By Bill Dan Arnold Borodi
I have never walked to Namugongo. But I have watched those who do for the Martyrs Day celebrations, neighbours who set off before dawn, colleagues who return quieter than they left, and strangers whose blistered feet tell a story their faces do not explain. There is something about that yearly movement of people that is hard to ignore.
And yet, every 3rd of June, I find myself sitting with a question I cannot shake. Are we honouring a story, or are we living one?
The Uganda Martyrs, young men who died between 1885 and 1887 because they refused to renounce their faith or submit to Kabaka Mwanga’s demands, were not accidents of history. They were people who at a critical moment chose principle over safety. That choice is the heart of their story. It is also, I think, the part we find easiest to admire from a distance.
Over the years, I have seen a pattern as I have watched events happen in Uganda as a journalist and as a citizen. Institutions that speak strongly about values in public often behave differently in practice. Accountability, when it is demanded, is usually demanded from those with less power. Those with much more authority and influence often find ways to escape it through procedures, systems, or silence that the system quietly allows.
This is not unique to Uganda. But it carries a special tension here, in a country that sets aside a national day to honour people who refused exactly that kind of moral compromise.
The martyrs’ story is often told as a purely religious one, a matter between young men and their faith. But that is too narrow. What Kabaka Mwanga demanded was not just personal obedience. It was total submission to unchecked power. What the martyrs refused was the normalisation of that submission.
In that refusal lies a message for every institution that demands silence, every system that punishes honesty, and every community that has learned to look away from wrongdoing.
As a journalist, I am not outside this reflection. Our profession is meant to speak uncomfortable truths. But we do not always succeed. The pressures are real from economic to political and sometimes to personal fears. There is always a temptation to soften a story, avoid a difficult subject, or stop a line of inquiry before it becomes too costly. I have seen this, and at times, I have been close enough to it to understand how easily it happens.
That is why Martyrs’ Day should be more than a ceremony. It should push us to ask hard questions in newsrooms, in government offices, in courts, and in schools. Not because Uganda is without faith, but because the martyrs set a very high standard, and we have chosen them as national symbols.
The walk to Namugongo remains one of the most powerful expressions of faith in this country. Thousands who make that journey are not being cynical. They are showing a deep desire for something real, something costly, something worth believing in. That desire matters. But desire without direction is not enough.
The most honest way to honour the Uganda Martyrs is not through bigger ceremonies or longer processions. It is through the daily choice to do what is right, even when it is difficult, whether in public office, in work, or in private life when no one is watching.
The martyrs chose conscience over survival in a moment of extreme pressure. The least we can do is choose it in our ordinary moments.
