Philip O’Flaherty and the Irish roots of Uganda’s Protestantism

Introduction

This article examines the Irish missionary Revd Philip O’Flaherty’s role in establishing and developing Uganda’s Protestantism during his stay in the East African country from 1881 to 1885. Upon his arrival, Bwana (Colleague) Firipo (Philip in Luganda), as he came to be called by those who knew him, formed a partnership with the Scottish missionary Alexander M. Mackay that planted a church that has evolved into the strongest Anglican province in sub-Saharan Africa today (McKinnon, 2020: 57). The two were the only CMS missionaries until May 2, 1883, when the Englishman Robert P. Ashe joined them. In this article, I argue that O’Flaherty’s timely arrival in Uganda with a unique life experience and skills turned the plight of an otherwise struggling mission station to establish Protestantism in Uganda. While Mackay continues to receive the credit alone for, among others, his decision to remain in Uganda when CMS missionaries unanimously voted to leave Uganda, not much work was accomplished until the Irishman arrived (Kasibante, 2009: 81). The historian J.A. Rowe (1966: 60) correctly states that Mackay was fortunate to receive as a timely reinforcement a new missionary, Philip O’Flaherty, as he had just those qualities of tact and savior faire that the grim Scotsman lacked.

The Uganda mission of the CMS was founded in England in 1875 after an anonymous donation of £5000 from a person who identified himself as an ‘unprofitable servant’ on November 17, 1875. The donation itself arose out of a letter published in the Daily Telegraph of November 15, 1875, from the English explorer Henry M. Stanley, in which he called for “practical Christian tutors” to be sent to Uganda, where they were eagerly awaited by an African king willing to even pay for their services. While the CMS had reluctantly hesitated to establish a mission station in Central Africa, Stanley’s letter and the donation changed its position. With much enthusiasm, eight missionaries with different skill sets were successfully mobilized and began leaving England for Uganda on March 11, 1876, with two of them arriving in Buganda’s capital, Lubaga, on July 8, 1877 (Stock, 1899: 95). On their welcome, Lt. Shergold Smith, one of them, journaled: “I could not see, so my report is that of ear. The king rose as we entered, and advanced to the edge of his carpet and shook hands” (Stock, 1899: 101). Unfortunately, Smith died soon afterward while his colleague Revd C.T. Wilson returned to England in mid-1879. Of the eight, only three made it to Uganda, including Smith and Wilson, with Mackay, who arrived in 1878 after being held up in present-day Tanzania.

While a second contingent of missionaries that included Robert Felkin (later Dr), Revd Charles W. Pearson, and Revd George Litchfield were sent, arriving in Uganda via the Nile on February 14, 1879, they too quickly left, some as soon as they arrived. By this time, a unanimous decision had been reached to abandon Uganda altogether for a better place elsewhere with a letter delivered to Muteesa I, the king, only for Mackay to change his mind at the last minute to stay. When O’Flaherty arrived on March 18, 1881, he found only the unordained Mackay in the country. O’Flaherty himself was coming to Uganda with the unprecedented responsibility of escorting back to Uganda three Baganda envoys, only known as Namukadde, Kataluba, and Magijo, who had traveled to England with Wilson and Felkin to deliver a letter to Queen Victoria from Muteesa I, the 30th Kabaka (king) of Buganda.

O’Flaherty was also not the first Irishman to be sent to Uganda, but he was the first to make an impact on the East African kingdom and the emerging Church of Uganda. Using archival material from mostly Adam Matthew Digital and secondary sources, this article examines what made O’Flaherty thrive in Uganda while sometimes drawing from his experiences, including as a Catholic in Ireland and a missionary salesman in Turkey.

