on a separate fire. The others were bound in reed mats, stacked on a single pyre and set alight. Both Catholics and Anglicans died in that fire.

The killings at Namugongo were the largest single episode in a persecution that ran from January 1885 to January 1887. The first Anglican converts were killed at Busega in January 1885. Bishop James Hannington was killed in Busoga in October 1885. Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, the Catholic majordomo of the court, was beheaded in November 1885. The last of the canonised Catholic martyrs, John Mary Muzeeyi, was beheaded in January 1887. Namugongo is the place the whole persecution is named after because that is where most of them died on one day.

Two shrines now stand on the site, on ground that faces each other across a road. The Catholic basilica of the Uganda Martyrs is built over the spot traditionally identified as the place where Charles Lwanga was burned. The Church of Uganda's Martyrs' Shrine stands on the ground associated with the main pyre. Every 3 June, which is a public holiday in Uganda, pilgrims who have walked from parishes across the country and from neighbouring countries fill both sites.

2. The Persecution at a Glance

The persecution has a clear shape once the dates are laid out. It begins with three Anglican converts, turns on the killing of a bishop, claims the senior Catholic at court, and then breaks over the royal pages in the space of ten days in the summer of 1886.

Dates follow the accounts assembled for the beatification and canonisation causes and the standard published histories of the Buganda mission. Where individual dates in late May 1886 vary between accounts, the variation is given in the sections below rather than smoothed over here.

3. The Kingdom of Buganda Before the Killings

Buganda in the 1880s was a centralised kingdom on the northern shore of Lake Victoria, one of the strongest states in the region, governed by a king called the kabaka through appointed chiefs rather than through hereditary lords alone. Power ran outward from the palace, and the kabaka could make or unmake a chief. That is the first thing to hold on to, because it explains why what happened at court mattered so much and why a movement among the royal pages counted as a political event.

The pages, the bagalagala, were boys and young men from good families placed in the royal enclosure to serve the kabaka and to be formed for office. Service at court was the road to a chieftaincy. They carried messages, waited on the king, guarded the inner rooms and slept in the palace. Anyone who wanted to know what the next generation of Buganda's rulers would believe had only to look at the pages, and everyone at court knew it.

Ganda religion before the missionaries centred on the balubaale, spirits with named shrines and mediums, on the ancestors, and on the kabaka's own ritual standing at the centre of the kingdom. Islam had arrived earlier through Zanzibari and Swahili traders coming up the caravan routes from the coast, and there was a Muslim party at court before there was a Christian one. Kabaka Mutesa I himself had observed Muslim practice for a period. For the wider history of the faith that reached Buganda by that road, see our guide to Islam and what Catholics should understand about it.

Three religious parties therefore formed inside the palace within a decade: Muslim, Anglican and Catholic, known locally by the terms the court used for them. They competed for the ear of the king and for places among the chiefs. The persecution of 1885 and 1886 falls in the middle of that competition, and the civil wars that followed Mwanga's reign were fought along those same party lines.

4. How Christianity Reached the Court

Christianity reached Buganda by invitation. Kabaka Mutesa I, who had been dealing with Egyptian and Zanzibari pressure from the north and east, told the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in 1875 that he would receive Christian teachers, and Stanley's published appeal brought them. The Church Missionary Society, the evangelical Anglican mission society, sent the first party, which reached the capital in 1877. Alexander Mackay, a Scottish engineer, became the best known of them and stayed through the worst of the persecution.

The Catholic party followed in 1879: the Society of Missionaries of Africa, founded by Cardinal Charles Lavigerie and universally called the White Fathers from the North African habit they wore. Father Simeon Lourdel, whom the Baganda called Mapeera from the French mon père, and Brother Amans Delmas were the first to arrive. Lourdel is a central figure in everything that follows. He knew Mwanga personally, he pleaded for the prisoners, and he was at Namugongo's road when the condemned were marched past.

