Kanungu to Malindi, cult religion persists                   

During the week, Kenyan police exhumed or discovered over 70 dead bodies near the coastal town of Malindi, in the South of Kenya, as they investigated a preacher said to have told followers to starve to death.

Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, the church leader, is in custody after shallow graves were discovered in Shakahola forest. He has been described as a “cult leader” redolent of Joseph Kibweteere whose church was based in the Southwest of Uganda in Kanungu district.

Kibweteere had convinced followers to confess their sins and sell their possessions in preparation for the end of the world on January 1, 2000. Over 700 persons died as result of this doomsday cult.

As a consequence of both incidents, many people are asking what makes such cults so deadly and why has there been, from the mid-1980s onwards, an uptick in the number of charismatic church leaders operating in the Great Lakes region of Eastern-Central Africa?  Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy & Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa, which was shortlisted for the Herskovits Award, attempts to unearth, no pun intended, answers and logics as to why such death cults have come into being in the Great Lakes region.  In this highly readable historical ethnography of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC), an African-Initiated Church (AIC) that emerged in the mid-1980s, we see why.  An AIC is a Christian church independently started in Africa by Africans rather than chiefly by missionaries from another continent. The book’s subtext is the cliché “context is everything” as it examines the social undergirdings from which the MRTC grew with a view to explaining what many describe as cultic madness.

“Kanungu is already compared to other millenarian cult suicides around the world. Including those of ‘Jonestown’ (Guyana, 1978), ‘Solar Temple’ (Switzerland, 1994), ‘Heaven’s Gate’ (San Diego, 1977) and so on,” writes the author.  MRTC, the book reveals, was registered as a non-governmental organisation which submitted annual reports to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In its report for 2000, the final one, it stated that its “mission” had come to an end. Yet it’s in the MRTC’s beginnings that we find answers.  The author argues that the MRTC evolved (or devolved, based on what we know now) out of logics and practices formerly attached to the fertility goddess called Nyabingi (mother of abundance or the one who possesses many things).

Nyabingi was believed, by colonial authorities, to be the presiding spirit guiding a political society or a cult. It primarily, however, addressed people’s misfortunes, the Bakiga tribe of Southwestern Uganda, and it fought the British colonialists, whose colonial dispensation was described as a misfortune.

Again, Nyabingi addressed household sickness, specifically infertility which is known as engumba in Rukiga. In this case, the woman in the household would receive visions from the spirit or Okworekwa, instructing the barren woman to attend a Nyabingi medium. This would demand a sizeable payment (okutoija) for its interventions and appeasement.

Okutoija squares with the MRTC demanding payments from their followers, payments which were exorbitant and not out of joint with the anatomy of practices the colonial archive and ethnographic record has regarding the Nyabingi’s demands.  Also, local people turned to the Nyabingi during times of natural disasters such as floods, landslides and even times of political upheavals. Gathering at a local Nyabingi shrine to seek mollification, afflicted persons would make sacrifices through a ritual known as Okutamba. During these rituals, the Nyabingi would redistribute the payments received through okutoija in order to negate the effects of said natural disasters.  These exchange networks, which were diffuse and not as tightly-knit as the colonial authorities said they were, essentially addressed natural misfortunes in the manner the MRTC grew because it seemingly addressed the AIDS scourge in the early mid-1990s.

As a pattern emerges, we also learn that the MTRC projected the Virgin Mary as a divine similar to Nyabingi with a range of terms used to describe the Virgin Mary that were previously used for Nyabingi, such as omugole, nyoko’kuru.

This indigenising of the Virgin Mary ensured that church followers no longer had visions of Nyabingi but of the mother of Jesus Christ. This reorientation of the Nyabingi into a Catholic idiom struck a chord with the locals and made Kibweteere immensely powerful.

Although Kibweteere comes across as a central figure, this Marian movement only became a Doomsday Cult following Fr. Dominic Kataribaabo’s entry into the sect. His exposure to several millenarian doctrines in a number of international Marian organisations abroad, especially in California, USA, in the 1980s, emphasised eschatological (the doctrine of the end of the world or end times) thinking within the MRTC.

Regardless of who lit the match, so to speak, the MRTC was primed to explode into the rogue’s gallery of homicidal Doomsday cults. Only, unlike many international cults, the MRTC represented the distinct cultural mobility of logics and practices amongst the Bakiga into Christian faith.

Book title
 Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy & Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa 
Author
Richard Vokes 
Pages
240
Price
Shs20,000
Where
Fountain Publishers Library and Bookshop.