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 A Country of Prophets?
Bizarre cults, mixing Christian and pagan elements, complicate the problems of a desperate nation.

By Fredrick Nzwili

Uganda, a small East African country, is the home of countless self-acclaimed prophets and prophetesses. In the shadows of banana plantations, rolling hills, and green forests, gods are said to speak to people directly, sometimes demanding human sacrifice. Various forms of mysticism have driven the political and social agenda in this region for centuries, and traditional pagan beliefs have survived the arrival of the Christian faith, and in many cases distorted the Gospel message. Exotic religious beliefs blossom and flourish here, and some cults have been directly responsible for many deaths—as in the case of one group, led by a doomsday prophet, that drove over 1,000 people to their deaths in the town of Kanungu in March 2000.

Religious deaths have haunted the country since 1886, when Kabaka Mwanga—the king of the Buganda, one of the main tribes in Uganda—ordered the deaths of 37 Christian converts. The Christians, who had been working as the king’s clerks and couriers, were burned to death for refusing to renounce their new faith. Today the world reveres them as the Ugandan martyrs, and every year, on June 3, thousands of Christians make a pilgrimage to Namugongo, where the martyrs died. “The martyrs have had a great impact on Christianity in this region,” observes Ben Tenywa, a guide at the Namugongo Catholic Martyrs’ Shrine. He estimates that one million people from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and other parts of the world have made the pilgrimage to their shrine. And the shared experience of that pilgrimage, he believes, “brings the Church together against threats of cults and sects in Uganda.”

Cults had plagued this country long before the time of the Ugandan martyrs. But the evangelization of Africa added another dimension to the proliferation of religious sects. For decades now, many new groups have been formed by people who have left the mainstream Christian churches to found their own sects, usually advocating their own eccentric version of fundamentalist Christian doctrine.

Nor has the Catholic Church been immune from this problem. In a recent pastoral letter entitled “Test the Spirit,” the Catholic bishops acknowledged the proliferation of the cults. They wrote:

Since the event of the Second Vatican Council, a new Pentecostal phenomenon has dawned everywhere. It is advocated and manifested in popular missions, renewal of devotions, organizations, groups, communities, movements, and associations. Along with this spirit, there has emerged a proliferation of religious groups, sects, and cults—some of which are either started or led by Catholics and have attracted and misled many people.

Preying on poverty
Even statistically speaking, Uganda’s religious composition is mixed. Most of the people—66 percent—classify themselves as Christians, with the Catholic and Anglican churches claiming the largest numbers of believers. Muslims make up 19 percent of the population. The remaining 15 percent of the people adhere to one of the traditional African faiths.

In practice, however, the situation is more complicated. Like the bananas that grow so abundantly in the fertile soil of Uganda, bizarre religious sects flourish amid the rampant poverty, disease, and illiteracy. New sects arise constantly, combining different aspects of Christian and pagan mysticism in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of religious belief and practice.

Faced with the grinding poverty and pervasive disease that makes their everyday existence so difficult, many people seek solace in the blissful world that the cults promise them. “The answers seem easy to find in the superstition and witchcraft practiced by these cults,” says Father David Kyeyune, a spokesman for the Ugandan bishops. He believes that “the impossible levels of desperation and helplessness among the people of Uganda, HIV/AIDS, and ignorance have all contributed greatly to the acceptance of these sects.”

The traditional religions of the region involved witchcraft, calling on “spirits” to gain supernatural help. When the Christian churches banned these practices, some practitioners, in effect, went underground, practicing their old superstitions under the guise of Christianity. The net result, Father Kyeyune reports, is a more potent form of paganism. In the past, the belief in witchcraft was restricted within local communities, with each village following its own practices. Now the Christian symbolism which is understood (or misunderstood) all across the society provides the basis for a new form of pagan belief, which can readily attract followers from many different backgrounds and geographical regions. In a country where almost every official form requires individuals to state their religious affiliation, and where the most readily available book is the Bible, Christianity exercises at least some hold on virtually everyone. From the capital city of Kampala to the most remote village, people can be found wearing rosaries around their necks. All sorts of Christian groups thrive here: from the familiar Catholic and Anglican parishes to the small “home churches” in which a dozen or so people share their faith in a system that mixes the Bible with the messages of their “ancestral spirits.”

Moreover, because of the abundance of sects and the confusion of doctrines, strange new cults can and often do pass themselves off as Christians, and illiterate people are prone to believe them. “This is something we cannot take for granted,” admits Father Kyeyune.

Witchcraft, with its promise of direct intervention by supernatural powers, has a powerful appeal for people in dire need. But once an individual is drawn into a cult, things can take a dramatic change for the worse.