Both missions taught in Luganda, both attracted converts among the pages and the younger chiefs, and both were understood at court as belonging to rival European powers. The Baganda gave the two parties names drawn from the countries the missionaries came from, and the distinction between the English party and the French party was as visible to the court as any doctrinal difference. That is worth stating plainly, because the martyrs died inside a situation where religion and foreign politics were already tangled together.

The catechesis was serious and it was slow. Catechumens were tested over long periods before baptism, and several of the martyrs died as catechumens rather than as baptised Christians. Charles Lwanga himself was baptised in 1885, shortly before he took charge of the pages. Kizito, the youngest of the group, was baptised by Lwanga on the night the arrests began, when it was clear there would be no other chance. The Catholic Church's teaching on that case is settled: those who die for the faith without having received the sacrament are held to be baptised by their death (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1258). For the sacrament itself, see our guide to baptism.

5. Kabaka Mwanga II and the Crisis of 1885

Mwanga II succeeded his father Mutesa I in 1884 as a young man still in his teens, and he inherited a court he could not control. His father had played the religious parties against each other for years with some skill. Mwanga had neither the standing nor the patience for it, and within a year of his accession he was facing a Christian party among his own pages, a Muslim party among his chiefs, an older establishment that wanted the missionaries expelled, and news from the coast that Europeans were carving up the interior.

The German declaration of a protectorate over territory in East Africa in 1885 reached Buganda as a warning. Mwanga's advisers told him that the missionaries were the advance guard of a foreign conquest and that the Christians in his household would open the door to it. On the evidence of what he did next, he believed them at least in part.

The other element in the record is personal. The accounts written by the missionaries at the time, and the testimony gathered afterwards for the causes of the martyrs, state that Mwanga made sexual demands of the pages and that the Christians among them refused him. Both the Anglican and the Catholic sources say this, independently and at the time. Some later historians of Buganda have argued that the political threat was the deciding factor and that the refusals gave a shape to a decision the king was already moving toward. The two accounts sit together in the sources, and this page does not choose between them.

Mwanga's own later life is documented. He was deposed and restored in the wars that followed, fought against the establishment of British control, was finally defeated and exiled to the Seychelles, was received into the Anglican church during that exile, and died there in 1903.

6. Bishop Hannington and Joseph Mukasa

James Hannington was the Anglican bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, and he was killed in Busoga on 29 October 1885 while approaching Buganda from the east. The route mattered. Buganda tradition held that danger to the kingdom would come from the east, and the caravan road Hannington took was closed to strangers in the mind of the court. Mwanga's chiefs read the approach of a bishop by that road as an invasion, and the order went out. Hannington was held for several days and then killed with most of his porters.

Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe was the senior Catholic at the court, the majordomo of the royal household and the man responsible for the pages. He had already protected the boys from the kabaka more than once. When he learned of Hannington's death he rebuked Mwanga for killing a man who had not been given the chance to state his business, and for the demands the king was making of the pages. He was arrested and beheaded at Nakivubo on 15 November 1885, and his body was burned. He is counted the first of the Catholic martyrs of Uganda.

Charles Lwanga took over Joseph Mukasa's responsibility for the pages that same night. What follows over the next six months is the story of a man who knew exactly what the job now cost and took it anyway. He kept teaching the catechumens, kept the younger boys out of the king's reach where he could, and baptised those he judged ready.

The missionaries' letters from the winter of 1885 into 1886 read as an account of people waiting for something. Father Lourdel tried repeatedly to reach the king and to intercede. Alexander Mackay on the Anglican side did the same. Both missions told their converts to be careful and neither told them to dissemble, and the converts largely did not.

7. The Arrests at Munyonyo

Munyonyo is a lakeside site south of the capital where Mwanga kept a residence, and the arrests began there on 25 May 1886. The immediate trigger recorded in the accounts is small and domestic. The king came back from a hunting or fishing expedition, found pages missing from their posts, learned that Denis Ssebuggwawo had been teaching catechism to another page, and questioned him. Ssebuggwawo admitted it and would not take it back. He was killed that day at Munyonyo, speared by the king himself according to the accounts, and finished by the executioners.

