On the concrete floor next to Namugongo’s Catholic Martyrs shrine sits Regine. The old lady doesn’t know her exact age. For the last three nights she has been sleeping here, next to the church. Nobody accompanied Regine when she travelled across Uganda. “Last night it rained and we all got wet. I didn’t care about that. We have to endure some suffering to strengthen our faith. Just like the martyrs here did,” she says.
History of the Namugongo martyrs
Martyrs day is celebrated on the third of June because on this day in 1886, a total of twenty-six Ugandan Christians were killed. The Catholic Church was built exactly on the spot where the leader of the group of martyrs, the Catholic Charles Lwanga, was burned to death.
The rest of his group, 13 Anglicans and 12 Catholics, were executed on a pyre two kilometres down the road. That place is now used by Anglicans for their own commemorations.
The man responsible for these killings was Kabaka Mwanga, king of the powerful Buganda kingdom. He saw European missionaries reaching his kingdom and one after the other converted to Christianity. The 26 were pages of king Mwanga. They rebuked Mwanga’s order to denounce the new faith and therefore met their painful death. Mwanga fought Christian missionaries for the better part of his life, only to convert to Christianity a few years before his death.
More here-
http://www.rnw.nl/africa/article/christians-honour-uganda’s-martyrs
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