Kanungu and beyond
The most frightening example of a sect gone bad is the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. By late 1999 the movement’s leader, Joseph Kibwetere, had attracted thousands of followers with his unique message—which included, among other things, a prediction that the world would end at the close of that year. On March 17, 2000, police were appalled to find that several hundred members of the cult had burned to death inside a church in Kanungu. Investigating what seemed at first to be a group suicide, they uncovered several mass graves of other cult followers in the same area. As the overall death toll mounted to 1,000, authorities gradually drew the conclusion that cult leaders had begun systematically killing their followers after the predicted end of the world did not occur. Joseph Kibwetere himself disappeared from sight, and (although his wife claims that he died of natural causes nearly a year before the Kanungu massacre) he is still wanted by police in Uganda.

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments is not the only doomsday cult in the country, however. Wilson Bushara, the leader of the World Message Last Warning sect, has also disappeared from public sight, but there are indications that his cult remains quite active. Bushara reportedly left the country soon after the Kanungu massacres, leaving word that he was on the run because he feared for his life because of his past association with Joseph Kibwetere. Public officials, who have named Bushara as one of Uganda’s ten most wanted criminals, say that the World Message Last Warning group has been guilty of theft, rape, kidnapping, and murder—all allegedly justified by the “prophet’s” religious beliefs.

Bushara is evidently a man with great magnetic appeal. When he first emerged as a self-styled prophet, he gathered over 1,000 followers within the space of two weeks—despite the fact that he required them to sell all their property and give him the proceeds. He soon set up his own communal settlements, complete with a private police force. But as the group grew larger, troubling reports emerged. Police were told that Bushara was encouraging his potential followers to steal in order to have enough money to offer him as they entered the cult. There were reports of communal sex in his settlement, and sexual abuse of children. In 1999, the police dispersed hundreds of Bushara’s followers, and freed several children who had been detained by the cult. Bushara himself was jailed, during the same raid in the town of Luzira, on charges of having molested two young girls. The World Message Last Warning cult was disbanded. When he was released from prison, Bushara went underground.

In 2000, despite the official ban on the group, there were widespread reports that the World Message Last Warning sect was engaged in a fundraising drive, raising funds for a “last supper” to be held on December 25. Bushara had reportedly urged his followers to rid themselves of all their possessions in preparation for the event; the funds they raised were to be used for the costs of this “last supper.” His faithful followers reportedly rented inexpensive houses in various towns, waiting for their leader to appear and lead them in the climactic event. Frustrated police officials sought in vain to learn where the “last supper” was scheduled to take place. Apparently the event never did occur, and the funds collected for “administrative costs” were used for other purposes.

The wave of apocalyptic prophecies that swept Uganda at the close of the millennium will not soon be forgotten. Kibwetere and Bushara were only two among many “prophets” who told their followers that the world would come to an end at the close of 1999 (or the close of 2000, by a different reckoning). Most of these prophets urged their faithful to dispose of their earthly possessions and fast for several days to purify themselves and assure their places in heaven.

Kanunga was not the only place where these millennial prophecies produced tragic results. In the town of Mukono, east of Kampala, one cult proclaimed that Jesus Christ would come again on January 1, 2000, and that anyone who consumed any food or drink in the preceding 10 days would be impure and unfit to meet him. At least four children died, and several others required hospitalization, when their parents forced them to observe the fast.

Since the passing of the millennial fever, the latest prophets to announce themselves on the Ugandan scene have advanced more familiar claims: that they have received visions; that they are God’s messengers; that they can see the future; that they can heal diseases. Last year a man who had spent most of his adult life as a chicken vendor rode a donkey around southern Uganda, claiming that he was retracing Jesus Christ’s ride into Jerusalem two millennia ago; he announced that he was the last prophet on earth. Another, more successful cult leader is Gagwajwa Nabasa, a 21-year-old woman who says that she “saw the light” when she died—temporarily, to regain life after four days—and attained the power to communicate directly with God and to cure all diseases. Her followers—estimated to number over 2,000—pay several dollars for each consultation in which they seek her advice or her intervention to cure their ailments. Many of Uganda’s sick—including the countless thousands afflicted with AIDS —still flock to her “shrine” in Sembalule, south of Kampala.

Rebels guided by spirits
The powerful and unpredictable effect of cults has a heavy influence on the political scene in Uganda, where a festering civil war aggravates the misery of the impoverished people. While the invocation of spirits offers no prospect for relief from misery for people elsewhere in the country, in northern and northwestern Uganda the reliance on spirits is a major aspect of rebel warfare. In the battle between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the United People Defense Force (UPDF), the LRA leader is said to devote most of his time to communicating with spirits and interpreting their results. The LRA leader, Joseph Kony, is a former Catholic altar boy. But he claims to be guided by a committee of eight spirits—three American, two Sudanese, two Chinese, and one Congolese—who now inhabit another world. As the war rages on, Kony, dressed in a white robe, sits quietly at his headquarters well behind the rebel lines. In front of him on a table is a glass of water. He puts one of his fingers in the water and swirls it, repeating the act as often as he feels necessary to discern the number of soldiers that he will lose that day.

