Uganda by Pen and Camera/Chapter 4

by Charles W. Hattersley

Chapter IV

The Work of the Missionaries

When one considers the state of the Church in Uganda at the present day, it is difficult to realise that it was only thirty years ago, that is to say, in the year 1875, that Sir H. M. Stanley first visited Uganda, and was told by King Mtesa that he would like to have missionaries sent to his country. Our illustration will help us the better to realise this, for the man sitting on the chair is one of the first six men, or as they were then, boys, selected by King Mtesa to read with the first missionaries, Mackay and Smith, who did not arrive there till 1877 and 1878, roughly speaking,

Chief Mukubnkwata and his son, two of Mackay’s pupils.
The Rev. Henry Wright Duta, with wife and family.

twenty-seven years ago. The next picture shows Henry Wright Duta, or, as he is generally known by the natives, Kitakule, another of the first six, and these two men have been constant readers ever since. Still another of that early band is living in the neighbourhood of Ngogwe, some thirty-four miles from Mengo. Since then great changes have passed over the land. One now never hears the drum being beaten to call people to war, nor is the drum heard announcing that a human sacrifice is about to be offered, and victims are being caught on the roads. In place of these are the drums beaten every morning calling people to worship in the House of God. There are scattered throughout Uganda over 1,100 churches, all connected with the Church Missionary Society. In these churches 52,000 worshippers assemble every Sunday, and probably half that number day by day come for reading and for instruction. It is not that the people had no other interests, for up to the year 1898 there was invariably a war going on somewhere, in which the Baganda were implicated. People almost always date their birthdays and other special events by saying, ‘It happened in the year of such and such a war.’

The cathedral at Namirembe has been erected entirely at the cost of the natives, who have already expended considerably over £400 on it, and are doing still more. When the brick church was first suggested the natives held a council, and it was decided how much each member of the Church could afford to pay. All agreed that they would pay the share considered to be their due, and the money was very quickly promised, to the amount of over £700. It must be borne in mind that the Baganda are poor people ; not one of the chiefs could be called really wealthy. This church is built of brick, and the inside of the roof very beautifully decorated with reeds, the sewing on of which is marvellous. The roof is thatched with grass. It was found to be impossible to get sufficient level timber for such a big structure, and so it could not be covered with corrugated iron, there being no saw-mills in the country. Corrugated iron roofing cannot be used unless all the timbers are perfectly true.

The church will seat over 2,000 people; the men, according to custom, sitting down one side, and the women down the other. It is cruciform in shape, and is 220 feet long by 50 feet wide in the nave, the transepts each extending 50 feet beyond this. As a pleasing contrast to the old condition of things, when 3,000 victims were offered as sacrifices to the spirit of the king in one day, on the first Christmas Day after the opening, the number of people attending divine worship in this cathedral was 3,000. More than 500 of these could not gain admittance, but sat outside the open doors, a common occurrence in Uganda, the doors and windows, on account of the heat, never being closed. This is very convenient for people with bad colds, who do not wish to disturb their fellow-worshippers. Of the 3,000, some 1019 stayed to Holy Communion, and the collection was over £7 sterling. Much of this was undoubtedly offered by the chiefs; but it must be remembered that the wages of a labouring man are only, roughly speaking, 1¹⁄₄d. a day—that is, one hundred cowrie shells, which vary in value very considerably, and were at the time about eighty-eight to a penny.

Services had been held in the cathedral previous to this, the formal opening, when Bishop Tucker returned to Mengo early in December; but the first service of all was held whilst the church was still building. That was on June 26, the proposed coronation day of King Edward VII., for we did not hear until eleven o’clock on that day that the coronation had been postponed. Our service was held at eight o’clock in the morning (about half-past five, English time), when the church was crowded to excess, an equal number of worshippers being seated in the churchyard, having failed to gain admittance. Altogether there were some 5,000 people present, and our next illustration shows this congregation dispersing.

Collections in these churches are always interesting, and are chiefly taken up in cowrie shells, which, though very bulky, it would seem at present are indispensable. The people willingly bring their offerings, and the money collected is used to pay native evangelists and pastors (of whom there are considerably more than 2,000) sent out year by year into the country districts. No English money is used to pay these men, nor is any money from the C.M.S, ever used to pay for church building, or, indeed, for any Native Church expenses. If the Church in Uganda is to be a living Church, it must realise that it must pay all its own expenses, that it is the Church of the country, and not a Church to be supported by English funds.

