Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh writes, “This week’s article is about Alexander MacKay, the missionary to Uganda. Despite dying of malaria at age 40, he left an enormous legacy there. His story is one of gritty determination, God’s grace, suffering and breakthrough. May his story inspire us all.”
The missionary, overwhelmed with grief, labour and sleeplessness, poured out his heart, weeping and shaking with deep emotional agony. “Our hearts are breaking”, he wrote, “All our Christians dispersed. We are lonely and deserted, sad and sick.” But with an unbroken, grit-like determination he added later, “I believe that a work has begun in Uganda which has its origin in the power of God, and which never can be uprooted by all the forces of evil.”
The cruel pagan King Mwanga listened intently to the Arab Muslim slave-traders. Driven by jealousy, they falsely claimed that Alexander MacKay, the Scottish missionary, was preparing for the white people to “eat the king’s country”. Being the foremost king of the Baganda people, Mwanga was based at its capital Rubaga, near Lake Nygassa (today’s Kampala next to Lake Victoria). MacKay had tried his utmost to persuade King Mtesa and his son Mwanga to abolish the lucrative slave trade. Regularly the kings would send out their African soldiers to capture hundreds of innocent men, women and children, to be bought by Arab Muslim slave-traders, who would take them off in chains to be sold in Zanzibar. Now King Mwanga heeded the Muslims and the purging of Christians began.
The first five Christians were suddenly imprisoned. These young men were tortured, and their arms were hacked off to prevent them from struggling; then they were burnt alive as they sang to God “Daily, daily, sing the praises.” The next year a Christian wedding took place on Sunday 23rd May, 1886. Despite the fear of persecution, many came to support the couple, but there was a sense of deep foreboding of possible repercussions. The next day King Mwanga sent out his soldiers to arrest all the Christians they could find. Hundreds of men, women and children were brutally tortured and burnt alive as the crazed king sought to destroy the church. Despite this, those that survived crept out of their hiding places to meet in secret locations at night, to pray and to hear the preaching of their elders. Every night their numbers grew and more and more were baptised as Christians.
MacKay’s missionary assistant, Ashe, was given permission to leave Uganda, but MacKay was forced to stay alone, facing death every day by a king who personally threatened to hack him to pieces with a machete. As the broken Scotsman wept for those whom he had loved and taught as his own children, he remembered his calling so far away in his beautiful country of Scotland. He had grown up as the son of a Free Church Minister in the village of Rhynie in Aberdeenshire where the walks with his father were his treasured memory. On these outings they would stoop down and study the flowers and wildlife together; they would also be engrossed in mechanical devices on the farms, trying to understand how they worked.
It became apparent that Alexander Murdoch MacKay junior (1849-1890) had a passion and skill for engineering, so he pursued a career in this, studying at the University of Edinburgh. He also had a passion for God, and believed that Christ had called him to combine the message of the gospel with his practical skills, or in his own words, to become an “engineering missionary”. After having experience working for mechanical engineering firms in Scotland and Germany, he read a letter in the Daily Telegraph, which had been written in 1875 by the famous explorer, Sir Henry Morton Stanley. In this article Stanley pleaded for missionaries to be sent to Uganda because King Mtesa welcomed them there. MacKay applied to the Church Missionary Society.
The day came when eight men stood before the Church Missionary Society Committee in London. They had been prepared as a team to be sent out to Uganda. MacKay, the youngest of them, spoke out. “I want to remind the committee,” he said, “that within six months they will probably hear that one of us is dead. But when that news comes, do not be cast down, but send someone else immediately to take the vacant place.” Such a statement was not that of a pessimistic prophet, but a realist. They knew the cost of the enterprise they were undertaking. As it turned out, MacKay’s words were an understatement. Of the eight men that left for Uganda, only he survived; the others either died of disease, or were hacked to death by the locals.
When MacKay arrived at Rubaga on the banks of Lake Ngassa on 6th November 1876, King Mtesa greeted him like a long-lost brother. He seemed eager to learn about the Christian faith, opening his court every Sunday for church services. But later it became clear to MacKay that this was a pretence: what the king really wanted was the benefits of Western culture for himself, so that he could become more powerful and wealthy. MacKay’s practical skill as an engineer amazed the people: he built bridges and roads, dug wells, and pumped the water out for them. In his free time at night, he translated the New Testament into their language, and preached to those who gathered around him.
MacKay was not the only one to influence King Mtesa. Arab slave-traders would bring him guns and expensive red cloth in exchange for slaves. When MacKay spoke out against the king enslaving his own people in such a brutal way, he angered the Arab Muslims and they plotted his downfall. Although for a while it seemed that MacKay’s pleading led to a temporary suppression of the slave trade in Uganda, it would break out again. As MacKay laboured hard for the king, he became known as “Mzungu-wa-kazi” – “white man of work”, and the king was keen to have him in his court as an advisor. However, the Arab Muslims sought to convert him too, and the tug-of-war between the two faiths exasperated him.
This was complicated yet further by two French Roman Catholic priests who arrived and who also spoke against MacKay’s Protestant faith. King Mtesa was drawn to Christ’s teaching, but his pride prevented him from breaking free from his many sins. In the end King Mtesa resorted to his pagan upbringing, resuming the slave trade and worse things. Two years before MacKay had arrived, King Mtesa had sent out his soldiers to dismember and burn alive 2,000 of his own people in a single day, as an offering to the gods against disease. A year later another 2,000 were butchered as an offering to the departed spirit of his dead father when he rebuilt his tomb. Now, almost daily, a batch of dismembered corpses was secretly thrown with the others in the stinking marshes.
When King Mtesa died, his son Mwanga succeeded to the throne at the age of seventeen. At first the Christians thought he would favour them, especially as he had married a Christian wife, but he proved to be a merciless persecutor of the church in Uganda, as he sided with the Arab Muslims in his zeal for wealth from the slave trade. Being poisoned by them, he sent his soldiers to slaughter the travelling party of Bishop Hannington because they were deemed to be sent “to eat up Uganda”.
The next year saw the massacre of Ugandan Christians by their pagan king. In 1887 MacKay was ejected from Uganda, but in his absence a revolt took place in which the evil tyrant Mwanga was overthrown. MacKay was allowed to return to his beloved Ugandan brothers and sisters in Christ who had suffered so much, but with much grief they buried him in 1890 after his death from malaria at the young age of forty. His ministry had laid the foundation of the Ugandan Protestant Church and had raised up the lives of so many.
The fruit of MacKay’s work was a thriving church of tens of thousands of Ugandan Christians, the abolition of the slave-trade, and the banning of torturing and burning alive multitudes of people to quench the murderous thirst of pagan kings. He also left behind a practical Christian worldview that influenced all areas of Uganda.