Foreign Proselytization and Sectarian Power Struggles

The religions of the earliest cultures in present-day Uganda were generally based on the veneration of ancestor and guardian spirits capable of possessing their worshippers, though specific beliefs varied among different tribes. It was not until the middle of the 19th century that foreign influences penetrated into the region. Muslim Arabs traders came from Zanzibar, and Christian explorers arrived from Europe, most notably from Britain. Buganda, the largest of modern Uganda’s traditional kingdoms, received a stream of foreign missionaries beginning in the 1870s. Anglicans were quickly followed by French Catholics, and Zanzibar-based Muslim traders also began their own proselytization efforts. All three parties were successful in converting many of the Baganda tribesmen, who began vying for power in the royal court. Kabaka (King) Mwanga attempted to diminish the power of all the religious factions in his court. His brutal tactics, including the execution of 45 Christians known today as the Uganda Martyrs, led a joint Muslim-Christian effort to depose the kabaka in 1888. This alliance soon crumbled, and a coup brought the Muslims to power. A series of conflicts led Baganda Christians to oust the Muslim rulers and divide the kingdom along Catholic and Protestant lines. In 1892, violence erupted between the Catholic and Protestant converts, the former backed by French missionaries and German imperialists, and the latter by the British. The Protestants won out with British support, and the British went on to gain control of the rest of what is now Uganda by 1899.