ABSTRACT

On 17 March 2000, a fire in the church headquarters of The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC) killed several hundred members of this sect, in the small town of Kanungu, South-western Uganda. Six days afterwards, the Ugandan police discovered a pit grave containing 153 bodies at another of the sect’s compounds, in the nearby village of Buhunga. Two days later, a further 155 fresh corpses were pulled out of a cellar at the home of one of the sect’s leaders, Fr. Dominic Kataribaabo. Subsequent discoveries unearthed a further 136 bodies, and during my research on the incident I discovered a number of additional graves, suggesting that the final death toll may exceed these figures. These latest discoveries of these additional graves threw doubt on the original conclusion, propagated by the world’s media, that the fire itself had been an instance of mass suicide, and pointed instead to the conclusion that the sect had been involved in some bizarre form of mass murder. It is not my intention here to address the question of whether the Kanungu fire is best understood as suicide or murder. Instead, this chapter is concerned with the sect’s ‘millenarianism’, evidence of which had led to the initial interpretation of the Kanungu fire as a suicide. 1