Uganda is heavily Christian, split fairly evenly between Catholics and Anglicans, with a fast growing Pentecostal sector and a Muslim population of roughly a seventh. That even Catholic and Anglican split is not a coincidence of mission geography. Both arrived at the court of Buganda within a few years of each other in the 1870s, competed for the favour of the Kabaka, and their converts then fought a series of religious wars in the 1890s in which Protestant, Catholic and Muslim factions contended for control of the kingdom. The British backed the Protestants, and the settlement that followed distributed chieftaincies and land along confessional lines. Party politics after independence inherited the division almost intact.
Beneath the mission churches, Ganda religious practice continues. The balubaale are deities of particular domains and places, approached through mediums, and the clan ancestors are addressed at their own shrines. The Kasubi tombs, the burial place of the Kabakas, are a UNESCO World Heritage site and a living royal shrine rather than a monument; a fire destroyed the main tomb building in 2010 and the reconstruction was carried out according to the traditional techniques and ritual requirements.
Two events mark the extremes of what religion has meant here. Namugongo, the shrine to the Uganda Martyrs, draws well over a million pilgrims each 3 June, among the largest annual Christian gatherings in Africa. And at Kanungu in 2000, hundreds of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in a fire and in related killings, in one of the worst such events anywhere.