Mackay of Uganda
By the Right Reverend J. J. WILLIS* •
0 UTSIDE the West door of the Anglican cathedral in Kampala, Uganda, there stands a roughly-hewn stone cross ; and on it is inscribed a single word, MACKAY. There is no record of his work ; no eulogy of his character. No date is given of his birth—which was October i3th, 1849—or death ; not even is his Christian name recorded. The cross is impressive in the severity of its restraint ; but for the people of Uganda it is enough. To this day, throughout Uganda, the name is a name to conjure with ;imd under that simple cross rest the remains of one who was called by Stanley, and not without reason, "the best missionary since Livingstone."
Alexander Mackay, was born in the little Scottish village of Rhyme, in the county of Aberdeen. He was a son of the manse, for his father was the Free Church minister of Rhyme. To his father, who was a student and a scholar, he owed all his earlier education ; from him he inherited his passion for reading. As a boy Alexander Mackay had a bent towards anything mechanical ; he spent every available hour visiting factories and workshops, and absorbing every scrap of practical knowledge from whatever quarter. Later education at the Aberdeen Grammar School, at Edinburgh University, in the Free Church Training College and in Germany turned the boy into a first-class engineer and draughtsman.
Brought up, as he had been, in the hard life and strict discipline of a Scottish manse, he had deep religious convictions, and the ambition of his life was to devote all his practical knowledge to the service of God as a missionary engineer. He was a born missionary ; and in spite of attractive offers from an engineering firm in Russia, from General Gordon in the Sudan Administration, from Sir William Mackinnon of service in the Chartered Company in East Africa, to the end he remained a missionary, and it is as a missionary that he will always be remembered. But he was more than a missionary ; he was a missionary statesman, and, though he never lived to see his vision realised, he laid foundations on which others have built, and urged a policy which another generation was to follow with far-reaching results.
Mackay was first attracted to work in Madagascar, but a subse- quent invitation from the Church Missionary Society, following on Stanley's appeal for Uganda, drew him to East Africa, and in 1876 he sailed for Uganda. He was the youngest of a party of eight men, and three years later he was alone in Uganda, the sole survivor of the original party. How arduous was the journey at that time, to what was then an unknown country in the heart of Africa, may be gauged by the fact that Mackay left Southampton in April, 1876, and did not arrive in Uganda until November, 1878. And there he was almost completely isolated ; at times with a companion, for months alone ; and often going, even for a year on end, without letters or news from home.
He saw from the first that the whole future of Uganda depended en communications with the coast. Immediately on arrival he set to work himself to explore the possibilities of river communications, and spent weeks trying to find a passage up the small and tortuous nvers that flow into the Indian Ocean. He succeeded, with
Bishop of Uganda, 1912-1934. incredible labour, in making a passable road from the coast for 230 miles into the interior, cutting his way through the roughest of thorn scrub. But he saw clearly that something far more permanent would be needed if Uganda was to be brought into contact with the outside world. And he saw very clearly, too, that Uganda could never hope to make any effective progress until occupied and developed by some European Power. Communica- tions and occupation—on these two factors the whole future of Uganda, humanly speaking, depended ; and the more he saw of the government and people of Uganda the more clearly he realised the disastrous effects of centuries of isolation and stagnation, of irrespon- sible, despotic tyranny, of ignorance, superstition and utter moral degradation ; and the impossibility of such a people ever recovering if left to themselves.
As a missionary he summed up his policy in the words, "To connect Christianity with modern civilisation." Religion and industry, neither without the other, were the key-notes of all his missionary activity. He lived for fourteen years in East Africa, and died at his post in February, 1900, without having once returned home. Both of Mackay's basic hopes were in due course realised. In 1889 the Imperial British East Africa Company sent its first representatives, Jackson (afterwards Sir Frederick Jackson, Governor of Uganda) and Gedge. They arrived in troubled times; but the company was singularly fortunate in having as administrator during those critical days, Captain (afterwards Lord) Lugard, who initiated in Uganda that policy known as "indirect rule" which he was later to develop with such conspicuous success in Nigeria.
In spite of heavy financial losses the company gallantly held on, and saved the situation in Uganda until the British Government could be persuaded to accept responsibility. In 1894 the British flag was hoisted in Kampala, and Uganda became a British Protectorate. From that time the progress has been consistent and rapid, indeed spectacular. The whole face of the country has been changed almost beyond recognition. As a missionary for eleven years in Uganda, and as Bishop of the Diocese for twenty-two years, I have had an invaluable opportunity of watching the transformation in process. In Uganda British colonial administration has been seen at its best. It has brought to a distracted country peace, law and order. Irresponsible despotism has given place to constitutional native government.
Latent resources have been explored and developed, with resultant increase of wealth (the cotton crop alone in a single year bringing in to the native population over £7,000,000). Medical services have covered the Protectorate with a network of hospitals, dispensaries and maternity and child welfare centres. Sound education has undermined the ignorance and abject superstition of earlier days. Native chiefs have learned to administer justice, and to accept increasing responsibility of self-government. The standard of living has appreciably risen. Commerce and trade have expanded, largely through Indian enterprise, but increasingly undertaken by Africans. Communications, in the shape of all-weather roads, some of them quite first-class, have united every part of the Protectorate with the centre. The Kenya-UgandatRailway has connected Uganda, no longer isolated, with the outside world, and by it civilisation is pouring into the country. The journey which once took a year or more is now accomplished, by air, in a single day.
The progress, commercially, educationally, socially, has been great beyond any possible dreaming in Mackay's day ; but it has been along the lines which he himself so vigorously advocated. And above all it has, to a remarkable degree, realised his deepest desire that the civilisation should be Christian. Great as has been the pro- gress, and impossible as it would have been but for the wise and firm administration of the British Government, practically every fresh development in the country has been initiated by Christian missionaries. Education, medical and social services, the cotton crop (Uganda's primary industry), industrial development in all its forms (building, printing, carpentry, &c.)—all owe their inception to the enterprise of the missionary. And the result, while still disappoint- ingly short of hopes and ideals, has been great. In no mission field has the response been more eager and widespread—from every class, from the king downwards, and every tribe in the Protectorate. Nominally at least the leading chiefs arc, almost to a man, Christian ; and in the kingdom of Buganda the majority of the population.
The people everywhere are passionately eager for education, and for ever more and better education ; and the education given, whether in church schools or in Government college, is firmly based on a Christian foundation. While half of the entire work of Anglican missions overseas is in the hands of the Church Missionary Society, at least half of their work is concentrated in the two African areas of Uganda and Nigeria. There the Native African Church has developed under native leadership as in few mission fields. If Mackay could have lived to see the Uganda of today he would have felt that the sacrifice and the toil, the sufferings and the martyrdoms of those early days have not been in vain. And we do well to remember and to commemorate with honour and gratitude those who first blazed the trail ; and of all those early pioneers no name is more revered and more honoured than that of "the best missionary since Livingstone," Alexander Mackay.
Previous page
