On 12 October 2025, my wife and I were in Kampala. We had traveled from Nairobi specifically to make our own pilgrimage to Namugongo—a callback to the annual gathering held there every 3 June.
The history requires precision. The Catholic shrine commemorates Saint Charles Lwanga and twenty-one companions canonized with him. They were executed under Kabaka Mwanga II between 1885 and 1887, but they did not all die at Namugongo or by fire. The Vatican record distinguishes thirteen who were burned at Namugongo on 3 June 1886, including Lwanga, from nine killed elsewhere by other means.
The number is not the institution
Three million is the number often attached to Namugongo. It is not a clean census. Uganda Police reported securing more than 3.5 million participants across the principal sites in 2024, while a later Ministry of Tourism visitor survey estimated that 813,945 people visited Namugongo in 2025: 563,940 at the Catholic shrine, 125,697 at the Protestant shrine, and 124,308 along the roadsides.
The smaller figure does not weaken the observation. It improves it. Hundreds of thousands are enough. Nearly half of the surveyed visitors reported trekking, with an average journey of 5.31 days. Pilgrims came from across Uganda and from countries including Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some organized groups set out more than two weeks before the feast.
That is the institution I am interested in here—not the Catholic Church as an administrative body, though that is worth its own analysis. The institution is the pilgrimage itself: the recurring consensus that this place and this story still justify the allocation of time, money, discomfort, and physical effort.
On 3 June 2025, Ugandan authorities said they had intercepted a man and a woman traveling by motorcycle near the Munyonyo shrine. According to the police account, the woman appeared to detonate explosives as officers closed in; both riders died, and the incident remained under investigation. It is therefore more accurate to describe it as a suspected attack disrupted by security forces, not as two suicide bombers conclusively identified and killed. The main commemoration at Namugongo continued.
Continuity under threat is evidence of institutional durability. It is not, by itself, evidence of wisdom. Institutions can persist because people are courageous, but also because they are habituated, pressured, frightened, or unable to imagine an alternative. The question is not merely whether people keep coming. It is what the act of coming does to them and to everyone watching.
What cost does
The first mechanism is signaling. Belief is private; sacrifice is visible. A declaration can be made cheaply. A long journey is harder to counterfeit. Social scientists use the language of costly signaling to describe practices that make otherwise hidden commitments legible to a group. The cost does not prove what is inside a participant’s mind, but it gives other people something observable on which to base trust.
The second mechanism is reinforcement. A pilgrim arrives with an individual intention and encounters thousands of other people who have reorganized their lives around the same destination. Each person becomes evidence to the others—not evidence that the belief is true, but evidence that it is still shared. The invisible becomes socially tangible.
This is why collective rituals involve more than doctrine. People walk, sing, wait, pray, eat, and move together. Experimental research suggests that synchronized and physically arousing group activity can, under some conditions, increase cohesion and cooperation. A crowd does not merely express a pre-existing institution. Through coordinated action, it helps reproduce one.
The third mechanism is memory. Documents preserve an account, but ritual preserves an expectation. The calendar approaches June; routes are planned; groups are formed; bodies begin moving toward Namugongo. The story of 1886 is not left in 1886. It is repeatedly assigned a date, a destination, and a physical form.
That is how pilgrimage turns memory into infrastructure. The road becomes an archive. The body becomes a medium. Repetition carries the institution across generations that never met the original witnesses.
Where the political analogy breaks
In 2025, I watched Kenyan young people continue to demand accountability under real danger. After the demonstrations of 25 June, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights documented nineteen fatalities and 531 injuries. In Tanzania, the political and legal sequence preceding the 29 October election left the main opposition incapacitated and ACT-Wazalendo’s presidential candidate disqualified. The African Union observation mission later concluded that these developments diminished electoral competitiveness and that the election did not comply with applicable AU democratic standards.
Namugongo raised a different institutional question: what does it take for people to maintain loyalty to something they cannot see, cannot audit, and cannot vote out?
But sacred loyalty and political legitimacy cannot be judged by the same rule. A democratic institution earns loyalty by remaining answerable to citizens and replaceable by them. A pilgrimage is organized around fidelity to a sacred memory. The danger begins when political rulers demand the loyalty appropriate to a shrine while refusing the accountability appropriate to a government.
Cost also has to be interpreted carefully. A burden may signal commitment, but it can also be produced by coercion, inherited obligation, social pressure, fear, or accumulated sunk costs. Expensive participation does not automatically establish sincerity, consent, truth, or legitimacy. Many destructive institutions have survived by teaching people to treat suffering as proof that they must continue.
The proper questions are therefore directional. Was the cost freely assumed or imposed? Is it shared, or do ordinary members carry it for the benefit of leaders? Does sacrifice deepen mutual obligation, or merely obedience? Does the institution convert what people give into care, memory, and a common good—or does it consume them in order to preserve itself?
When people repeatedly incur visible costs around a shared story, they make private conviction public and the institution socially real. Repetition converts memory into expectation. But cost strengthens legitimacy only when it is freely borne, reciprocated, and ordered toward a good beyond the institution’s own survival.
The sentence I wanted to write at Namugongo was: you believe it because it costs you something to believe it.
That is too clean. Cost does not create belief from nothing, and suffering does not certify truth. The more defensible claim is that durable beliefs acquire practices through which commitment can be embodied, witnessed, and renewed. Later generations do not reproduce the martyrs’ deaths; a blister is not a fire. They reproduce, in measured form, the proposition that this memory may still make a claim on the body.
The walk does not prove the story. It proves that the story remains capable of organizing bodies, calendars, resources, risk, hospitality, and attention.
That is what an institution finally is: not a claim people repeat, but a pattern people keep.
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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