On 17 February 1879,
after a treacherous voyage across Lake Victoria Nyanza, two Europeans on a
mission finally arrived at the court of Buganda Kingdom in the interior of East
Africa. The Kingdom was to be their new life station. But one morning, just
three years later, they packed their bags and left!
The two Europeans, Father Simeon
Lourdel and Brother Amans, were part of a team of five French Catholics from
the Society of the Missionaries of Africa, commonly known as White Fathers, led
by Father Léon Livinhac. The team set off from Marseille in France, arriving at
the East African coast after several months and then crossing into the interior
of Africa to the great Buganda.
They were on assignment by the founder
of the White Fathers, Archbishop Charles Lavigerie, who harbored ambitions of
securing the Nile for France and then spreading
Catholicism to greater parts of Africa.
British missionaries from the (Anglican)
Church Missionary Society had arrived at the court of the Buganda Kingdom two
years ahead of Lavigerie’s team and were the first European missionaries in
this interior part of Africa. They were sent in response to an open letter from
King Muteesa I to Queen Victoria, prompted by British explorers, requesting to
send more white men to teach his people how to read and write.
Lavigerie was suspicious of the
agenda of the British in Buganda Kingdom – the biggest and most powerful
kingdom in pre-colonial Uganda and so he sent his team.
The
Mission
Lavigerie’s instruction to the team
was that they should convince Kabaka Muteesa I to become Catholic. Then, they
were to establish a base in his kingdom which was to be used as a launch pad of
Catholicism to the greater part of Central Africa. The kingdom was
strategically located for his mission.
Lavigerie reckoned that focusing on
the overbearing king would automatically win them souls from the king’s
subjects, without preaching a single word to the individual Africans. This
would help them gain significant ground over their Anglican rivals who had
arrived at the Kingdom earlier.
The friendly reception the White
Fathers received at the palace and the king’s offer of prime land at Rubaga
near the palace for the white men to settle boosted their hope for the mission.
But soon, that hope begun to fade very quickly.
Frustrations
Shortly after they had arrived, the
White Fathers observed that the king was a cunning man. It became apparent that
the king was going to be a hard animal to pin down to the Catholic faith
because he was not willing to commit to any single religion. Converting his
subjects was therefore going to be quite some work. Additionally, he seemed to
give them liberty to choose which foreign faith to take on.
Writing in his book, The Catholic Church in the Buddu Province of
Buganda, 1879-1925, Fr. John Mary Waliggo recounts how, in September 1879, seven
months after the Catholic missionaries had arrived, Muteesa asked the Anglican
missionaries to baptize him. Just one month later, he requested the Catholic
White Fathers to do the same. The following month, he was seen praying with the
Muslims. By the close of that year he had ditched all the competing foreign
religions and reverted to invoking the spirits of his local gods!
Yet more frustration was on its way to
the Catholic missionaries in Buganda. From Algiers, the operations base of the
White Fathers, Lavigerie sent a message to them, instructing the Fathers to
observe a mandatory requirement to baptize a convert only after an incubation
period of four years following thorough assessment for good behavior and a
commitment to monogamy.
Father Lourdel reckoned that it was
going to be harder to hold away baptism from the intelligent and impatient
Baganda who had already begun to ask deep questions about the faith. The White
Fathers, already disappointed in their failure to lock down the polygamous
king, and fearful that they would lose their converts to the other religions,
silently defied Lavigerie’s order and baptized the converts when they deemed it
fitting.
Licentious
Africans
On 9 November 1880,
Charles Pearson, an Anglican missionary to Uganda, visited the White Fathers
and he recounted to them a shocking event where he witnessed the most
abominable scene he ever saw with his eyes a few days earlier.
According to The Diaries of the White Fathers, compiled by Joel Bertrand, 2014,
Pearson recounted how on 5 November when he was at the king’s
court, Muteesa told men at the court to undress, then his prime minister
measured their penises to determine the winner. Later, the king ordered the
winner to masturbate until he ejaculated which excited him and the people who
were there. Pearson was greatly shocked.
