On 12 October, 2025, my wife and I were in Kampala. We had traveled from Nairobi specifically to attend our personal Namugongo pilgrimage — a callback to the annual gathering at the shrine where Saint Charles Lwanga and 21 other Catholic martyrs were burned to death in 1886 on the orders of Kabaka Mwanga II.
Three million people gather there every year. They walk from as far as Rwanda, the DRC, and Tanzania. Some walk for weeks. In the past, the Ugandan security forces intercepted and killed two suicide bombers near the Munyonyo Basilica hours before Mass. The celebration happened anyway.
The institution I am interested in here is not the Catholic Church, though that is worth its own analysis. The institution is the pilgrimage itself — the three-million-person consensus that this particular place, this particular story, still means something that justifies the walk.
In a year in which I watched Kenya's young people risk their lives for accountability and Tanzania's voters find their choices removed before they arrived at the polls, Namugongo offered a different kind of institutional question: what does it take for people to maintain loyalty to something they cannot see, cannot audit, and cannot vote out?
The answer the martyrs gave, in 1886, was: you believe it because it costs you something to believe it.
Gabriel Mahia writes from the intersection of U.S. institutional infrastructure and East African operational reality. This essay is part of the Year in Kenya series — twelve months, April 2025 to April 2026.
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