Mwanga then ordered the palace gates shut and the pages assembled in the morning. On 26 May he had them drawn up and told those who prayed to stand on one side. Charles Lwanga led the Christians out, the Catholics and the Anglicans together, and the boys crossed the ground and stood with him. Kizito, the youngest, was among them. Lwanga had baptised him and several others during the night, using water in the dark, after it was clear what the morning would bring.

The king asked whether they intended to remain Christians. They said they did. He condemned them and gave them to Mukajanga, the chief executioner, to be taken to Namugongo. Andrew Kaggwa, a chief and the bandmaster of the royal court, was seized separately and killed at Old Kampala on 26 May, and his arm was cut off and taken to the king.

Two things in this scene are worth stating precisely, because popular retellings blur them. The pages were not asked to worship an idol, and they were not offered a formal choice between apostasy and death in the classical Roman manner. They were asked whether they would go on praying and go on refusing, and they said yes to the first and yes to the second. The Church's judgment that this constitutes martyrdom rests on that: they died for fidelity to Christ expressed in obedience to the moral law, and the king killed them precisely for it.

8. The March to Namugongo

The distance from Munyonyo to Namugongo is roughly sixteen kilometres, and the condemned were marched it over several days, bound and under guard, because the executioners were preparing the ground and gathering firewood at the far end. The march is the part of the story that pilgrims re-enact most directly, and it is why walking is the characteristic form of the June pilgrimage.

Several of the group were killed on the road rather than at the execution ground. Gonzaga Gonza, who was in irons and could not keep up, was killed at Lubawo on the way. Matthias Mulumba Kalemba, an older man and a judge, was dismembered on the road near Old Kampala at the end of May and left to die. Noe Mawaggali was killed at Mityana on 31 May, speared and left tied to a tree. Athanasius Bazzekuketta, the king's treasurer, was killed at Nakivubo. Pontian Ngondwe, a soldier of the royal guard, was killed at Ttakajjunge.

Father Lourdel reached the road as the column passed and was able to see the prisoners. The accounts record Charles Lwanga's calm and Kizito's cheerfulness, and they record Lourdel's distress at being unable to do anything for them. Those details come from the missionaries' own letters and from the depositions taken afterwards from survivors, including pages who were released or who escaped.

The individual dates for the killings on the road differ by a day or two between accounts, because they were reconstructed afterwards from the memories of witnesses rather than recorded at the time. The sequence is stable across the sources even where the exact days are not.

9. 3 June 1886: The Burning

On the morning of 3 June 1886 the prisoners were brought out at Namugongo. Charles Lwanga was separated from the rest, taken aside, wrapped in a reed mat and laid on his own fire, which was built up slowly from the feet. The accounts record that he asked for the wood to be arranged so he could speak, that he told the executioners he was glad to die for God, and that he called on the name of God until he could not.

The rest were then bound in mats, carried to the main pyre and laid on it in layers. Mbaga Tuzinde, the son of Mukajanga the chief executioner, was clubbed to death first at his father's order to spare him the fire, after the executioners had tried and failed to persuade him to renounce and go home. The pyre was lit and the group died together. Catholics and Anglicans were on it, which is why both churches keep the same date and why the two shrines stand where they do.

The number burned at Namugongo on that day is given in the sources as somewhere in the low thirties, counting both churches together, and the exact figure is not fixed because the executioners kept no list and the reconstruction was done afterwards from witnesses. Of the twenty-two martyrs the Catholic Church later canonised, thirteen died at Namugongo on 3 June. The others died before or after, on the road, in the capital or in the months that followed.

The persecution did not stop that day. John Mary Muzeeyi, a Catholic who had been caring for the sick and burying the dead through the whole crisis, was arrested and beheaded on 27 January 1887, and his body thrown into a swamp. He is the last of the canonised group.

