Bishop Hannington Memorial Stones

DIFFERENT CATEGORY - two inscribed foundation stones set into a purpose-built 1938-9 memorial church (architect Edward Maufe, Grade II listed), thousands of miles from both the murder site and the grave, rather than a wayside marker. Included on reflection after initially being set aside as 'out of scope' - on the merits, an inscribed stone naming a specific murder is exactly this archive's territory, and this site already includes memorials erected far from where the killing happened (see Spencer Perceval and William Fenton). James Hannington, born in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, was the first Anglican Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa. In 1885, while pioneering a new route to Buganda (in what's now Uganda) that bypassed Arab slave-trade routes, he unknowingly triggered the fears of Kabaka Mwanga II of Buganda, whose kingdom was already unsettled by German imperial expansion nearby and by a prophecy that Buganda's conqueror would come from the east - the direction Hannington was travelling from. Mwanga ordered Hannington's party imprisoned, then had his porters killed and, on 29 October 1885, had Hannington himself speared to death at Kyando village. His alleged last words were 'Go, tell Mwanga I have purchased the road to Uganda with my blood.' A near-contemporary eyewitness-adjacent account (a letter from fellow missionary Alexander Mackay, 1886) argued the killing was 'absolutely unprovoked' and driven by Mwanga's wish to send a deliberate challenge to European powers, not merely a response to the specific route taken. CORRECTION: the 1938 church's own martyr's-crown imagery and contemporaneous accounts often described the killers as 'Masai tribesmen' (as Historic England's listing still repeats) - this appears to be a period inaccuracy; modern accounts, including Wikipedia's, are consistent that the killing was carried out by Basoga chiefs and warriors on the direct orders of Mwanga II of Buganda, not Maasai people, who are a different group entirely. A separate memorial to Hannington also exists at Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint, his home parish.