Suicide cult new phenomenon for Africa

LONDON - The little town of Kanungu, nestled in the south-west corner of Uganda, has been hurtled into that small, exclusive and - generally First World - club of mass suicide cults.

"It's just so un-Ugandan," mused one Africa specialist. For while Uganda is deeply religious, most Christians tend to worship in the mainstream, not on the fringe. The elite is generally Anglican, reflecting the favour it enjoyed under British colonial rule, while the masses, particularly the rural poor, targeted for more than a century by European missionaries, are usually Catholic.

In West Africa, an eclectic - and to outsiders bizarre - mix of traditional religion and Christian teachings is common. Not so in Uganda, although some reports suggest that cults have been proliferating there and that the Government has been trying to control them.

Before the violent events in the south-west, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) was Uganda's most infamous religious cult and for President Yoweri Museveni, the most politically dangerous. It operates in the north, along the border with Sudan, and its leader, Joseph Kony, a former Catholic altar boy, claims his orders come straight from God.

Over the past decade, Kony's followers have kidnapped thousands of children and brutalised and brainwashed them into the LRA's ranks to fight against Government forces.

The first task for the tiny killers is often to murder their own parents or physically weaker and less compliant children.

Kony follows in a family tradition of cult-cum-rebel leaders who mix superstition, witchcraft and traditional beliefs with fervent Christianity. In the early 1980s, his aunt, Alice Lakwena (the Messenger), who founded the Holy Spirit Movement, would march thousands of followers into battle smeared in nut oil, armed with sticks and stones and singing hymns, because she convinced them the oil would make them invincible to bullets.

Despite all that, it is easier to see the rationale behind the religious groups of Joseph Kony and Aunt Alice than for the Ten Commandments Movement; the first two are partly a political reaction to the loss of the northern Acholi people's power since Museveni came to power.

The Catholic influence is also a feature with the Ten Commandments Movement. While children who escape from Kony claim he forces captured girls to dress as nuns during prayers, two former Catholic priests are said to have been among the leaders of the cult in Kanungu, and cult leader Joseph Kibwetere is a former lay reader of the local Catholic church. But if there is a larger, twisted political motive behind the massacre that police say left up to 470 dead, it is not yet known or understood, and Kanungu lies not in hostile territory but at the heart of Museveni's home area.

With investigations just beginning at Kanungu, it is too early to conclude what forces were at play. But it may have been that the cult was under pressure from inside and out. Their leader had forecast that the end of the world would arrive three months ago, at the turn of the millennium. When that came and went, he revised his forecast to allow another year.

It does appear as if the followers were preparing, at last, to go to heaven. Possessions had been sold, fortunes blown on final feasting.

There is speculation that the reported rise in religious cults reflects increasing disenchantment with politics in Uganda and other parts of Africa, particularly among the rural poor.

In that, there may be parallels with cults such as David Koresh's Branch Davidians in Waco, which tapped into social alienation and discontent with government in the developed world. Some go as far as to conclude that any growth in cults in Africa reflects a rejection of modernity, the global economy and the global village in which Africans can find no viable home.

- INDEPENDENT