Ugandan Cult’s Deadly Secrets Haunt the Living

If this is truly the way to heaven, pray the other side is nothing like the hell left behind.

Corpses stuffed into a pit toilet. Five hundred or so charred skulls in a makeshift mass grave. Grieving friends and family too numb to shed another tear.

“It is a disaster beyond explanation to see flesh--African flesh--burnt like meat,” said Emmanuel Musimenta, one of several traditional leaders from this shattered village in southwestern Uganda. “These people always had their own secrets, and they have kept them to the end. They’ve taken them into death.”

It is the secrets, perhaps even more than the final conflagration that created this awful scene, that haunt the living. The faithful followers of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God may have died a horrible death, but the cult members have been spared the agony of those left here questioning what it was all about--and whether all the dead willingly lost their lives.

“I fail to understand how I can pray for God to save their souls when I don’t know what they were believing,” said the Rev. Geoffrey Izooba of the Anglican church a mile down the road. “My people are asking, but I don’t have answers. I say, ‘Pray for their families, not their souls.’ ”

The apparent mass suicide here Friday of up to 500 people troubles the living because the dead somehow believed that they were doing good--that they had found salvation.

These weren’t high-tech cultists trying to manipulate public opinion through the Internet, like the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, but simple Ugandans from all walks of life. Police officers, teachers, farmers and children, authorities say, locked themselves in the metal-roofed church and set it ablaze.

Inclusive in their faith, they had tried to bring more with them, warning that theirs was the only route to redemption. Residents here said cult members went door to door, Bible in hand, sharing their prophecy of doomsday.

But many relatives suspect that doomsday was forced upon at least some of the cult members. When some tried to leave in recent months, one relative said, cult leaders came after them, forcing many to return.

The cult’s leaders, who included a former prostitute, a Ugandan opposition activist and several excommunicated Roman Catholic priests and nuns, said they had been told by God that the world would soon come to an end. The exact date was nebulous--it apparently was first set for Dec. 31, 1999--but they said that when it was time, the chosen few would gather in the one-story church here. The small building on a lush knoll on the edge of town would transform into an ark that would ferry the believers to a new life.

On Tuesday, Uganda’s Roman Catholic bishop condemned the cult and its “obsessed leaders” and said the beliefs are anathema to the Roman Catholic Church, of which the group reportedly was an offshoot.

Geraldine Tumusime, the elected representative for women to the local government, bought into the prophecy and moved to the compound with her six children just before Christmas.

All are believed dead.

“They came to me too and said all of us will be saved, but if you don’t join us you will not enter heaven,” said Prudence Natukunde, a young mother who works at the local government office here. “Geraldine was a good lady, and we don’t know how they persuaded her. It made no sense to the rest of us. We are mostly Roman Catholics here.

“She went and took the children, even though her husband said, ‘I can’t go with you.’ ”

Gervis Muteguya also said no--to his own mother. A public administrator in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, Muteguya made the 260-mile journey by bus to Kanungu to bury his mother, sister, brother, sister-in-law and niece.

He arrived Tuesday, but he was too late. The church building where they died had been leveled Monday, turning it into an instant mass grave of brick, mortar, galvanized steel--and the ashes of his family.

Muteguya, dressed in the clothes of someone from far away--black leather shoes, creased trousers and a button-down shirt--took a fistful of soft soil and tossed it onto the heap in a respectful tribute to the dead. He pondered his family’s final hours, surveying the death scene from his perch on a fallen roof beam.

“They must have died in pain, catching on fire,” Muteguya said, the palm of his hand pressed firmly against his heart. “I feel they must have regretted that. They believed they were going to heaven. They were tricked into it somehow.”

Local authorities have pieced together most of the victims’ final days. For a week before the fire, cult members had received a book of matches each day at prayer time. They apparently practiced lighting them. On Friday, they were given ceremonial robes, a book of matches and candles as they entered the church for the final time. The building, meanwhile, had been doused in gasoline. When it came time to light their prayer candles, the churchgoers were incinerated.

The so-called last supper the night before had been sumptuous. Cult members from other chapters in Uganda descended on the mother church for the feast of a lifetime. All of the Coca-Cola within miles of the village was bought up, 70 cases in all. Three bulls were slaughtered. The garden was picked clean.

By Friday morning, all that was not eaten was dumped onto the dirt path leading to the church--there was a trail of flour like a too-long bridal train.

Almost everything else in the complex was gone. In the weeks before, members had held the biggest yard sale ever witnessed here. Cows, which usually cost $350 a head, went for $150. Radios. Clothing. Cooking utensils.

“They said the end was near anyway, and they were going to use the money to celebrate the opening of their new church,” said Clemensi Siime, a health worker in the village. “That celebration never happened. It was scheduled for Saturday, but they burned themselves Friday.”

An elderly traditional leader poking through the ash and rubbish Tuesday with a spear said the timing was probably intentional. The man, who asked not to be named, said he had been invited to this Saturday church opening. The new building, in the shape of a huge cross, had been prepared with mats and soft grass on the cold floor.

“It was all part of the deception,” he said. “They wanted to keep the authorities away until Saturday.”

The deception apparently went even deeper. On Tuesday, coroner workers were trying to extricate several dozen bodies from the pit toilet in the main dormitory. Police suspect that the victims were poisoned. The bodies had been concealed beneath a seal of fresh cement.

Muteguya and many other relatives fear a great conspiracy. He says some cult members, including his 15-year-old sister, had tried to leave; some had even demanded refunds of their possessions when the Dec. 31 prophecy didn’t come true.

“I really feel for the children, like my sister,” Muteguya said. “She came here because my mother came here. The adults came willingly and some stayed willingly, but the children were innocent. That is what makes me unhappy.”

The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God had a school in the compound, though it was closed last year by Ugandan education authorities for alleged irregularities.

The pink report cards of dozens of students lay strewn about the camp. Alex Nabasa, grade 4, had been promoted to grade 5, one report said. “A good trial, but try harder,” the teacher scribbled.

The classrooms opposite the church building are now mostly empty. The bulletin boards are full of dated lesson plans. In the last room, however, near the skeleton painted on the wall for anatomy class, the blackboard had a fresh message written in English.

“Good Journey,” it said.