June 3 is the feast of Sts. Charles Lwanga and his twenty-one companions, the martyrs of Uganda, killed between November 1885 and January 1887 on the orders of King Mwanga II of Buganda. Charles Lwanga was the chief of the royal pages, a convert of the Catholic missionaries of the White Fathers, who baptised the younger pages himself when the missionary was kept away. He and the others were condemned to death for refusing the king's sexual demands and for their Christian faith.
The twenty-two were marched to Namugongo, the traditional execution site, and burned alive on June 3, 1886. The Anglican pages who died with them — twenty-three in all — are commemorated by the Anglican Communion on the same day. The Catholic martyrs were beatified in 1920 and canonized in 1964 by Pope Paul VI, who visited Uganda in 1969 and celebrated Mass at Namugongo. The Basilica of the Uganda Martyrs at Namugongo, built in 1968 on the site of the execution, is the largest pilgrimage site in Africa.
The June 3 feast is kept by the universal Church. From Namugongo, where they died, to the African Catholic churches that look to them as the first African saints of the modern age, the feast is the feast of the young pages who chose death rather than the king's demands — the first saints of sub-Saharan Africa since the Ethiopian eunuch baptised by Philip.