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| The White Fathers who pioneered Catholicism in Uganda |
Embarrassed, Pearson left in haste,
lest God’s anger burnt against the people at the royal court and he was caught
in the consequences of His wrath. When the White Fathers heard this, they
reckoned that this was a cursed land for such abomination to happen in the
open.
Later on, the White Fathers became
terribly disturbed by what they begun to suspect about the boys in the
orphanage which they had started shortly after arriving. They suspected that some
of the boys were engaging in homosexual practices.
They believed that the orphans
picked the habit from the influence of the boys of the royal palace in the
neighborhood. Homosexual practices were not uncommon and they went on
unfettered within the king’s palace.
Like the voyeurism of the king, they
were saddened to observe that these Africans did not find such acts abhorrent. In
fact, the way the subjects traditionally addressed their king strongly affirmed
the accommodation of such sexual expression.
“All
subjects, whether male or female, referred to the Kabaka as ‘Bbaffe’, meaning “our husband”. He had
powers over their lives and their sexuality”.
At the end of July 1882, the White
Fathers caught one of the orphans called Cyprian red-handed engaging in
homosexual acts with another orphan. When the lad was quizzed, he gave a
harrowing account of his addiction to homosexual acts with the other orphans.
It shocked the men of God that almost all the boys at the orphanage were
engaging in homosexuality willingly.
By Mid-October, they realized that
no matter what they did – including isolating the lead culprits, the boys had
ingenious ways of meeting to respond to their raging hormones, and this was
frustrating. The missionaries then believed that the devil protected the lads.
Even the surrounding communities
were grossly uninhibited and the people freely expressed their sexuality and
sexual appetites. The men of God reckoned they dwelt in the devil’s haven. They
became very uncomfortable living within such communities and they contemplated
leaving.
On 18 October, they
embarked on a novena – a devotional prayer that was to be repeated for 9 successive
days.
Mission Abandoned
In the last week of October,
according to The Diaries of the White
Fathers, the missionaries committed to dedicate the last three days of the
novena, specifically to seek God’s guidance on whether they should stay or
leave, or just start another mission elsewhere.
On 27 October, the last
day of the novena, Father Lourdel and Brother Amans, as well as all the other
White Fathers who had joined them in June 1879, unanimously voted to leave licentious
Buganda and prayed for God’s affirmation of the decision.
Later that day after the vote, they
also learnt that their orphans had been involved in a connivance with other
boys who attended confirmation classes at the mission to steal their property,
and that King Muteesa may have encouraged the thefts. At that moment they did
not wait for God’s response – they packed their bags and within a few days,
they set sail on Lake Victoria without looking back! It was sudden. It was
surprising.
Concealing
a Negative Legacy
The common story about the White
Fathers’ mission in Buganda is ambiguous and brief in the part explaining their
hasty withdrawal. It is a narration that simply mentions that they abandoned
the mission because their orphans had become unmanageable and were entrenched
in homosexual practices.
The details behind this story are
not known until you find and dig into the diaries of the White Fathers.
The foregoing story – recounted from
the diaries which are kept in Rome in the central house of the White Fathers,
places the story in the prevailing context. It reveals a blissfully unaware
pre-colonial African society whose people freely expressed their sexuality to
the point that the open voyeurism of the Muteesa I was not taboo. Even homosexual
practices were neither abhorred nor punished.
Unfortunately, pre-colonial Ugandans
had never recorded their own history because they were illiterate. When the
Catholic Fathers were invited to come back to Buganda several years later, they
made the rejection of homosexuality the cornerstone of their preaching. In so
doing they, sowed the lethal seeds of homophobia in the people of Uganda that
remains entrenched to this day.
Inevitably, the sexual tolerance of
same gender expression was obliterated from African history when bigoted
writers distorted the truth of this history to cover up the negative legacy of colonization.