Where it began
The early decades were hard, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The first missionaries buried their own to fever and built what they could by hand. They learned the languages slowly, opened small schools and simple clinics, and trained local catechists, men and women who could carry the faith in their own tongue and among their own people. None of it was dramatic. It was teaching children their letters, sitting with the sick, and being there, year after year, until being there began to mean something.
From Uganda the work spread, into what is now Kenya and beyond, across distances that took days to cross.
A Church taking root
Out of that patient groundwork a Church grew. The Society had a hand in building dioceses that are thriving centres of Catholic life today, Kampala, Tororo, Kisii, Kisumu, each now with its own priests, parishes, schools and people. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Society has kept a presence since 1905, more than a century of staying through everything the country has been through. It reached Cameroon and, later, Sudan, and in 1959 began the slow, careful work among the Maasai of Kenya, a nomadic people with a deep culture of their own, where the missionaries learned to listen for years before they presumed to speak.
It would be dishonest to tell only the good of this. The Society arrived in the age of empire, and the assumptions of that age shaped some of what was done. Not every choice was right. The Society does not pretend otherwise, and it does not need to, because the better part of the story is plain enough: institutions built to outlast their founders, and a Church handed, in the end, to the people it was always meant to belong to.
You can see that in something as simple as the great pilgrimage to the shrine of the Uganda Martyrs, which now draws enormous crowds each year. The Society had a part in honouring those martyrs early on. Ugandan Catholics lead that pilgrimage now, in their hundreds of thousands, and that is exactly as it should be.
The turn
The clearest sign of how far the story has come is in who the missionaries now are. For most of these hundred and thirty years, a Mill Hill missionary in Africa had come from Britain or the Netherlands. Today most of those entering the Society are African, and the Society forms them in its own centres in Cameroon, Kenya and Uganda. The Church that once received missionaries now sends them, to its own peoples and to others beyond them.
That is the whole arc in a sentence. The Society came to Africa to give what it had, and what it has left behind is a Church strong enough to give in its turn. There is no better ending a missionary could ask for than to be no longer needed in quite the way he once was.
