NEGRO KNIGHT VISITS LONDON

Shannon News, 13 July 1926, Page 4

NEGRO KNIGHT VISITS LONDON

SIR A. KAGWA HAS BEEN PREMIER 26 YEARS

A great general and statesman of Negro blood who has lately been visiting London has a romantic career behind him. This is Sir Apolo Kagwa, Katikero or Prime Minister, to the King of the Uganda Protectorate. He is one of the few Negroes, and the only Negro Prime Minister, with a British title. He was in London, for the coronation of King Edward, in 1902, when people were astonished by by his enormous size. Sir Apolo had a lively introduction to the politics of his country when, only twenty-four years old, he was a page of honour to the bloodthirsty King Mwanga. Mwanga disliked the Christians among his subjects, converted by missionaries sent out at the instance of Sir H. M. Stanley, and he resolved to have them massacred. Apolo and another page protested. The other page was dispatched on the spot, and the King wounded Apolo in the head with his hatchet, but dared not have killed him. '

It was only a year or two later that the King owed his life to his former page. Still hating the Christians, and the Mohammedans too, he plotted to entice the people to both faiths into a desert island in Lake Nyanza and leave them there to die. But his plan was discovered, and it was only the intervention of Kagwa which prevented his incensed people from destroying him. But Mwanga’s brother Kiwewa, who then became King, turned Mohammedan, and he, too, attacked the Christians, so that Kagwa was driven to join in restoring bis enemy to his throne. The Mohammedan were defeated after a brilliant campaign under Kagwa, who then became Prime Minister.

It was Kagwa who persuaded the Protestant and' Roman Catholic Christians to forget their own feuds in the fight against the Mohammedan, and it was Kagwa, too, who placed his forces under the leadership of Sir Frederick T \gard and accepted the British Protectorate under which his country has since prospered. For the last twenty-six years Sir Apolo Kagwa has been Prime Minister not to King Mwanga but to his son King Daudi Chwa, for Mwanga revolted against the British and in his turn proclaimed himself a Mohammedan. He ended j&is days a prisoner in the Seychellaa Islands.

It was under the inspiration of ths Prime Minister that the people of Baganda built their great cathedral, men, women and children jbining to carry the clay for the bricks many miles in baskets on their heads. The cathedral was destroyed by lightning only to be rebuilt, this time with

great stone pillars under the brick domes, the chieftians, under Sir Apolo’s chairmanship, subscribing £IO,OOO to its cost.