Kony’s military losses have been huge in recent months. The scale and tactics of his attacks against the UPDF are controlled by the way small models of guns and helicopters burn when they are placed on a charcoal fire. Kony says that the burning of these figures helps him to envision the lines of battle. These routines, using water and fire, also allegedly help Kony to communicate with his council of spirits, who help him form his military strategy. The commanding officers of the LRA often meet with Kony on “sacred” hills, where they offer sacrifices and prayers near springs of flowing water.

Is this outlandish way of fighting a war unique to the LRA? Remarkably enough, in Uganda it is not. The LRA was formed in 1987, after the defeat of another rebellion by the “Holy Spirit Movement,” which had been led by Kony’s cousin, Alice Lakwena. Lakwena claimed to be inspired by the spirit of an Italian army captain who drowned in the Nile during World War I. (Kony, too, is said to have been inspired by a deceased Italian missionary who worked in northern Uganda while the young Kony was growing up there.) Lakwena’s army was defeated when the rifles of the Ugandan army disproved her claim that by smearing their bodies with herbs, she had made her soldiers bulletproof.

Originally, under Kony’s leadership the LRA had banned tobacco, alcohol, and sex. More recently—prompted by the military necessities that required more recruits as well as the growing skepticism within the ranks—the rebel leadership has relaxed those bans. Kony still expects his fighters to show reverence for trees, anthills, rivers, and outcroppings of rock that are associated with the traditional deities of the local tribes. The LRA has also been accused of multiple human-rights abuses, including atrocities committed against civilians, the forced conscription of thousands of children, and the abduction of young women who are taken as brides by the LRA soldiers.

The main source of support for the LRA is in the north of Uganda, where the members of the Acholi and Lango tribes feel that they have been marginalized by the current government regime. But political analysts note that Kony’s movement lacks any real political goals. The main stated objective of the LRA is to govern Uganda according to the Ten Commandments. Innocent young men, recruited to fight for that goal, do not understand that the LRA has a highly unorthodox interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

The ignorant young soldiers who serve under Kony’s direction are also frequently misled by his claims of access to special spiritual powers. Taking a lead from his cousin, Kony has told new LRA recruits that the oils of certain plants will make them immune to bullets. As they see their comrades mowed down by machine guns, some young LRA members are now deserting the battle, convinced that the “spirit” does not work.
The government of Sudan, which has been the main source of practical support for the LRA, is also reportedly becoming impatient with the leadership provided by Kony’s “spirits.” The Khartoum regime is demanding that Kony provide his soldiers with proper training in the techniques of modern warfare.

But the latest reports from the front in Uganda indicate that Kony is moving in exactly the opposite direction. The LRA leadership is now telling its followers that the “spirit council” is predicting the imminent arrival of a “silent world,” in which all guns will miraculously be silenced. When that “silent world” arrives, the claim continues, the victory will be won by those who know how to fight with stones, knives, and spears. So LRA members are now moving through the villages of their region, collecting spears.

Rise of a doomsday cult
Outlandish as all these claims may seem to outsiders, they are not particularly unusual in Uganda, where strange superstitions are commonplace. The most common forms of superstition are found in varieties of witchcraft—in which women are usually the main actors, because of the traditional African belief that women have a natural affinity for discerning the powers of herbs and other traditional medicines. But the forms of cult activity can take on an endless variety—as one example will illustrate.

In the early 1980s, the Religion Today News Service reported, a lovely young woman arrived in Uganda from Rwanda. Specioza Mukantabona, who was 18 years old, was said to be the most beautiful woman in the region, and men would travel for miles to see her. She also claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary, who had allowed her to speak directly to heaven. Upon arriving in Uganda, Mukantabona went to the headquarters of the Kibale diocese, seeking the support of the Catholic Church. Although she met with skepticism there, the woman’s fame spread rapidly, and a cult grew around her. Soon she cut her ties with the Catholic Church and gathered her own band of followers—who became the first members of the ill-fated Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments.

The record shows that this cult later came under the control of former Catholic priests and nuns (who were excommunicated), who taught that the Church had become an enemy of the people, and needed reform. The leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments said that they took their guidance from the Virgin Mary, whose commands were channeled first through Mukantabona and later through another woman named Cledonia Mwiride. In many respects the Movement followed basic Catholic teaching. But there were clear areas of divergence. Medical care was discouraged, and members barely talked to each other for fear of breaking what they reckoned as the tenth commandment; “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”

Among the followers of the Movement—who would later become the victims of the massacres in Kanunga—many were afflicted with diseases such as AIDS, many were refugees from the genocidal warfare between Hutus and Tutsis in neighboring Rwanda, and others had suffered extreme hardships of other sorts during Uganda’s years of civil war. Against the background of such suffering, the cult seemed to offer them the promise of redemption. And the harsh discipline of the cult’s daily life—which required them to wear uniforms, work hard, eat little, and pray frequently—was no deterrent for people who had endured so much already.