Relationship with Muteesa

The CMS had explored the possibility of setting up a mission station in Central Africa earlier but was unable for reasons ranging from the cost of undertaking such a mission to a lack of missionaries willing to venture that far. This changed when Stanley visited Buganda in early 1875, meeting Muteesa for the first time besides Lake Nalubaale (Anglicized Victoria) on April 5. Impressed by what he saw, the English explorer journaled, “In this man, I see the possible fruition of Livingstone’s hopes, the light that shall lighten the darkness of this benighted region” (Pulford, 2011: 32). David Livingstone was a pioneer English missionary to Central Africa but was never in Buganda (in present-day Uganda). Following the meeting, Stanley wrote the famous letter (mentioned above) outlining the type of missionary that was needed—practical—and the cost of the entire expedition. Stanley estimated the expedition cost at £5000, which, interestingly, was also the initial donation to the CMS to establish the Uganda mission. While the letter might have alluded to it, relations with Muteesa, an absolute monarch, had to be a major factor if missionaries were to thrive in the African kingdom. While the CMS had sent over 10 missionaries before O’Flaherty’s arrival, he was the first to understand this rather harsh reality. In the words of the Catholic priest and historian John F. Faupel (1962: 50), his ready wit made him an instant favorite of Muteesa while remaining true to himself.

O’Flaherty arrived in Uganda just after Catholics and Protestants had lowered their credibility before Muteesa and Buganda following public debates on theology between Simeon Lourdel, the head of the Catholic mission, and Mackay, the de facto head of the Protestant CMS mission. Because of this, bitter jealousy sprang up between the Catholic missionaries, who were French, and the CMS missionaries from England, with each party endeavoring to undermine the other, placing the religious future of Uganda in balance (Mockler-Ferryman, 1903: 279–80). It did not help that Mackay, a Scotsman, abhorred Catholicism (Brierley and Spear, 1988: 606). Yet some aspects of Catholicism that he disliked had resonated with the Baganda, drawing many Baganda to Catholicism. The consideration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in the Catholic Church was closely related to how the Baganda revered their Namasole (Queen Mother) (Kabengwa, 2021). For Muteesa, it was shockingly surprising that people following one person—Jesus—could be opposed to themselves as the two missionary groups had turned out in Uganda.

As a member of different Christian denominations, growing up endowed O’Flaherty with unique perspectives on issues and the world than his colleagues, particularly Mackay. He was born into Catholicism before converting to Presbyterianism in his youth. When he moved to England, he again converted to Anglicanism. This might have influenced how well he related with Catholics in Buganda, something Mackay had not managed to achieve. But O’Flaherty also avoided theologizing issues that required practical solutions for which Muteesa might have liked him. Asked by the African monarch what it would take for Buganda to become rich, he journaled his feedback to the question on October 31, 1883:

I mentioned (1) monogamy, (2) the absence of slavery, (3) a settled gentry and tenantry—the land in Buganda is the King’s, (4) liberty of conscience, and (5) the introduction of foreigners, with certain liberties to teach the people how to develop the resources of their own country. (Missionary Pamphlets, 1885: 71).

While other missionaries would have avoided being this straightforward, he never hesitated to say what he felt needed to be done without invoking theology. Monogamy was at the time a controversial subject, especially considering Muteesa is believed to have married as many as 147 wives, but this did not stop him from placing it at the forefront.

Two years before O’Flaherty arrived, Zanzibari-Arabs, who had first arrived in Buganda during the reign of Ssunna II, the 29th Kabaka of Buganda, convinced Muteesa I that Islam was the true religion. Based on his first impression of Christianity, he believed it for a while and proclaimed it the state religion (Faupel, 1962: 48). According to the Ugandan historian A.B.K. Kasozi (1981: 129), although Muteesa did not himself convert to Islam due to a Ganda custom forbidding a Kabaka from intentionally shedding blood, he welcomed it and used it to acquire more economic and social power. A mosque called “Muteesa’s Mosque” was built within the precincts of his palace at Lubaga, Kampala, Uganda, where Islamic prayers and Arabic lessons were conducted daily. Likewise, Buganda’s economy grew from the slave trading of mostly people captured in Buganda and surrounding territories. In a letter to the Times in 1889, Mackay claimed that as many as 2000 people were sold by Muteesa to Arabs annually, showing that Arabs were strategically better allies of Muteesa than Christians (Mullins and Mukasa, 1904: 18-19). O’Flaherty’s experience as a missionary in Muslim contexts was a great asset to his work in Uganda, helping him form relationships because of his knowledge of other religions and the intercultural experience of living and working with people from different backgrounds in Crimea and Turkey. Our experiences give us things we exchange to build our names and trust (Piot, 1996: 43).

