A completely irrelevant African mosaic

Africa may not be known for a large number of renowned cults, but that is not because there are no cults in Africa, but because they have rarely managed to break through to the world public perception, to overcome the local, to overcome the regional. But one of them became famous in such a dramatic and gruesome way that it managed to make Jonestown look too soft...

No African sect can compare to the legendary Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God from Uganda. A country known for its most famous son, the cultish dictator Idi Amin Dada, infamous for a bunch of nonsense, one interesting film and one .gif animation - has proven to be fertile ground for serious escapism among a part of the population. Perhaps among the paradise there was also optimism that after decades of dictatorship, hunger, disease, civil wars and corruption, better days would finally dawn. Instead, the picture of misery was completed by bizarre sectarianism with a dramatic epilogue.

When poverty is twinned with hopelessness, extremes can be expected. And one such path to extremes was the cult with an unusually long name that preached the imminent end of the world (January 1, 2000, of course). In the nineties, that golden age of sectarianism, a large number of phenomenal cults were affirmed around the world. The coming new Millennium created fertile ground for anticipating the end of the world. In Uganda, fate brought together two people with extremely dubious origins who would be key to the spectacle called mass suicide.

Joseph Kibwetire, a mysterious figure with failed political ambitions, some material wealth and undoubted spiritual strength - decided that the official doctrines of the Catholic Church no longer corresponded to the needs of the time.

And the time was nigh.

But what is Yin without Yang, what is day without night, what is Joseph without Credonia? That was the name of the woman who would radicalize Joseph to the extreme, a former "lady of the night", owner of a grocery store and producer of banana beer. The surname of the one who saw the light, repented deeply and decided to embark on the path of righteousness - was Querinde.

Finding herself in a kind of spiritual discord, Credonia saw in Joseph great potential for theological innovation, with an emphasis on the coming Armageddon. And so another cult appeared in the world, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. Around 1990, their joint book with the strange title "Timely Message from Heaven: The End of Time" appeared, which expounded the theology of the sect. With the arrival of an "uncle from America", a certain Doctor of Theology named Dominic Cataribabo, the cult gained religious weight. And so, year after year, the number of followers began to grow to reach some 5,500 lost souls by the end of the decade. Extremely antagonistic towards sex and personal hygiene, open to child labor and slavery, this group began to prepare for the Day of Judgment which was to dawn on 1.1.2000 with the beginning of the Millennium. Completely uninformed about the calendar details and the fact that the new Millennium came on 1.1.2001 and not 2000 - the sect members began to sell off what little they had, to slaughter their livestock and step by step to say goodbye to this world.

After the Last Day had come and gone and the Day of Judgment and the Second Coming were nowhere in sight - many sectarians left the cult, disappointed and angry. Left with about 1,400 of their most fanatical followers, the two madmen managed to put a new spin on the new situation and set March 17, 2000 (St. Patrick's Day) as the new auspicious date.

Not for Armageddon but for the Ascension.

And the best way to ascension was death.

It would come to their camp in the Kanungu area in the form of mass suicide by unidentified poison. Unlike their famous predecessors from Jonestown, this time there were no cheap sodas to dissolve as agents of death, but the sectarians decided to go out in style, drinking Coca-Cola laced with poison. 778 people died in the main camp in Kanungu and another 283 died in five smaller locations around the area. To this day, it is not known how many of the 1,061 bodies committed suicide, how many were killed by other sectarians and how many died in fires caused by an explosion in the main camp. The fate of the leaders and founders is also unknown. Initially, it was claimed that Joseph and Credonia were killed in the events, only to be seen alive years later, Joseph in Malawi and Credonia in Uganda. An international arrest warrant was officially issued for Joseph as a suspect in mass murder.

Although at first glance this cultism and its epilogue seem like a copy of the events in Jonestown in 1978 with small touches of the determination shown by the members of Heaven's Gate in 1997 - it must be admitted that this cult also had original ideas and concepts, although I am not sure what they would be. In terms of the number of corpses, this cult is at the very top of history, more morbid than them only the Tuggees from India. But the Tugggess were devotees of homicide and not suicide. As for suicidal sects obsessed with the Day of Judgment, here the Movement has no competition because it surpasses the famous Jonestown by a full 122 corpses. What it lacked in terms of quality was compensated by the quantity of corpses. It is too difficult to achieve the fame of Jim Jones or the creativity of Marshall Applewhite anyway, with such a burden on your back one cannot carry on a Ugandan lewd priest and some ex-prostitute-wannabe-Mary-Magdalene.

Finally, criticism should be directed at the media that allowed such an event to pass completely unnoticed. And not only that, but the ex-post-facto attention that this sect deserves is non-existent, there are no documentaries, books, films about this event. What is the reason for this is a question, is it a latent racism where the death of 1061 black sectarians is less important than the death of 41 white sectarians from the USA, is East Africa still too far from the mainstream information, is people's perception conditioned to consider such events as something normal in those areas?

It is most likely a matter of Newsfeed racism...

(Roger Mortis, 157)

The Grey sky

Life itself writes novels.

At least that's the relatively popular phrase from third-rate Serbian TV series.

