Today marks 25 years since the gruesome Kanungu cult massacre in Uganda that claimed the lives of more than 700 people. The incident marks the darkest chapter in the history of the East African country whose past is full of many political and social turmoil.
The Kanungu mass murder-suicides
On March 17, 2000, the world woke up to the horrifying news of the mass killings of hundreds of followers of a doomsday cult in a small village in the Kanungu district of Southwestern Uganda. The deceased were members of a cult called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG). The deaths, which were initially suspected to be mass suicides, were later declared to be mass killings.
On the day of the tragedy, charred bodies of more than 500 people were discovered in a church whose windows and doors were boarded shut with nails. The horror did not stop with a single incident. The Ugandan authorities kept discovering piles of dead bodies in the weeks to follow from different locations.
On March 25, 2000, 153 dead bodies were found buried in one of the cult’s buildings in Buhinga village in the Rukungiri district. This was followed by the discovery of 155 dead bodies below the house of Father Dominic Kataribabo, one of the leaders of the cult, in Rugazi, Bushenyi district, two days later. A couple of days after this, 81 bodies were found in Rushojwa and a month later on April 27, 2000, 55 bodies were discovered in Buziga.
Events leading up to the incident
The cult leaders had told their followers that the world was going to end on December 31, 1999. However, when their prophecy did not come true, they decided to take matters into their own hands. The cult leaders announced the next day of the apocalypse to be March 17, 2000. They said that the apocalypse would come with “ceremony and finality”.
A day before the ‘final day’, that is on 16th March 2000, a huge party was organised by the cult in Kanungu with lots of food and drink. Thereafter, cult members and their families were gathered in the hall of a Church named Ark. All the windows and doors of the Church were boarded with nails and the building was set on fire. More than 500 cult members who had gathered in the Church were gutted in the fire.
Days before the fateful day, cult leader Kataribaho was said to have purchased about 50 litres of Sulphuric Acid. When the Ugandan authorities started investigations into the activities of the cult following the Church fire, they discovered from different locations the dead bodies of people who were said to have been killed weeks before the Church fire. Some of the reports said that some of these people were killed years ago.
The cult leaders were never found by the authorities. It is presumed that they escaped to some unknown location.
What was the MRTCG cult
The mass killings that sent shockwaves across the world drew attention towards the doomsday cult MRTCG which engineered these mass killings. The MRTCG cult was founded by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere in 1989 after the founders claimed to have seen the visions of the Virgin Mary.
The cult had several other leaders including Joseph Kasapurari, Ursula Komuhangi, Rev. Fr. Dominic Kataribaho and John Kamagara. The cult rose to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and was dedicated to restoring God’s Ten Commandments to their rightful position in the world.
Credonia Mwerinde, a former sex worker, and Joseph Kibweteere, a former politician, set up the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in the early 1990s. They proclaimed to have received revelations from the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, and their doctrines were an amalgamation of Christian and indigenous African traditions. The doctrines of the group emphasised the importance of faithfully following the Ten Commandments and preparing for the end of the world. Members were instructed to adhere to a stringent set of rules and rituals. They also believed that the world would end and a new earth would begin with year one, after the year 2000. The cult was registered under the NGO statute in 1997 to preach the Ten Commandments, the word of Jesus and the Virgin Mary and provide education and healthcare.