Upon graduation and unable to adequately provide for his family, O’Flaherty enlisted in the British army and was deployed to fight in the Crimea War, where he was first introduced to Islam. In his book Sketches of the War, he writes: “I read with patience and avidity the history of Turkey and Arabia, the rise and fall of the Turkish empire, and the promulgation of Islamism” (O’Flaherty, 1855: 37). After Crimea, he would then spend six years as a missionary salesman in Ottoman Istanbul, Turkey, a predominantly Islamic culture. When Muteesa challenged him about his thoughts of the Koran and Mohammad on May 27, 1881: “I proved from that book [Koran] itself that it was a tissue of falsehoods, and the author an impostor, and the religion of Islam a delusion.” (Missionary Pamphlets, 1885: 67).

O’Flaherty related with ordinary Baganda in ways that spoke to the assertion that individuals are not born with culture but only with the ability to learn and use it (Oberg, 1960: 180). On an introductory visit to Muteesa’s palace, he met a young man interested in learning whom he took up as his first student in Uganda. Mukasa, as he was called, was baptized in 1882 and got married in one of the first Christian marriages in Uganda, to Sarah Nakimu Nalwanga, in 1883 before they had a child who was one of the first infants to be baptized in Uganda. When Mukasa was baptized, he chose Philip, O’Flaherty’s name, as his baptismal name, while Nakimu chose Sarah, O’Flaherty’s wife’s Christian name. Unfortunately, Mukasa died of smallpox in early 1884. But when his relatives came to collect his corpse, O’Flaherty refused to surrender it, arguing that as a Christian, Mukasa had become his brother too and wanted to bury him at the mission station. Mukasa was eventually buried at the mission station in the first Christian burial in Uganda (Stock, 1892: 79). O’Flaherty had reached a level where he understood the ideas that informed the lives of the people he lived with, contributing to his success (Adeney, 2019: 19).

First Protestant baptism

On March 18, 1882, one year after arriving in Uganda’s capital, assisted by the unordained Mackay, O’Flaherty performed the first-ever Protestant baptism in Uganda (Mullins and Mukasa, 1904: 28). Five Ugandans were welcomed into the church on the day, including Sembera Mackay, Mukasa Edward, Mukasa Philip, Henry Wright Buuzabaliawo, and Yakobo (Jacob) Takirambudde. The baptism and the decision to perform it are important in appreciating O’Flaherty’s monumental contribution to establishing Uganda’s Protestantism as from July 8, 1877, when Wilson and Smith first arrived at Muteesa’s court, five years had passed without a single person baptized in Buganda. The first reason it took this long for a baptism to be organized was that before O’Flaherty arrived, the other missionaries did not see the Uganda mission as a long-term project, which affected how they understood their missionary task. As a result, many Ugandans moved from one mission station to another and back. The Catholic martyr Matthias Kalemba Mulumba spent time with the CMS mission before joining the Catholic mission. Sembera, the first Protestant convert, visited the Catholic mission before settling with the Protestant mission. Although they arrived two years later, the Catholic mission had performed several baptisms, starting on March 28, 1880, and had two lined up in 1882. It took them only four months to prepare the first converts for baptism (Uganda Martyrs Shrine, 2018).

Additionally, barely two years had passed since O’Flaherty arrived after CMS missionaries in Uganda signed a letter informing Muteesa of their decision to abandon the mission, only for Mackay to backtrack days later, leaving behind an uncommitted mission and one lacking manpower. Pearson was, for instance, told privately to consult Wilson about the prospects of persevering with the Uganda mission before leaving England; if Wilson’s report was unfavorable, he was authorized to seek an opening elsewhere (Matson, 1982: 33). He left Uganda a little over a year after arriving on February 14, 1879. O’Flaherty arrived in Uganda under uncertainty surrounding the future of the CMS mission in Uganda, but unlike his colleagues, he possessed a long-term vision for the mission. Equipped with the testimony of Ddamulira, the young boy who died unbaptized after requesting baptism, and Sembera, Mackay’s student who authored a note demanding baptism, O’Flaherty wasted no time organizing the baptism, which he led (Mullins and Mukasa, 1904: 27). Ddamulira believed in witchcraft all his life, only to request baptism when he fell ill. Though he died unbaptized, his story contributed to the first baptism when it reached the mission station as it illustrated the readiness of Ugandans to become Christians. Relatedly, on October 8, 1881, Sembera delivered a note to Mackay, his friend and teacher, that he composed with a pen made of a piece of spear grass and ink from banana juice and dirt, requesting baptism. Sembera’s story became the main catalyst for the first-ever baptism, and he became the first person to be baptized a Protestant in Uganda the following year.

