Passage Five
How could faith beget such evil? After hundreds of members of a Ugandan cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, died in what first appeared to be a suicidal fire in the village of Kanungu two weeks age, police found 153 bodies buried in a compound used by the cult in Buhunga, 25 miles away. When investigators searched the house of a cult leader in yet another village, they discovered 155 bodies, many buried under the concrete floor of the house. Then scores more were dug up at a cult members home. Some had been poisoned; others, often-young children, strangled. By weeks end, Ugandan police had counted 924 victims including at least 530 who burned to death inside the sealed church exceeding the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide and killings by followers of American cult leader Jim Jones that claimed 913 lives.
Authorities believe two of the cults leaders, Joseph Kibwetere, a 68-year-old former Roman Catholic catechism teacher who started the cult in 1987, and his prophetess, Credonia Mwerinde, by some accounts a former prostitute who claimed to speak for the Virgin Mary, may still be alive and on the run. The pair had predicted the world would end on Dec. 31, 1999. When that didnt happen, followers who demanded the return of their possessions, which they had to surrender on joining the cult, may have been systematically killed.
The Ugandan carnage focuses attention on the proliferation of religious cults in East Africas impoverished rural areas and city slums. According to the institute for the study of American religion, which researches cults and sects, there are now more than 5,000 indigenous churches in Africa, some with apocalyptic or revolutionary leanings. One such group is the Jerusalem Church of Christ in Nairobis Kawangwara slums, led by Mary Snaida-Akatsa, or mommy as she is known to her thousands of followers. She prophesies about the end of the world and accuses some members of being witches. One day the brought a special visitor to church, an Indian Sikh man she claimed was Jesus, and told her followers to repent or pay the consequences.
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