14th October, 1934
At half-past-three this morning I was serving a Mass; at four o'clock I myself offered the Holy Sacrifice in my cabin. The ship was quiet and still. We were in the waters of the harbour off Mombasa. I saw the dawn come; a great white light coming nearer and nearer through torrents of rain. Then the sun sent the water away, and I saw the Pilot's motor-boat dancing on the waves with joy. We began to dance too; the dream of many years is coming true. We had reached Africa as missionaries.

The ship went very gently to the shore as though it were afraid of hurting the water, and the land on both sides had on its best dress of sunlit greens to welcome us.
(photo : Fr Howell)

The Holy Ghost Fathers received us with that genial hospitality which characterises them, and some White Sisters clapped their hands and smiled their happiest smiles, while all kinds of people took off all kinds of hats.

On the heads of Englishmen, Greeks, Indians, Africans, Canadians, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, a German or two, Arabs and Italians, who stood on the Railway Station platform, I saw helmets of seven different shapes and colours, berets, caps, turbans, straw-boaters, one bowler, one top-hat and a London Policeman's helmet on a native who had also a shirt. There were soft hats, and fezzes, tam o'shanters mostly scarlet, double brimmed sombreros and a multitude of ladies' head-dresses.

At four o'clock, the wood-fuelled train puffed and puffed and moved; thousands of natives yelled and waved their hands until they could be seen no more. Then we went over the fine bridge to the Mainland, and saw behind us the glorious Island looking now like one mass of high majestic palms in a huge casket of golden sunshine lined top and bottom with the bluest of skies and sea. I was terribly hot and terribly tired but felt it was good to be here; at last on my way to Uganda.

One's thoughts went to the first caravan of White Fathers who left Mombasa in 1877 to walk for a year to Uganda, a journey that ranks as one of the world's greatest journeys. We shall do the distance in forty-eight hours in this train. We take our meals in a splendid restaurant-car—meals which would shame the food on some British railways. We are waited on by white-socked boys with scarlet sashes and little round white caps, and bare silent feet. There is nothing of "darkest Africa" about it. I have with me only one trunk and a suitcase because I know that I can buy almost everything I shall need in Uganda itself. But in 1877 the priests employed four hundred porters because they would find nothing they required once they left the coast. They literally cut their way through the bush, and often pulled their donkeys out of swamps. The Superior of the caravan died on the way and was buried at midnight, secretly in a forest to escape the rapacious demands of a petty king. His grave has never been found, but we spoke of him as our train sped through the night, and we did not forget that the rough ways have been made smooth for us moderns by the blood and the sweat of the heroic pioneers of sixty years ago.
(map : Mombassa today)

15th October, 1934
After a perfect night I stood in the corridor with an Englishman who was a very pleasant geographical and zoological fountain, and who simply spouted information of Africa. We saw fat buffaloes in herds and also herds of thin cows, swift grey antelopes and zebra and wild ostriches racing over the very dry sunburned veldt.

We broke our journey at Nairobi and I had the surprise of my life. Broad boulevards like Paris, and shops both inside and out like Regent Street, and to complete the illusion Father Laane (photo) whom I had last seen in London. He gave us iced beer and the best cream doughnuts the world has ever known; as many as we could eat and a large basket of them for the journey and dozens of oranges from the White Sisters' grove at Mangu only forty miles away. The good Sisters knew how hot we should be in the train. How grateful we were for that kind thought and deed. Still nothing of "darkest Africa" about this journey.

At every station large numbers of people from the Interior come to greet us. They are far from their homes and are glad to send a message to their country by the hands of their "Fathers".
Then came Lake Victoria Nyanza, blue as blue can be, at Jinja the source of the Nile. Here were Ripon Falls which appeared to be much smaller than I expected. They looked to be not more than fifty yards across and falling not more than twenty odd feet. There was the lovely green islet forking the waters, and down below, hippopotami standing in the river.

16th October, 1934
Twenty-seven days after the Golden Arrow carried me out of London, I fell, this afternoon, out of the train at Kampala (Uganda's commercial capital), into the of arms of a big black man. He held me firmly. Love at first sight ? At least, I trust, a symbolic incident.

I was then embraced by some French missionaries and others shook my hands. Then there came a genial Archdeacon of the Church Missionary Society to bid me welcome. He had been standing with a very distinguished native whom I thought I recognised. I had. He was Serwan Kulubya, Finance Minister in the Native Government, who had represented the Kabaka of Uganda before the Commission for the Closer Union of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda, which met in London a few years ago. It was he who said, "Uganda does not wish to become a horse in the Kenya stables." (That was a phrase I was to hear in Uganda whenever the question of Union with Kenya was discussed. Uganda is essentially a "Black man's country" and is quite happy as she is, thank you.)

We shook hands. He is a tall, slim, aristocratic looking Native. His dark lounge suit looks like Savile Row and his English is as good as his coat. Significantly the White Fathers in their White Cotton habits stood a little apart, and there was a District Commissioner, affable and smiling equally to all and very helpful with advice. That too I was to find was fall of significance; for if anywhere in the world a Protectorate lives up to its name it is Uganda where, without any doubt, the British are not seeking themselves, but helping the people to help themselves.