Maybe there's something to that phrase.

But anyway, the novel about D.V. will never be written.

Because nobody wants novels about losers. About the naive. About the poor. About good deeds.

D.V. was a good man.

At a time when good people were despised.

Born in the meantime, in an undefined country, at the crossroads of history, at the moment of the unknown, under a gray sky, D.V. was not an ambitious person. Raised according to rather outdated concepts, he grew up into a normal man, a character with modest self-confidence and hidden sentimentality. The gray sky under which he lived brought a time when work in a suburban village no longer brought even bare survival. His childish will, which leaned towards his grandfather's wishes to remain on the property, was ignored and he found himself on the gray asphalt of the city between two dried-up riverbeds.

The trauma of replacing the rural world with urban life remained with him throughout his teenage years and into his youth. He came from a traditional family of former forest guards. A long-extinct duty that had been passed down from generation to generation through the centuries, through all the changes and replacements, through all the wars, epidemics and powerful men, until the time when the sky turned gray. It was hard for him between the school desks. Too hard for his simple soul to find verbal expression for the burden he carried every day, for six hours or more.

The path he took later, with his craft, was not easy either, but it still seemed infinitely easier to him to work all day than to listen to the monotonous voice of a middle-aged monstrous fat man in front of a blackboard or to ask him if he could go pee. School completely killed D.V.'s desire for reading and intellectual development. He was afraid of books like a mad dog. His character, on the other hand, did not allow him to believe in any deity, and so D.V. found himself in the middle of the road again, under a gray sky.

The sky was also gray the day he went abroad.

The sky was gray when he got married.

And when his daughter was born.

And when he realized that he had earned quite a good amount during his two decades of stay in a country whose language he had not managed to completely master. Perhaps he would have learned it better if he had not been afraid. Of reading. If only he had managed to become attached to some collective, to get fired up by some ideology, to enter the waters of organized mysticism - his life path would probably have had a different outcome. But that possibility never even crossed his mind.

The day of his funeral was sunny.

About seven people were present, who felt sorry that they had to spend such a wonderful day seemingly sad. His wife had left him long ago for another, and his daughter was the only one whose heart had been broken into more pieces than there were crickets in the cemetery. The priest was absent ex officio, because those who took their own lives will burn in hell anyway. In the last couple of years of his life, D.V. somehow managed to suppress his fear of reading and writing, and for the first time since graduating from high school, he bought a pencil and a notebook. And in it she would put naive, clumsily sentimental thoughts, extremely childish and bad drawings and the occasional stain from tears that she sometimes couldn't control.

His daughter inherited his savings and the fully paid-off house, but what was dearest to her was the notebook. And in it there were trees, streams, undefined birds, a thin black cat that she had more than the other elements, houses and simple scenes of rural life placed between the sadness that flowed from the naive and not particularly meaningful sentences.

On one page she recognized herself in a poorly scribbled drawing...

Not knowing why, the girl wouldn't let anyone see the notebook. And fortunately for her, no one wanted that. She too was raised according to rather outdated concepts. She too grew up to be a normal person, a character with modest self-confidence and open sentimentality.

She was a good person.

At a time when good people were despised.

(Roger Mortis, 156)

The poor Sparrow

Sparrows are birds that no one notices.

Their existence is taken for granted, especially in urban environments, just like that of apartment blocks or parking lots. They are simply there. They are creatures that fly around, small, poor, timid, usually in brown-black-gray inconspicuous colors, poor only as sparrows in the middle of winter can be.

I don't know why, but almost every time I see them (and I see them every day) - they cause me a feeling of mild melancholy. Is it because they symbolize poverty or marginalization or something else or because of some bad movie in my head, who knows. Although they have a perfectly good voice and sing sparrow songs every morning, that feeling of melancholy still appears uninvited, from the side, from an unknown direction, for no particular reason other than the appearance of the sparrows.

But after a while, that feeling was supplemented by a feeling of some mercy. Small, poor, miserable, some shaggy, some colorful, thin and fat, sad and cheerful - I began to notice them and give food and water to the little poor things.

And they, in turn, bring gifts. Perhaps behind the existence of sparrows lies the fact that they are a small feathered container for the trapped souls of the invisible, the poor, the excluded, the isolated, the imprisoned, the powerless, the humiliated, the unfortunate...

The legend speaks of the evil side of Gautama Siddhartha, also known as the Buddha, who cursed the sparrows to be invisible until the end of the world. Namely, at the moment when the Buddha became enlightened - all living creatures came to bow before him. Tigers, cobras, dogs and rats, wasps, mosquitoes and people. The only ones missing were the sparrows, who, carried away by their play, foraging, and idleness, did not consider the event to be anything special. And so, towards the end of the ceremonies, attracted by the vast number of animals and birds, they appeared to see what was going on. Sincere curiosity, not the greatness of the Buddha, was the reason for their presence.

Buddha, enlightenedly angry that the sparrows dared not bow down, cursed them to be unnoticed until the end of the world, to remain on the margins of existence, at the end of perception...Poor little sparrows.

(Roger Mortis, 155)