Uganda

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.

Between 1885 and 1887 Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda had a number of Christian pages of his court put to death, most of them burned at Namugongo in June 1886. Twenty two Catholics were canonised in 1964 and are commemorated together with the Anglican dead, and the shrine at Namugongo has become one of the largest pilgrimage destinations in Africa, with pilgrims walking from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and beyond.

The events are not in dispute. Their explanation is, and the disagreement is worth stating plainly because the atlas records where camps exist rather than choosing between them.

The traditional account, and the one the canonisation rests on, holds that the pages refused the Kabaka's sexual demands on religious grounds and were killed for that refusal, with Charles Lwanga acting to protect the younger pages.

A body of historical scholarship reads the confrontation primarily as political. On this account the missions had created, for the first time, a group of court retainers whose ultimate loyalty lay outside the kingdom, at a moment when Mwanga was watching European powers annex his neighbours and had just had an Anglican bishop killed for approaching from the east. The executions on this reading were about allegiance and sovereignty, with the pages' disobedience the occasion rather than the cause.

The two readings are not wholly exclusive and neither is fringe. What makes the difference consequential is that the first has been mobilised in contemporary Ugandan politics, cited in support of anti homosexuality legislation, which gives a nineteenth century argument about a king's court a present political charge that historians on both sides have noted.