Two years later Buganda fell into the wars between the religious parties that Mwanga's reign had set up, and the kingdom's politics were rearranged around them. Within a generation, Christianity in Buganda had grown from a court faction into the majority religion of the country. Tertullian's line about the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the Church, written in North Africa around the year 197, is quoted at Namugongo constantly, and the missionaries of the 1890s used it themselves.

10. Who the Martyrs Were

The martyrs were Baganda, mostly young, and mostly attached to the royal household. Twenty-two Catholics were canonised in 1964. The Church of Uganda commemorates its own martyrs from the same persecution, and Ugandans commonly speak of the Catholic and Anglican dead together as one body of martyrs, though the two causes were separate and each church keeps its own record.

The twenty-two Catholic martyrs canonised in 1964

Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, Denis Ssebuggwawo, Andrew Kaggwa, Pontian Ngondwe, Athanasius Bazzekuketta, Gonzaga Gonza, Matthias Mulumba Kalemba, Noe Mawaggali, Charles Lwanga, Kizito, Mbaga Tuzinde, Mukasa Kiriwawanvu, Gyavira Musoke, Ambrose Kibuuka, Anatole Kiriggwajjo, Achilles Kiwanuka, Adolphus Ludigo-Mkasa, Bruno Sserunkuuma, James Buuzaabalyaawo, Luke Baanabakintu, Mugagga Lubowa and John Mary Muzeeyi.

The list is the one used in the canonisation of 18 October 1964. Spellings of Luganda names vary between the Latin acts, the missionary records and modern Ugandan usage, and several of the martyrs are known by more than one form of their name.

Some of them in particular

Charles Lwanga was a courtier in his twenties who had charge of the pages after Joseph Mukasa's death, catechised them, and baptised those who were ready when the arrests began. He is patron of youth and of Catholic Action in much of Africa.

Kizito was the youngest, about fourteen, baptised by Lwanga on the night before the pages were assembled. He is the figure Ugandan children are taught first, and school and youth groups across the country are named after him.

Matthias Mulumba Kalemba was an older man, a judge, who had been a Muslim before he was a Christian and who had come to the faith through his own reading and questioning as much as through the missionaries.

Andrew Kaggwa was a chief and the leader of the royal band, a married man rather than a page, and one of the most senior Catholics in the kingdom after Joseph Mukasa.

Mbaga Tuzinde was the chief executioner's own son, and his father tried hard to save him. He would not renounce and he would not walk away, and he was clubbed at the pyre.

The Anglican martyrs

The Church of Uganda honours its own dead from the same persecution and does not fold them into the Catholic account. Among them are the three young men killed at Busega in January 1885, Yusufu Rugarama, Makko Kakumba and Nuwa Serwanga, who are commemorated as the first Anglican martyrs of Uganda, and Bishop James Hannington, killed in Busoga in October 1885. Others died on the pyre at Namugongo alongside the Catholic pages, and their names are recorded at the Anglican shrine on the site. Anglicans commemorate their martyrs by inclusion in the calendar of the Church of Uganda rather than by a canonisation process of the Roman kind, and the distinction is worth respecting rather than blurring. For the Anglican tradition in its own terms, see our guide to Anglicanism.

11. Why They Were Killed

The sources give two reasons together and historians have weighted them differently ever since. The missionary letters written at the time, the depositions of survivors, and the acts of the canonisation process all record that the pages refused the sexual demands the kabaka made of them and that they refused to abandon the faith when the king demanded it. That is the account the Church acted on, and it is the account carried on the shrine's own inscriptions.

Historians of Buganda who work from the Ganda side add the political frame. Mwanga had a body of young men at the very centre of his household who took instruction from foreigners, obeyed a law he had not given them, and could not be relied on to do what a page had always done. In a kingdom where the kabaka's word was the ordering principle of everything, that was a constitutional crisis wearing the clothes of a religious dispute. The killing of Hannington on the eastern road belongs to the same anxiety about foreign power. So does the timing, a few months after news of European partition reached the interior.

