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The short but decisive Battle for Mengo
Emin Pasha’s Nubian guerrillas with the maxim gun received from Stanley and handed over to Capt. Frederick Lugard. COURTESY
What you need to know:
Tensions had continued to flare throughout most of 1891 between the Catholics and the Protestants. Although the factions had agreed not to attack each other, a murder in Mengo sparked off a war that would change the balance of power.
Kampala
On January 21, 1892, a Catholic Muganda, who claimed he had earlier had his gun grabbed from him by a Protestant rival, sat by the roadside in Mengo, patiently waiting.
In the early days of Mutesa, guns had been the preserve of the Kabaka and his forces but as more and more Baganda got involved in trade with the Arabs, arms became widespread and available to chiefs and people of means. It was not uncommon to find people walking around bearing arms, especially amidst the heightened tension between the religious groups.
Deadly encounter
When a Protestant party came walking by, the Catholic man grabbed a gun from one of them and ran back to his home with the deprived man in hot pursuit. During the ensuing fight, the Protestant man was shot dead.
A criminal matter became a political crisis when, first, the Catholics refused to hand over the corpse to the Protestants for burial, daring them to come get it if they could.
Secondly, when Frederick Lugard raised the matter with Mwanga the following day, the Kabaka ruled that the Protestant man had trespassed by following his assailant into his home therefore the Catholic man had no case to answer.
Mwanga would have nothing more to say about the matter. He was the Kabaka, after all, and if the matter led to war, so be it.
Egged on by the Catholic Fathers, Mwanga was in a bullish mood.
Part of the Protestant forces was away in Bulemezi and Kyaggwe and the Catholics were convinced that the restraint shown by Lugard up to that point to be a sign of weakness, not strength.
Defiance
Word might have gotten out about the perilous financial position of the IBEAC (but not of the one-year stay of execution to their command to withdraw) but it was an opportunity for the Catholics, who were more numerous, to seize the political upper hand from IBEAC, which they accused of favouring the Protestants.
Mwanga, who had suffered humiliation after humiliation at the hands of Lugard and his Katikkiro Kaggwa had earlier defiantly pulled down the IBEAC flag and raised his own. On New Year’s Day 1892 he marched to attend a Catholic Church service accompanied by around 10,000 people including a band and dancers in provocation of the Protestants.
Lugard now tried, unsuccessfully, to defuse the tension as the Protestants demanded justice or, at the very least, the return of the corpse.
Mwanga kept him waiting in the scorching sun for several hours and Catholic Bishop Hirth expressed indignation at the “unjust pretensions of the Protestant party, who aim at the attainment of exclusive power in Uganda”.
Mwanga allowed for the corpse to be handed over and buried but grievances that had been building over for several months were bubbling dangerously close to the surface.
On the night of January 22, Lugard secretly passed on 40 muzzle-loading guns and one 22 kilogramme keg of gunpowder to Katikkiro Apolo Kaggwa and his Protestant camp.
Mwanga’s spies learnt about the arms and, exaggerating the number of guns, added to the indignation in the Catholic camp, which started sounding war drums on the evening of January 23.
The next morning, as the Catholic fighters started assembling, Lugard, aware of the weaker position of the Protestants, sent them another large consignment of arms, including 300 rifles that had been taken from the missionary-turned-arms dealer Charles Stokes, and another 150 snider guns.
Before long, war broke out, with the Catholics, who had assembled their forces at Mengo and Rubaga hills, taking an early advantage against the weaker Protestants on Namirembe hill. It appears that the Catholics did not expect Lugard and his forces to intervene or to do so on the side of the Protestants.
Yet that is precisely what happened. Lugard, who was stationed on Old Kampala Hill just over a kilometre away from where some of the fighting was taking place, opened fire with his famed Maxim gun.
“Seeing a great mass of men rushing down from the top of [Mengo hill] towards us, I opened fire with the Maxim at a distance of some 1400 yards,” he later wrote in his diary.
“By a wonderful piece of good fortune (for my estimate of the distance was a guess) my calculation and my sighting were correct, and my shots went right among the enemy.”
It was the first time the Maxim gun was being used in action in Buganda (Lugard had taken it along to fight the Muslims in Bunyoro in 1891 but it had not been required then). Although it was the superior armament at the time and the basis of Lugard’s authority, its biggest impact was its threat, not its bullets.
“The moral effect of this long-distance shooting, and of the apparent ubiquity of the Maxim, was incalculable to such people as the Baganda,” Lugard said.
“I don’t suppose a dozen men were hit, and probably not more than half-a-dozen killed by my fire, yet I had broken up their charge, and dispersed and terrified them. And thus I maintain that the Maxim saved a great deal of bloodshed, as it had also done in Unyoro.”
Mwanga deposed, again
The battle lasted only a few hours. Sent into disarray by the Maxim gun, the Catholics dispersed and fled while the Protestants followed up and set their homes and Rubaga church on fire. Capt Williams, sent in by Lugard, helped burn Mwanga’s palace at Mengo after the Kabaka had fled with some loyalists to Munyonyo before crossing over to Bulingugwe Island.
Mwanga had been defeated and ousted from power for the third time in four years but something more fundamental had happened; the Protestants had taken the upper hand in Buganda’s politics – a position they would not relinquish for the next 80 years, and one whose traces remain prominent in Uganda today.
