St. Charles Lwanga and the Uganda Martyrs
Patron of African youth, converts, Uganda
Charles Lwanga and twenty-one companions, aged thirteen to thirty, were pages at the court of King Mwanga II of Buganda. The young king, enraged at their refusal to submit to his sexual demands and at their continued Christian witness in the palace, condemned them to death in 1886. Wrapped in reed mats, they were marched 37 miles to Namugongo and burned alive. From the pyre Charles encouraged the boys: 'My friends, we are about to see Jesus.' Their blood became the seed of the Church in East Africa: within twenty years there were 100,000 catechumens in Buganda alone. Paul VI canonized them in 1964, the first canonized saints of sub-Saharan Africa.