James Hannington

Life and Ministry

James Hannington was born in 1847 in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, the son of a wealthy warehouse-owner, took his degree at St Mary Hall Oxford, and was ordained in the Church of England in 1874. He sailed for East Africa under the Church Missionary Society in 1882, was invalided home with a near-fatal fever within a year, and returned in 1884 — this time consecrated as the first Anglican Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, with a diocese stretching from Zanzibar across to the Great Lakes. The CMS had been working in the kingdom of Buganda, on the north shore of Lake Victoria, since 1877; the young king Mwanga II, who had succeeded his father Muteesa I in 1884, was watching with mounting suspicion as European missionary influence (Anglican from the south, Catholic from Lake Tanganyika, Muslim Arab traders from the east) began to compete for the loyalty of his court pages.

Circumstances of Death

Hannington left the coast in July 1885 to make the overland journey to Buganda by the new Masai route — a route that bypassed the established southern caravan road and which a Bugandan prophecy had identified as the direction from which the destruction of the kingdom would come. Mwanga, hearing of the unusual approach, ordered Hannington intercepted at the border. The bishop was seized at Luba's village in Busoga on October 21, 1885, held in a foul-smelling hut for eight days, and on October 29 Mwanga's order arrived to put him to death. The eyewitness Bugandan account, gathered later by Hannington's biographer, records his last spoken words to the spear-bearers: "Tell the king I die for Buganda — that I have purchased the road to Uganda with my life." He was speared to death along with most of his porters; only four survived to carry the news.

Legacy

Mwanga, having killed the bishop, turned against the Christian pages of his own court within seven months, ordering the burnings and dismemberments at Namugongo that produced the Uganda Martyrs (the next entry). The "road to Uganda" did open within five years — the Imperial British East Africa Company entered Buganda in 1890, the British Protectorate was declared in 1894, and the Anglican Cathedral at Namirembe in Kampala traces its founding to Hannington's commitment. His remains were recovered by an Anglican expedition in 1892 and reinterred at Namirembe Cathedral, where the bishop's chair bears his name to this day.