The two explanations do not compete for the same ground. One says what the king's motive was. The other says what the martyrs died for. The Church's judgment concerns the second: the requirement for martyrdom is that the death was inflicted in hatred of the faith and accepted for the faith, and the acts of the cause found both. A political motive in the persecutor does not remove martyrdom in the persecuted, and the early Roman persecutions were also political.

One further point of accuracy. The Muslim party at court had suffered its own killings under Mutesa I, and Muslims were killed in Buganda's religious wars as well. The martyrs of 1886 are no evidence for any general claim about Islam in East Africa. Namugongo stands as a monument to a group of young men who would not do what they were told, and it is aimed at no one.

12. Beatification and Canonisation

The Catholic cause moved through the ordinary channels and took a long time. Pope Benedict XV beatified the twenty-two Catholic martyrs on 6 June 1920. Pope Paul VI canonised them in Rome on 18 October 1964, during the Second Vatican Council, with African bishops present in the council for the first time in that number. The canonisation of an African group of martyrs from the modern missionary period, in the middle of a council that was rethinking the Church's relationship to the world's cultures, was read at the time as a statement about the African Church's standing.

The Roman calendar keeps the memorial of Saint Charles Lwanga and companions on 3 June, and it is a solemnity in Uganda. Charles Lwanga is named as a patron of African youth and of Catholic Action in Africa. Churches, schools, hospitals and a university in Uganda carry the martyrs' names, and parishes across the continent and beyond are dedicated to them.

The Church of Uganda's commemoration developed on its own track. Anglicans do not run a canonisation process, and their martyrs are honoured by being written into the calendar of the province and by the shrine and the annual observance at Namugongo. Uganda's civil calendar keeps 3 June as Martyrs' Day, a public holiday for the whole country, which means the two churches' observances and a national holiday all fall on the same day.

For what the Catholic Church means when it names someone a saint, and how the process works, see our guide to the saints. For the wider question of Catholic and Anglican relations, including where the two churches agree and where they do not, see our guides to ecumenism and Anglican orders.

13. The Catholic Basilica at Namugongo

The Catholic shrine at Namugongo is a large modern church built on the site traditionally identified as the place where Charles Lwanga was burned, and its design is deliberately Ugandan rather than European. The building takes the form of a traditional round Ganda hut, a tall conical roof carried on a ring of external supports, with the altar under the centre of the cone. The church was built in the years after Pope Paul VI's visit and dedicated in the mid-1970s, and it carries the title of minor basilica granted by the Holy See.

The interior is worth slow attention. Copper pillars around the sanctuary stand for the canonised martyrs. The stations and the sanctuary art use Ugandan figures and Ugandan dress. Relics associated with the martyrs are kept at the shrine, and the altar stands over the traditional site of Lwanga's pyre, which is the reason the building sits exactly where it does and not on flatter ground nearby.

Outside, the shrine grounds run down to an artificial lake with an altar platform standing in the water and banks rising around it in tiers. That outdoor arrangement is where the Mass of 3 June is celebrated, because the church itself holds a small fraction of the people who come. On an ordinary day the lake is quiet and pilgrims walk the grounds, pray at the water, and go into the basilica.

There is a museum on the site with material on the martyrs and the mission, and a series of outdoor stations that groups use for processions. Pilgrims commonly take water from the shrine's lake home with them. That practice belongs to popular piety, and the Church's own rule about popular piety applies: devotions of this kind express faith and surround the sacramental life of the Church without replacing it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1674-1675). Nothing about the water is claimed as a sacrament, and no promise attaches to it.

How the shrine is governed

The basilica is a Catholic shrine of the Archdiocese of Kampala with a rector and a resident community, and it functions as a working parish church as well as a national pilgrimage site. Mass and confession are part of the ordinary life of the place, and the volume of confessions during the days around the feast is one of the notable features of the pilgrimage. For what that sacrament is and how to approach it, see our guide to confession.

