What a Nickname

This was a quick but interesting read.  A 1907 biography for young readers of Alexander Mackay (pronounced "Mack-i"), the first Christian missionary to Uganda, one of a small group who responded to the public invitation by Henry Morton Stanley (the British-American journalist who "found" Dr. Livingstone in Africa) for Christian missionaries to go to Uganda after Stanley spent several weeks with Uganda's King Mutesa.  Stanley told the king all about the "white man's religion" of evangelical Protestant Christianity, and the king greatly desired Christian teachers for him and his people.

But all did not go smoothly.  Suspicion, shifting allegiances, exploitation (of the missionaries by the Ugandans), Islamic influence, royal succession issues, a murdered bishop, torture and burning of Ugandan converts, periodic danger of arrest and summary execution, and unrelenting hard work by the missionaries in a culture where men customarily avoided all work unless they were slaves (hence the Ugandans' nickname for Mackay, which translates "White Man of Work"), broken up only by intermittent bouts of "fever", make for an interesting story but an exceedingly difficult life.

Taking the gospel to a non-literate people with no previous exposure to Christianity and deeply ingrained habits of violence and avoidance of physical labor would be an unimaginable challenge.  Probably much more difficult than Mackay and his friends could have guessed.  But their faithfulness is admirable.