Bertrand Rosenthal
The Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult, of which about 470 members apparently committed mass suicide in rural Uganda, is the latest manifestation of indigenous Christian sects with apocalyptic, sometimes revolutionary overtones.
In Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, the synthesis of Christianity and traditional African religions, partly as a rejection of the so-called “Western churches”, gave rise to millenarian doomsday cults as the year 2000 approached.
On Sunday police were investigating Friday’s inferno inside a church used by the cult, but details of what happened remained sketchy.
Some of these indigenous movements have incorporated much more earthly political ambitions. The Lord’s Resistance Army maintains an armed struggle in the north to overthrow the government and restore the Ugandan people on the road to faith, according to its leader, Joseph Kony.
Last September, authorities raided a farm in central Uganda used as a base by the apocalyptic World Message Last Warning sect, made up of Tutsis and Bahimas from southern Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The sect’s members were accused of kidnapping children, and sexually abusing minors.
Two months later, anti-riot police dispersed an illegal gathering of 500 people in western Uganda, where the 19- year-old prophet Nbassa Gwajwa preached to her Hima and Tutsi faithful. Gwajwa claimed to have died in 1996 before being sent back to Earth by God on a mission to preach repentance to her people prior to the turn of the millennium.
In Rwanda, doomsday sects and cults promising collective redemption flourished as 2000 approached. Following the 1994 genocide, the number of Christian “churches” grew from eight to 300 under the religious tolerance practised by the new Rwandan regime, according to Andr Karamaga, president of Presbyterian Churches.
In Uganda, the rise of the Holy Spirit Movement in the 1980s brought with it a new breed of revolutionary faithful. The movement was spawned in the Acholi territory of northern Uganda, where warfare and political killings had ravaged society for nearly two decades. Alice Lakwena, an Acholi prophet, claimed to bring messages from the spiritual world advising people to oppose government intervention in the Acholi region.
According to United States government records, Lakwena also told her followers to protect themselves against bullets by smearing oil on their skin and declared that stones or bottles thrown at government troops would turn into hand grenades.
Many of her followers were killed in confrontations, while others acquired guns to reinforce their spiritual armour. The Ugandan army crushed Lakwena’s followers in 1986, perceiving them as a threat to the rule of President Yoweri Museveni, and in 1987 Lakwena fled to Kenya. But Kony, a self-proclaimed mystic related to Lakwena, in 1989 became head of the Lord’s Resistance Army.