14. The Anglican Martyrs' Shrine

The Church of Uganda's Martyrs' Shrine stands on the neighbouring ground at Namugongo, on the site associated with the main pyre, and it is an Anglican site under Anglican governance with its own clergy, its own museum and its own annual observance. Anyone writing about Namugongo who describes only the basilica has described half of the place.

The Anglican shrine is built around the memory of the same day, and it commemorates the Anglican martyrs by name. Its exhibits cover the Church Missionary Society mission, Alexander Mackay's printing press and translation work, Bishop Hannington's journey and death, and the Anglican converts killed at Busega in January 1885 before the Namugongo burning. The Church of Uganda holds its Martyrs' Day service there on 3 June, with its own pilgrim crowd, and the two observances run in parallel a short walk apart.

The Catholic position on this shared ground is not awkward and does not need to be softened. Catholic teaching holds that those who die for Christ can do so outside the visible bounds of the Catholic Church, and the Second Vatican Council recognised that many elements of sanctification and truth exist in other Christian communities. Pope Paul VI said in the homily at the 1964 canonisation that he wished also to recall those of the Anglican confession who died for the name of Christ in the same persecution, and Pope Francis prayed at the Anglican shrine before the Catholic one when he came in 2015.

Where Catholics and Anglicans still differ, the differences are real and this site does not paper over them. Our guides to the Catholic and Protestant divide and to the Church of England set out those questions. At Namugongo, on 3 June, what stands out is that the fire did not sort anybody by denomination.

15. Munyonyo and the Rest of the Martyrs' Trail

Namugongo is the end of a trail with several other marked points, and pilgrims who have time visit them in sequence. Munyonyo, on the lake south of Kampala, is where the arrests began, where Denis Ssebuggwawo was killed and where Charles Lwanga baptised Kizito. A shrine stands there, the Munyonyo Martyrs' Shrine, built on the site of Mwanga's lakeside residence, and Pope Francis prayed at it on 27 November 2015 at the start of his Uganda visit.

Between Munyonyo and Namugongo are the places where individuals died on the march. Nakivubo is where Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe was beheaded in November 1885 and where Athanasius Bazzekuketta was killed. Old Kampala is associated with Andrew Kaggwa's death and with the dismemberment of Matthias Mulumba. Mityana, west of Kampala, holds a shrine to Noe Mawaggali and the martyrs killed there. Ttakajjunge is where Pontian Ngondwe died.

Walking pilgrim groups often plan their route to take in several of these, and the sixteen kilometres from Munyonyo to Namugongo has become a devotional walk in its own right, done on foot in the days before the feast. That reconstruction of the condemned march is the closest thing the Uganda pilgrimage has to the pattern of the stations, and it works for the same reason: a body that walks the distance learns something a book does not teach. Our guide to the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross covers the older form of the same practice.

Uganda's martyrs' sites also sit within the wider map of Christian pilgrimage on the continent, which includes the rock-hewn churches of Ethiopia, the shrine at Kibeho in Rwanda, and the Roman North African sites of Augustine and Cyprian. Our guides to pilgrimage sites in Africa and to Kibeho in Rwanda cover those, and our guide to Christianity in Africa handles the demographic and denominational picture that Uganda sits inside.

16. The 3 June Pilgrimage

The 3 June pilgrimage to Namugongo is a walking pilgrimage on a national scale. Groups set out on foot from parishes across Uganda weeks in advance, and groups come from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, some of them walking for hundreds of kilometres. They travel in parish bands with a cross and a banner, sleep in parishes and schools along the road, pray the rosary and sing as they walk, and arrive at the shrine over the days before the feast. The roads into Kampala from every direction fill with them.

