HISTORY OF ISHAKA ADVENTIST HOSPITAL
By Kamiza John ByakiThe initiative to penetrate Uganda with the Adventist message was ignited in a South African Union Conference Council meeting held in Cape Town, South Africa, on March 19-26, 1903. In that meeting, it was decided that it was wiser to plant a few mission stations which were well equipped than to have numerous small stations. The council recommended consolidating the existing Nyassaland Station, and the one planted by the Germans in east Africa, and to plant four others in Abyssinia, Upper Nile, Madagascar, and one more north of the Zambezi. In executing the council resolutions, Brother Booth, a missionary who was working at the Nyassaland Mission Station, was tasked with making a survey visit to Uganda. It is said that he quickly made a trip to east Africa and Uganda in particular. He met with the authorities in Uganda who offered him not only a warm welcome but also encouragement to establish an Adventist mission station on the industrial plan. “A splendid site for mission station and schools in Uganda, with buildings already erected, was offered on favorable terms.” He made a trip back to Cape Town to report this good news, and he immediately left for England on a mission to raise money for the new mission venture. The last decade of the 19th century was characterized by religious and political rivalry in the Buganda Kingdom among the three non-African religions, culminating in the martyrdom of Anglican Bishop Hannington on the order of Kabaka Mwanga, the King of Buganda in 1885, and engulfing the martyrdom of several adherents of the Anglican, Catholic, and Muslim faiths in 1886. The conflict between politics and the three new religions and the rivalry among them soon spread throughout the Uganda protectorate—the colonial state. By the time the Adventist Church was ready with resources to establish a mission, the colonial authorities thought it unwise to add another religious organization to the list of those striving against one another. It was not until 1927 that Nchwanga was established in the western part of Uganda to become the first home of the Adventist mission in Uganda.3 Although the focus of the work shifted to relocate the mission to Kampala, the pivotal center of the country, mission work in western Uganda continued to prosper. To further accelerate mission engagement in the region, church leaders sought to seize the available opportunities for a hospital in each of the three countries of east Africa and directed the one in Uganda to a location in the west.