Today, in the hilly corner of southwestern Uganda around Kanunga, residents insist that the ghosts of their friends and relatives from the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments still haunt the place. “As dusk approaches, we see figures of people moving up and down as they used to do before they were killed in the fire. They put on the same red and blue uniforms,” says 18-year-old Deus Tweyongere, whose aunt and four cousins perished in the inferno. “Even during the day, I fear the place.”

Peter Mogadi, a local farmer, recalls an entire family of neighbors—parents, children, and grandchildren—had joined the cult and died on March 17, 2000. “We hear the ghosts wailing at night, and we see them moving,” he says.

Religious freedom and fear
Under Uganda’s penal code, the punishment for witchcraft is banishment of the perpetrator from his home and village. However that penalty is not often assessed, and constitutional lawyers are challenging the law (which dates from the colonial times) on the grounds that it restricts the freedom of worship, which is protected by the country’s new constitution.

The laws of Uganda, as interpreted by the Ugandan Human Rights Commission (UHRC), stipulate that religious freedom can be restricted if its exercise could disrupt public order, public security, or public morality, or violates the rights of others. The current government defines no state religion, with the constitution allowing for the freedom of conscience, expression, religion, assembly, and association—all of which the government generally respects.

But since the death of those 1,000 followers of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, the government has not been inclined to take religious freedom for granted. This year the government has frequently disrupted the meetings of cults that were believed to be dangerous. The Revival Pentecostal Church in Nseko Village, Kisangati, and the Church of the Servant of the Eucharistic Hearts of Jesus were forcibly disbanded after the government determined that their activities were a threat to public safety.

The UHRC reports that many questionable religious groups, operating under the claim of Christian belief, are still extracting donations from their followers—and in some cases, even insisting that the faithful must surrender all their property. There are persistent complaints of brainwashing and kidnapping. The government is constantly being urged to monitor the sects more carefully, to detect the signs that would call for intervention before a tragedy occurs. “There were enough early warnings before the Kanugu deaths to warrant suspicion that something was amiss,” the UHRC stated in its official monthly magazine, Your Right. “Now, although we can never undo the loss of life, we can—if we were committed to it—ensure that Uganda never experiences such a horrendous act by a doomsday cult.”

Still, the government has resisted pressure from some mainstream churches to close down all of the cults in Uganda. Many new cults are thriving—the Abaikiriza (“Believers”) cult, with headquarters in Kibale, founded in the 1980s, now has at least 3,000 churches in Uganda and neighboring countries. And as a rule the small churches coexist with the better-established groups, with a minimum of friction. However, all of the Christians in Uganda must now live with the suspicions and negative attitudes that arose in the wake of the Kanunga killings.

The struggle to survive
Uganda’s economy has grown a bit in recent months, but most people still live in abject poverty. The average life expectancy is 39 years; less than half of the population has access to clean water. The Ebola outbreak in October 2000 further strained the country, and although most of the country now lives in relative security after years of constant warfare, rebel activities continue to trouble the northern and western regions, while the involvement of Ugandan troops in Congo’s strife presents another major source of concern.

Especially in war-torn northern Uganda, poverty and migration have contributed to the alarming spread of AIDS. Displaced from their homes by the fighting, thousands of families have left their villages for life in the congested—but comparatively secure—urban areas. Others have flooded into crowded refugee camps, where the unsettled situation is not conducive to strong family life. “Young girls sleep far away from their parents, and can become promiscuous,” says Ronald Okwey, the assistant director of an AIDS program. “Even some of the parents misbehave.” Crime is widespread, and the police are ill equipped to deal it. They have no computers with which they might track criminals; in fact they often do not have gasoline for their few squad cars.

Still the rate at which AIDS is spreading has slowed somewhat in Uganda, and the Catholic bishops’ conference—which is actively involved in the care of AIDS victims—is cautiously optimistic about the future. “But we are careful,” says Ronald Kamara of the Uganda Catholic Secretariat, “because our neighbors have extremely high rates. There could be a spillover.”

Children travel several miles on foot every day to attend the schools that are operated by Catholic and other Christian parishes, emphasizing strict discipline and religious principles. But most of these students will drop out of school as soon as they complete the primary grades—if they last that long. Still as the sun sets, these young people can be seen donning their choir uniforms and rushing off to practice in their local church. Often they clutch their copies of the Bible under their arms as they trot through the streets. Stacks of Bibles are available for sale on street corners; they are sold alongside the daily newspapers. Uganda is that kind of country.

Fredrick Nzwili is a free-lance writer based in Kenya.

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