Andrew Kaggwa

Andrew Kaggwa, known in Luganda as Andrea Kaggwa, was a Catholic layman, court official, and catechist put to death for his faith in the Kingdom of Buganda in 1886 and venerated as one of the Uganda Martyrs. He was born in 1856 at Kigowa, in the heartland of Buganda in present-day Uganda. He entered the service of the kabaka and rose to become chief of the royal musicians, or bandmaster, under Kabaka Muteesa I and his successor Mwanga II, directing the court drums and other instruments of royal ceremony. Contemporary accounts also describe him as a man of influence among the pages and lesser officials of the palace and as someone entrusted with further duties at court.

The religious landscape of Buganda in the later nineteenth century was unusually open and contested. Muteesa I had received Muslim teachers from the East African coast, then Protestant missionaries of the Church Missionary Society from 1877, and Catholic missionaries of the Society of Missionaries of Africa, the White Fathers, from 1879. Court pages and officials sampled the new teachings. Kaggwa attached himself to the Catholic mission, was baptized on 30 April 1882 by Father Simeon Lourdel, the superior of the Catholic station, and took the name Andrew. Thereafter he acted as a catechist, instructing inquirers and candidates for baptism and standing as godfather to a number of the younger converts, several of whom would later be numbered among the martyrs. His combination of court rank and religious zeal made him one of the most visible Catholic lay leaders in the kingdom.

Kabaka Mwanga II, who came to the throne in 1884, grew increasingly hostile to the missions. He feared that Christian teaching undermined royal authority and that converts might look to European powers. A more immediate grievance was the refusal of Christian pages, formed by catechists such as Kaggwa and by the majordomo Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe, to comply with the king's sexual demands, which the converts held to be sinful. After Mwanga had Joseph Mukasa killed in November 1885, pressure on the Christian community mounted. In May 1886 the king, then residing at Munyonyo on the shore of Lake Victoria, ordered a general seizure of Christian pages and of those believed to have instructed them.

Kaggwa was arrested at Munyonyo and brought before the king. Mwanga held him particularly responsible for the conversion and intransigence of the pages. On 26 May 1886 the king condemned him to death. According to the earliest missionary and local testimonies, the executioner first cut off Kaggwa's arm and then beheaded him a short distance from the royal enclosure. He was about thirty years old. Other Catholics, including Denis Ssebuggwawo and Pontian Ngondwe, were killed at or near Munyonyo in the same period, while Charles Lwanga and the larger group of pages were taken to Namugongo and burned on 3 June.

The Holy See examined the cause of the Buganda martyrs in the early twentieth century. Pope Benedict XV beatified Andrew Kaggwa and his twenty-one Catholic companions on 6 June 1920. Pope Paul VI canonized them on 18 October 1964, during the Second Vatican Council, and later visited their shrine in Uganda. The Catholic Church keeps their common feast on 3 June. Kaggwa is remembered as a lay catechist and court musician who used his office to teach the Christian faith and who died rather than deny it. A shrine at Munyonyo commemorates the martyrs put to death there.