Africa may not be known for a large number of renowned sects, but that is not because there are no sects 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 cult 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 paradises 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 sect 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 sects 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 sect 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 sect 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 sect, 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 sectarianism 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 sect also had original ideas and concepts, although I am not sure what they would be In terms of the number of corpses, this sect is at the very top of history, more morbid than them only the Tagis from India. But the Tagis 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 you cannot carry a Ugandan pop 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 of 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)