But once the first one was performed, others naturally followed. That same Easter Sunday, April 9, 1882, Lutamaguzi Henry Wright, who had left Uganda with the home-bound Pearson, was baptized at the Universities Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in Zanzibar (Tucker, 1908: 111). Sematimba Mika (Micah), Kizito Kisingiri Zakaliya (Zachariah), Bakunga Paulo (Paul), and Muyira Yohana (John) were baptized in 1883 before they went on to become prominent Christian mobilizers and leaders. In October of the same year, 21 Baganda participated in the first communion, again led by O’Flaherty. The number of baptized Christians in Buganda increased to 88, including Nikodemo Sebwato, a prominent chief who let all his wives go (but one) to be baptized by the end of 1884 (Mullins and Mukasa, 1904: 31).

First church council

O’Flaherty’s friend Muteesa died October 10, 1884, and his son, Mwanga II, was chosen as his successor. Before assuming the throne, Prince Mwanga had been Mackay’s student for a while, which made missionaries think he would treat them favorably when he became Kabaka. It never happened, as the first four years of his reign were characterized by Christian persecution that intensified month by month. As early as January 31, 1885, he sent shockwaves throughout Buganda when he ordered the death by burning of three Christians, Noah Serwanga, Mark Kakumba, and Joseph Lugalama, issuing further instruction that once dead, their dismembered body parts be displayed in strategic places to discourage new converts. Lugalama was only about 11 or 12 years old. On the same day, Mackay journaled that: “The dear lads clung to their faith, and in the fire, they sang, ‘killa siku tuusifu’ (‘daily, daily, sing the praises’).” (Mullins and Mukasa, 1904: 32) From this moment on, the position of missionaries in Buganda became precarious (Ashe, 1890: 149).

In response to the persecution, O’Flaherty and his colleagues devised a plan to create a church council that would continue their work if Mwanga expelled them. Interestingly, the CMS in England had as one of its objectives planting and building independent churches but had not considered that such an objective could be accomplished through persecution (Hansen, 1986). In July 1885, under the fearful environment that Mwanga had ushered in, O’Flaherty, Mackay, and Ashe created the first church council in Uganda, believing it was a realistic way to keep the church’s life going even when Europeans left. One had to be Ugandan and baptized to be elected to the council, and their peers were the electors. While Mwanga did not expel anyone, persecution of his subjects intensified, justifying the council’s need as it organized Ugandans into a leadership unit to better respond to their king’s attempts to kill them. On October 29, James Hannington, the first bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa (including Uganda), could not reach Buganda as he was killed in Busoga by Luba, a chief from Busoga, on purportedly the orders of Mwanga.

The council never curtailed Mwanga but became a platform that developed many church and society leaders in Uganda, some of whom actively participated in his dethronement in 1888. He was replaced by his brother Kiweewa, who was also replaced by Kalema when Muslims turned against Christians, driving as many as 2500 into the Kabula hills in present-day Ankole, Uganda. Sembera Mackay, one of the first members of the church council, became a voice of peace to exiled Protestants and Catholics. He, Lutamaguzi, and Sematimba continued doing translation, which was beginning to emerge as an important aspect of owning the church by having religious texts in Luganda. Kaggwa Apollo (later Sir) and Nyonyintono Honorat played leading roles in the dethronement of Mwanga in 1888 and the return of Christians to Buganda in 1889. While commenting on the role of Christians in the reinstallation of Mwanga to the throne in 1889, Rowe (1966: 58) said Kaggwa, the Protestant leader, and Honorat Nyonyintono, the foremost Roman Catholic, were made commanders of two powerful regiments that attracted many Christian followers, armed by Mwanga with guns, and given a royal license to pillage and raid anywhere in the kingdom without restraint. Ward (2005: 108) further states that despite what Kaggwa did, he was, first and foremost, a loyal churchman. The work of organizing ordinary Ugandans into leadership units that could challenge or rise to the level of the king is traced to the formation of the church council.

