This is the story of Saint Andrew Kaggwa, one of the group of martyrs whose feast we celebrate today.
The nineteenth century witnessed the first sustained interaction between European nations and the many different cultures of sub-Saharan East Africa. Europeans met not only various tribal societies, but also a remarkable political entity on the shores of what is now Lake Victoria: a nation of three million people united under a centralized bureaucracy and ruled by an absolute monarch.
This realm was called Buganda, and its ruler was the Kabaka. The “Kingdom of Buganda” dominated the surrounding region, received tribute and took slaves from enemy tribes, and traded with Arab merchants. Some of the Bagandans accepted the religion of the Arabs, abandoning their traditional animism for an adherence to one God.
Among the many slaves was a young boy born about 1855, taken from a neighboring tribe, adopted by a Baganda clan family and raised as one of their own. He was given the name Kaggwa. His strength and outgoing personality won the favor of many, and he was recruited by the prestigious royal service as a teenager. He was assigned to the royal musical retinue which was at the time trained by Arabs. Young Kaggwa had a keen intelligence and (along with many other Bagandans) a remarkable hunger for the truth. Desiring to serve the One God who created all things, he followed his Arab teachers at that time and became a Muslim.
Meanwhile, French Catholic missionaries first arrived at the court of Kabaka Mutesa in 1878. Mutesa was a complex character, fascinated by religion, refined, but also corrupt, ruthless, and bent on the maximum consolidation of his own power. He allowed freedom for religious teaching, but constantly vacillated his favor between Arabs, English Protestants, and French Catholics.
Kaggwa was not content as a Muslim. But soon he encountered the French Father Siméon Lourdel, a Catholic priest from a strange land with a strange skin color, but also specially prepared to share something beautiful with the Baganda people. Lourdel proposed the true God who created all things, and who also became man in Jesus and redeemed the human race from sin. Jesus seeks every person of every race and nation, to draw them into communion with his ongoing presence and gift of himself in the Catholic Church.
By the time Kaggwa took his place at the Kabaka’s court, he had decided to enroll as a Catholic catechumen. The grace of the Holy Spirit worked powerfully in transforming his own searching intelligence and openheartedness. The missionaries were astonished by how Kaggwa and several other young catechumens rapidly learned the catechism with thoroughness and comprehension, became passionately committed to their faith, and began spreading it to others even before their own baptism. Kaggwa soon brought his friends to receive instruction from the missionaries, who found that they had already learned much from Kaggwa himself.
Finally, he was baptized “Andrew” Kaggwa on April 30, 1882. In the next four years, he rose to prominence in the court of Mutesa’s son, the Kabaka Mwanga. He married and began a Catholic Christian family, and also taught the faith to many others as a catechist in his home. In this way, however, he aroused the envy of anti-Christian officials which led to his martyrdom a week before that of young Charles Lwanga and the other children attendants at the royal palace on June 3, 1886.
