Was It Mass Murder or Suicide?

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Also, like many African new religions, the members adopted a simple uniform dress, in this case of green, black, and white. Through the late 1990s, much energy was spent upon construction at the headquarters complex. The Movement's school at one point boarded as many as 300 pupils. It was closed in 1998 by authorities, as the diet and housing did not meet government standards, and there was some objection to the curriculum. Several hundred members of the group resided at the headquarters complex. It appears that there were approximately 1,000 members nationwide, most former Roman Catholics.

We are only beginning to integrate the large body of knowledge of African Indigenous Churches (AIC) with what we have accumulated of Western new religious movements. We do know that, conservatively speaking, more than 5,000 AIC groups have arisen in sub-Saharan Africa since World War II and that the largest single block of them are composed of former Roman Catholics (the Roman Catholic Church being the largest religious organization on the continent). Uganda was not unique in either the number or even type of new religious movements that have formed in recent decades, but is unique in the atmosphere of death that pervaded the immediate area.

We are also aware that internationally during the last century, literally hundreds of sets of apparitions of the Virgin Mary have been reported within and on the fringe of the Roman Catholic Church. These groups have been identified with the most conservative element within the church, and a high percentage of them include a strong apocalyptic element. Many of these apparitions and the resulting channeled messages have become the basis of independent churches.

Many AIC movements are strongly identified with one or more tribal groupings and violence, often an expression of larger secular conflicts between tribes, police, and governments. The tribal associations of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments are, as of this writing, unknown.

The location of this tragedy was southwestern Uganda, relatively close to the point where the Uganda, Congo, and Rwanda borders come together. Kanungu is only 20 miles from Rwanda and 10 miles from the Congo border. This is a very unstable region, being close on one hand to the stronghold of the Congolese rebels that are attempting to overthrow the present government, and on the other to the sight of the massive genocide (some 800,000 in 1994) to the south. It is also an area ravaged by the AIDS epidemic. Uganda, in particular, lived through a horrible era under its former dictator Idi Amin (1970-79), credited with half a million deaths. Then, in the wake of the fall of Amin, Uganda became the home to a spectrum of new religious movements, a few, such as the Holy Spirit Movement and the Lord's Resistance Army, being aligned to revolutionary political forces.

The violence in the immediate vicinity of this occurrence is of a magnitude that most Westerners have difficulty comprehending. More recently, the government has moved to disperse several groups that it felt were dangerous either to the public order or to themselves. Since the incident with the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, the government of Uganda has also moved against surviving members of this group.