Luganda orthography

In his song called Africa, the Ugandan Kadongo Kamu musician Herman Basudde once sang that if he could think of one thing Europeans brought to sub-Saharan Africa, it was writing. Kadongo Kamu is a music genre indigenous to Buganda that Basudde and others have used to comment on Ugandan culture and its evolution. Basudde was right in his observation, as Luganda—his native language—was a mere spoken language before the arrival of English and French missionaries in Buganda. The first steps to its reduction into a written language were undertaken by missionaries, making Luganda a good example of how missionaries dignified and elevated indigenous cultures and languages through translation (Sanneh, 2009).

O’Flaherty was the first person to produce a major piece of writing on the grammaticalization and vocabulary of Luganda when his Collections for a Lexicon in Luganda and English and English and Luganda was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1890. Even though he identified only 12 classes in Luganda, his book was the first to organize the language to that level (O’Flaherty, 1892). Ashe, who had spent time with O’Flaherty in Uganda, was one of the people consulted by the SPCK before O’Flaherty’s book was published four years after his death (Mullins, 1904). The book was useful for more works on Luganda produced from the early 1890s, including George Lawrence Pilkington’s Handbook on Luganda (1901) and Luganda-English and English-Luganda Vocabulary (1892). While Wilson’s Luganda Vocabulary, published by the SPCK in 1880, was the first publication on Luganda grammar, because he spent little time in Uganda, it was not comparable with O’Flaherty’s and quickly went out of print.

In producing his book, O’Flaherty combined research and invention without borders. The historian J.A. Rowe tells a story of how one day Mackay came to terms that O’Flaherty had qualities that he lacked when he directly asked Muteesa the meaning and etymology of the words Kabaka and Katikkiro (Prime Minister). While Muteesa did not know the answers to O’Flaherty’s question, he called the Katikkiro to his rescue, and the ensuing conversation excited Baganda and missionaries alike. On how he approached Muteesa, Rowe (1966:60) writes:

I asked the king the derivation of two words, (1) Katikkiro and (2) Kabaka . . . and the king [Kabaka] asked the Katikkiro. “I confess,” said he, “I know not.” I then said I understand that ka-tikkiro means the highest pinnacle of a round roof, which gives strength and glory to the whole roof, protecting it from sun and rain.

Such is the extent to which he went in researching his book, which was complimented later on by Mullins and Mukasa (1904: 40), who said O’Flaherty proved himself to possess a remarkable personality, with the power of picking up a language.

Like other missionaries, O’Flaherty faced the reality of dealing with situations where an equivalent word or activity in English or Christianity did not exist in Luganda. There were, for instance, no equivalent words for baptism, communion, Easter, and Christmas before Christian missionaries arrived in Uganda. In such circumstances, missionaries and local people negotiated new words in different ways to fill the gap. In 1883, a challenge arose regarding how communion would be explained to those preparing to participate in the first one in the country, which was resolved by using the surname of the first person to be baptized—Sembera Mackay. Oku-sembera, the Luganda word for communion today, is derived from Sembera, defined in O’Flaherty’s Lexicon as “to approach” (O’Flaherty, 1892: 29). That Sembera Mackay’s surname is also the root of the Luganda word for communion is not a coincidence but a demonstration of imagination that missionaries like O’Flaherty were involved in daily to make Christianity a reality in Uganda.

Formal education

The Church of Uganda (2023) states on its website that throughout its history, it has founded and oversees 55 pre-primary schools, 4904 primary schools, 460 secondary schools, 50 vocational schools, and six universities, with an estimated current enrollment of 3.7 million. It is the same church, which, while starting in Buganda, spread in every direction and today commands a membership of 32% of Ugandans, according to the 2019 United States Department of State’s International Religious Freedom report.As they still are, to a large extent, church and education were intertwined from the founding of the Republic of Uganda, and the foundation was laid in the 1880s. In his book Eighteen Years in Uganda and East Africa, Alfred R. Tucker (1908: 153), the third bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa and later Uganda, states that:

A sketch of our educational system would be incomplete without some account of the industrial work which, more or less, since the days of Mackay, has had some share in molding the lives and characters of many of the Baganda.

