The early years of British Imperial influence in the independent African kingdom of Buganda were defined to a remarkable extent by the prior presence and activities of Christian missionaries. Buganda itself, one of a complex of independent polities clustered at the northern end of Lake Victoria between Lakes Albert, Kyoga, Edward, and Kivu, had first received missionaries in the late 1870s, soon after the visit of the British explorer H. M. Stanley. The ruler of Buganda, Kabaka Mutesa, had appeared receptive toward Christianity, and Stanley’s visit prompted an 1877 expedition to Buganda by Anglican Protestants. Shortly afterwards, a party of French Catholic missionaries, the White Fathers, also arrived; both sets of Christians were welcomed, despite the prior success of Islam in the area.

Buganda was at this time still wholly autonomous, and the Christian missionaries at Mutesa’s court were guests. The kingdom had always been receptive to the possible benefits that outsiders could bring, and the welcome Mutesa extended to the missions was made with an eye toward the material benefits that might be brought by closer trade contacts with European powers. However, the presence of the missionaries soon caused problems. While Mutesa made no symbolic commitment to either branch of Christianity, Islam or the indigenous Bugandan religion, the missionaries had some success in making converts amongst the courtiers and local chiefs. In the mid-1880s, after the accession of Mwanga as the new Kabaka, this caused a major incident: citing their faith and encouraged by the missions, the Christian courtiers to Mwanga refused to participate in the ritual homosexuality of the court, and during 1886 several dozen were killed as result (of these, 22 were beatified in 1920 as the ‘Buganda Martyrs’) (Hyam, 1991, 186-9). The killings were soon followed by a series of upheavals as the Kabaka first established then attempted to disband several Muslim militias, and then was forced from the throne into temporary exile in 1888 as the Bugandan political system disintegrated into warring camps – initially Muslims versus Christians, then later Catholics against Protestants.

The first agent of British power, Captain F. D. Lugard of the Imperial British East Africa Company, arrived in Buganda in 1890. By this time Mwanga was back on the throne, but without the full powers he had once held; Lugard, against the background of the fractious and suspicious Christian parties (all groups assumed he would side with the Protestants, and were rather surprised when he at first appeared not to), succeeded in obtaining the Kabaka’s signature on a treaty which effectively gave control to the Company. He then continued westward to strike further deals. By the time he returned to Buganda in 1892, relations between Catholics and Protestants were approaching a state of war. After having taken a fateful decision to abandon his erstwhile impartiality by distributing precision firearms to the Protestants, vicious fighting broke out, and Lugard found himself roundly condemned by the Catholic Church the world over, particularly in France, home of the White Fathers. The Catholic Church would eventually claim damages of £10,000 from Britain for destruction wrought by the IBEAC-armed Protestants (O’Neil, 1999, 14-15).

By the time Mwanga signed the final declaration of an official Protectorate over Buganda in August 1894, settlements overseen by the IBEAC had left the Protestant factions in politico-religious control of almost all of the country, with the Muslims and Catholics (now headed by Mwanga) awarded a far smaller share of territory (ibid 15-16; see also Gale, 1959, 51-87, and Low, 2009 passim).

The situation in Buganda at the dawn of the Imperial era proper was thus highly complex: an IBEAC charter had given way to an official protectorate over a country whose indigenous political system had persisted in a febrile and highly convoluted sectarian Christian form, with various factions grouped around differing Christian missions. These missions were often no longer connected to their home churches in any certain way, and after several years of mutual hostility were now intimately tied up in matters of state – so much so that the separation of church and state became a highly contentious issue, with missionaries at the turn of the century comparing the situation ‘to the one obtaining in the Middle Ages’ or even ‘the 4^th and 5^th centuries’ (Hansen, 1984, 3). Moreover, though there was no official French presence in the country, the Catholic faction was indelibly associated with France, and the Protestant with the English.

It appears to have been to dispel this last illusion that in 1894 the Foreign Office approved a plan supervised by Cardinal Herbert Vaughan to send a missionary party of British Catholics to Buganda. To reduce tension with the French missions, a papal decree authorised the division of Buganda into two spheres, with the eastern regions being the provinces of the British mission as the Apostolic Vicariate of the Upper Nile. In 1895 five missionaries from St Joseph’s Missionary College at Mill Hill departed for Buganda. They arrived at Kampala on 6 September, and by the 11 September Mwanga had arranged for them to take ownership of land at Nsambya Hill for their mission station. A second mission at Naggalama was soon opened, and by the end of their first year, the Mill Hill missionaries had baptised over a thousand Bagandan souls.