There was a large crowd of natives on the platform. Very many men in clean white smocks just looked on and smiled. These were the Baganda, Natives of Uganda. There were also many who, dressed only in shorts, were working hard at the luggage. These were foreigners; mostly the men of Ruanda (Banaruanda as they are called). This too was not without significance; for I was to learn that throughout the country the Baganda get other people to do the hard work whenever that is possible.

Looking back on to that platform, after four years, I realise that if the scene had been staged deliberately, it would not have better shown the essential factors of life in Uganda. The British protecting; the Natives governing under the British; the natives of the Country itself, happy and prosperous; foreigners of an "inferior race" doing the manual labour; The Church Missionary Society a great power in the land, and the Catholic Church also strong but a little apart, apart that is from "Officialdom" but entirely one with the Catholic natives.

I was driven up a small mountain to Rubaga, held spellbound by the bright beauty of the scene. Golden air containing red roads, masses of evergreen and multicoloured flowers; majestic palms, patches of cotton growing in the fields, millions of long, wide banana leaves, tall elephant grass and impenetrable undergrowth; all under a sky of entrancing blue. Very sublime and very mysterious. Here are signs of heroic struggle against centuries of neglect; signs of gradually-growing triumph. Hundreds of people and apparently thousands of children in school uniforms of khaki or blue or white, knelt at the roadside as we passed, or jumped up and down and clapped their hands with excited joy at our approach, as they called out shrill greetings.

At the Mission on top of the hill, the Vicar-Apostolic, Mgr. Edward Michaud, M.B.E., gave us a sweet welcome and pressed it home with (I was told) a very rare glass of wine and an English biscuit. Fresh missionaries come but once a year and their arrival is a tremendously joyous event to the overworked veterans of Uganda.

Father Hughes (photo), bearded and stout, was also there. Sparkling with pleasure, of course, but preoccupied. In fact the very walls of the house appeared to be preoccupied. The place was teeming with excitement, for which our arrival was but a subsidiary cause. The Vicariate of Uganda has just lost an enormous and precious limb. The Western province has been constituted an independent Vicariate, and the "Catholic" Province of Buddu has been set aside, but still under Bishop Michaud, for the native clergy. A foreshadowing of a coming Native Bishop?' This re-organisation has affected almost every mission in the country; hardly one has escaped a change of staff. The publication of the appointments coincided with our arrival. Hence the super-charged air.





17th October, 1934
Night? Poor. Bed? Hard. Pillow? Harder. Room? Smelly — bats. Mosquitoes? Noisy and stingy. Heat? Ovenish. Consequently very easy to rise at 4:55 a.m.

Some one hundred and fifty boys in spotless white shirts and shorts marched smartly past us, behind the splendid school drum and fife band. These were the pupils of the "English" school. It is a secondary school with a romantic foundation. Many years ago, the Vicar Apostolic, Mgr. Streicher, invited Father Prentice (photo), an English priest to open an "English" school. At the same time he promised to give him some financial assistance. Father Prentice went, full of hope, to the Bishop's room and received — an inkstand. "You can sell that," said His Lordship, "and make a start". The inkstand realised eight shillings and the beginning of what is now a first class school, as well as St. Mary's College at Kisubi which I am to see in a day or two. (I later found Catholic chiefs all over the country who owe their education, and consequently their elevation to that ink-stand foundation.)

An Englishman in Kenya said to a traveller (Mr. Negley Farson), "You'll find the roads good in Uganda — the natives built them". The natives also built the Catholic cathedral at Rubaga and it is very, very good.

It was begun in 1914 and consecrated in 1925. A masterpiece of missionary courage and efficiency. It speaks also most eloquently of the Christians' fervour and devotedness, as well as their skill. These people carried 2,000,000 bricks up the "mountain". This transport cost nothing. Brother Cyprian was architect, master of works and builder. He often taught the native workmen as the colossal building went up. Six thousand people fill it comfortably, twice every Sunday.

I don't like to see immensely big churches in the missions. They must be either too big for the congregation or not; if they are not, it is worse. Huge masses of people must be unmanageable; you cannot mass-produce saints. The ideal would seem to be smallish churches in many places where the priest can care for every individual soul. I was to see many very large churches in Africa, and the cause is not far to seek. Too few missionaries and too much poverty. It is the Vicar Apostolic's ambition to build at least one new mission every year, but even that one, which is not enough, is a tremendous strain upon his meagre resources of missionaries and money.

Mgr. Forbes, who was Co-adjutor to the Vicar Apostolic of Uganda, travelled America to beg the funds to build the Cathedral at Rubaga. It is very lovely within and massive and solid without — a symbol of the Catholic Church in Uganda.

It was evening when we came from the Cathedral and we stood on Rubaga Hill. In a few minutes it was dark and the warm, still air was filled with the noise of thousands of insects. A motor horn hooted its "progress" from the road down below; a thousand electric lights lit up commercial Kampala in the distance and the reed palisade enclosing the Kabaka (King's palace) was just visible on a nearer hill. The native villages were lost in the dark under their banana plantations. Through the windows of the Cathedral came the red glow of the Sanctuary lamp. Silent symbol of the Light and the Life of the World, Whom tomorrow I shall see thousands and thousands of Baganda, climbing the hill to adore and to receive.

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