Tucker was right as O’Flaherty wrote that on July 26, 1885, no less than 35 persons openly professed their faith in Christ; the first proper church was built but soon became small for the growing number of Christians while at the same time, the number of Baganda who attended the daily school was so high it became impossible to teach them well (Dawson, 1887: 426). This text shows the exponential increase in the church’s membership and the confluence of church and school, which can be traced to the 1880s.

The church that O’Flaherty planted did not discriminate against boys from girls and welcomed enslaved people as much as the Baganda in its activities. Before the introduction of formal education, the existing education was mostly for sons and daughters of chiefs and kings, and access to it was unbalanced toward boys (Morgan, 1980: 28). Christianity challenged this order by erasing differences between boys and girls in participating in church and education programs. Enslaved people were also welcomed and included with open hands since they had no easy pathway to social mobility before missionaries arrived. Sembera Mackay, the first Protestant convert in Uganda, was an enslaved person from Busoga, but being enslaved did not stop him from participating in church life as much as anyone (Harrison, 1907). Although a proper education system did not exist during O’Flaherty’s time, mission stations existed as schools, contributing to an education system that welcomed all.

As was necessary for many a missionary and mission station, O’Flaherty needed to translate religious texts into local languages, giving rise to a need for interpretation and translation work. The environment created by this work produced learning opportunities that benefited missionaries and improved the literacy of Baganda, who were equally involved in this work. By attaching himself to missionaries like O’Flaherty, Lutamaguzi became one of the most literate Ugandans of his day. He rose to be considered the leading local translator in Uganda and authored books while helping many missionaries write theirs. Baptized in the coastal state of Zanzibar in 1882, Lutamaguzi returned to Uganda shortly afterward and became a member of the mission station where O’Flaherty, Mackay, and Ashe mentored him. He was elected a member of the first church council in 1885, commissioned one of the first catechists in 1891, ordained one of the first deacons in 1893, and priest in 1896. Throughout the 1880s until his death, he was the most sought-after local interpreter and translator in Uganda but had acquired his education and training by learning from individuals like O’Flaherty.

Conclusion

While the CMS had sent many missionaries to Uganda before O’Flaherty arrived in 1881, he was the first to define what needed to be done. From the moment he set foot in Buganda, he sought to form relationships with Muteesa and Baganda that were essential to the mission’s success, often living among Africans without experiencing any threat to his personality (Rowe, 1966: 63). By performing the first baptism, O’Flaherty made a bold decision many of his colleagues had been unable to make in five-plus years of the existence of the Uganda mission, sidestepping missional politics and thereby getting the Protestantism off the ground. His contribution to the creation of the church councils brought Ugandan men and women into church leadership, while Uganda’s formal education system also emerged from his work.

Unfortunately, his legacy remains dislocated and largely uncredited, unlike his colleagues. Banished to Usambiro (present-day Tanzania), Mackay died on February 8, 1890, where he was initially buried. His remains were, however, retrieved and reburied at St Paul’s Cathedral Namirembe, Kampala, Uganda, in 1927. Pilkington, who came to Uganda in 1890 before embarking on an illustrious career in the translation of Luganda, was killed in Busoga, where he was initially buried before his remains were reinterred at Namirembe on March 18, 1898 (Mullins, 1904: 219). Even Bishop James Hannington, who never reached Buganda but died in Busoga, was reinterred at Namirembe on December 31, 1892.

Exhausted by persecution, in late 1885, O’Flaherty requested permission from Mwanga to return home, which he got, setting off for Edinburgh, Scotland, right before Christmas (Ashe, 1895: 79). He, however, died of a fever on board a ship on July 21, 1886, and was buried in the Red Sea (Teketwe, 2023). Sarah, his wife, who died on February 12, 1901, survived him.