On the day itself the principal Mass is celebrated at the outdoor altar in the lake, with the crowd on the banks and spilling into the surrounding roads and fields. A different diocese, and often a different country's bishops' conference, is given responsibility for animating the liturgy each year. The Church of Uganda holds its own service at the Anglican shrine on the same day. Both draw more people than the buildings could ever hold, which is why the outdoor arrangement exists at all.

Crowd figures for Martyrs' Day are published each year by Ugandan media and by the organisers, and the estimates vary widely between sources. This page gives no number rather than repeat one it cannot verify.

Going as a pilgrim rather than a spectator

The people who get the most out of Namugongo prepare for it. That means reading the martyrs' story before arriving, going to confession, walking at least part of the way if health allows, and taking the feast day Mass as the point of the trip. Pilgrimage is a practice of popular piety with a long history in the Church, and it works by putting the body where the mind needs to go. Our guide to what a pilgrimage actually is sets out the theology under the practice, and our overview of Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide puts Namugongo alongside the others.

A word on what a pilgrimage does not do. Going to Namugongo does not settle anything about a person's standing before God, and neither does staying at home. Grace is not distributed by mileage. The martyrs are honoured because they were faithful in the place they actually stood, which for most people is a house, a job and a family rather than a palace in Buganda.

17. Papal Visits to Namugongo

Three popes have prayed at Namugongo, and each visit marked something.

Paul VI, 31 July to 2 August 1969. The first visit of a reigning pope to sub-Saharan Africa. He came five years after canonising the martyrs, went to Namugongo, and laid the foundation stone of the basilica that now stands there. His address to the bishops of Africa at Kampala on that visit contained the line that Africans should be missionaries to themselves, which is still quoted across the African Church.

John Paul II, February 1993. He prayed at the shrine during a visit to Uganda in a period when the country was rebuilding after years of war and when the AIDS epidemic was at its worst in the region. His visit tied the martyrs' witness to the state of the country as he found it.

Francis, 27 and 28 November 2015. He went to the Anglican shrine first and prayed there, then to the Catholic shrine, then celebrated Mass at Namugongo. The order of those visits was noticed in Uganda and was intended to be. He also spoke that day about the martyrs as young people who were asked for everything at the beginning of their lives, and about young Ugandans now.

Dates and details of the three visits follow the published papal travel records and the addresses given on each visit, which the Holy See publishes in full.

18. What the Church Teaches About Martyrdom

Martyrdom in Catholic teaching is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith, a witness borne even unto death, in which the martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose and is united to him by charity (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2473). Two things are required: the death must be inflicted out of hatred of the faith or of a virtue connected with it, and it must be accepted freely for Christ's sake. The Uganda martyrs' cause was judged on exactly those two points.

Three consequences follow that matter for how Namugongo is read. First, martyrdom is not suicide and it is not sought. The Church has always distinguished between accepting death when it comes for the faith and provoking it, and the Uganda martyrs were killed after trying to keep serving in the household that killed them. Second, a catechumen who dies for the faith is baptised by that death (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1258), which covers the members of the Namugongo group who had not received the sacrament. Third, the martyr's charity extends to the killer. Mukajanga the chief executioner had to give the order that killed his own son Mbaga Tuzinde, and the shrine tells that part of the story as it stands rather than tidying it away.

The Uganda martyrs also stand in a line that runs from the first centuries to the present. The persecutions under the Roman emperors produced the shrines of Rome, and the record of that period is preserved in the catacombs and in the martyr traditions attached to the Colosseum. Perpetua and Felicity died at Carthage in 203, and the account of their deaths is partly in Perpetua's own words; our page on Perpetua and Felicity covers them. Maximilian Kolbe died at Auschwitz in 1941; our page on Maximilian Kolbe covers that. Namugongo belongs in that sequence and Ugandans place it there deliberately.

That passage from Wisdom is read at martyrs' feasts throughout the Church, and it is read at Namugongo. The book of Wisdom is one of the deuterocanonical books that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include and most Protestant Bibles print separately or omit; our guide to the deuterocanonical books explains that difference.