Just a word or two in passing about the cowrie shell currency. There are great numbers of Indian rupees and pice in the country, which are being largely used; but the natives must have something of a very small value. For instance, a man can buy sufficient tobacco for the day for one or two cowrie shells, of which, say, twenty-two go to a farthing, or if he wants a meal of bananas or plantains he can buy sufficient for five cowrie shells. He could not, therefore, afford to pay one pice for these commodities, as one pice equals a farthing. The Government sacrificed some £7,000 sterling by burning cowries to the amount, some time

1. Congregation leaving Mengo Cathedral.
2. Counting the collection.

ago, to try and get rid of the shells, but so far they have found it an impossibility to prevent their use. The natives like them because they can hang the strings round their necks, or hang them up in their houses. Having no pockets, they find small coins a great difficulty, and when they get home, where there are no cupboards, and no means of storing the coins, excepting on their bed-steads, they are constantly dropping the coins about and getting them lost amongst the grass on the house floor, which is often very thick indeed.

Although I am not dealing at length with the difficulties and drawbacks attending the work of the Mission, it is not, of course, to be supposed that there are none. Where is the Church which is not attended by many drawbacks and many downfalls, and does not own many disappointing members? If you visit our prison-yards in Uganda you will find among the prisoners men who call themselves Christians; but if you visit prison yards in England you will find precisely the same thing. People at home are very illogical, and when they hear that a native Christian has fallen into sin they are very ready to exclaim, ‘What! a Christian in Uganda to fall away and commit a sin of that nature?’ whilst they altogether forget that it is not Christianity which keeps many so-called Christians in England from falling into sin, but, to a very large extent, public opinion and the fear of exposure. It would seem that a very much larger proportion of people are deterred from sin because of their friends than the number of those who can say, with Joseph, ‘How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?’

The difficulty nowadays in Uganda is that the railway has made it possible for a great many adventurers to come up, prospectors and traders. Many of these are Indians and Goanese,^[1] and the example of some, I might say many, is not at all conducive to steadfastness and morality among the Baganda. Nor is the example of some Englishmen what it ought to be, considering that they come from Christian England. The same must be said with regard to some of the Germans. I have heard it observed by the native Christians of several Europeans, ‘Why should we be compelled to have such men sent up here? We have no men amongst ourselves who would live worse lives than these men live.’

These points are of the more importance because we are in the midst of a time of testing and trial. The fact that the country has been redivided under the terms of the new treaty has greatly upset all our congregations. Chiefs and their followers having been removed en masse to different parts of the country, and now a man no longer becomes a Christian because his chief is a Christian, for he need no longer remain the servant of a chief unless he wishes to do so, and there is not nearly so much to be looked for in the way of position as there used to be when a man became a Christian. The young Church of Uganda, started only twenty-nine years ago, needs very much prayer at the present time, that it may not fall away from its first love.

It must be remembered that it is practically only since 1890 that any settled work has been done; for in all the early part of Mwanga’s reign it was impossible to tell for two days at a time what attitude he would adopt towards the Church, and I need not say that his attitude was chiefly that of a hinderer. One of the most pleasing features of the work in Uganda now is the great desire the people are showing for furthur education. For a long time the Christian natives have felt that there was something for them beyond what they had already learned, and, over and over again, leading men such as Henry Wright Duta and Bartolomayo Musoke had begged Bishop Tucker and Archdeacon Walker, the secretary of the Mission, and others on the staff to commence schools other than those for Scripture alone. The limited staff at the disposal of the Bishop did not allow of this until after the year 1897. Early in the year 1898 schools were started in Mengo and one or two other centres on a very small scale, and these have been since developed. The natives come for instruction, not because they are compelled to do so, but because they enjoy coming, and no severer punishment can be inflicted on the older scholars than to forbid them coming to school for a week or two, until they learn better behaviour; though cases of insubordination are very rare.

The Mengo infants’ class—learning to read the alphabet.

1. Goa is a Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, some distance north of Bombay, and the Portuguese, having intermarried with Indians, have produced a race of half castes, who are usually called Goanese. Many of them are professing Roman Catholics.