Kanungu Massacre: The making of Joseph Kibwetere

March 17 marked 25 years since the Kanungu inferno, which claimed over 1,000 followers of the Movement for the Restoration of 10 Commandments. Today, we explain the origins of the cult and how it managed to pull off such a crime under the nose of the Government.

Uganda in the 1980s was a country in a storm of suffering.

Death lurked in hospital corridors and village huts alike, carried by the merciless AIDS epidemic. Whole families and villages were being wiped out. To many, this was no mere disease — it was divine punishment, a biblical reckoning in real time.

As if that was not enough, politics offered no sanctuary.

The ghosts of Idi Amin’s brutal regime still haunted the land and the bush war raged on. There was a sense of hopelessness and fear of how the world would look like after the year 2000. A lot of myths were being said about the world after 1999, including the end times.

A faith born from fire

Uganda was not just witnessing a spiritual crisis — it was witnessing a full-scale religious rebellion. There was the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena, a bizarre cocktail of Christianity and guerrilla warfare that was fighting Yoweri Museveni’s government, whose fighter believed they were spiritually immune from bullets.

Meanwhile, AIDS pushed people further into the arms of new religious movements.

Conventional medicine offered no cure, but faith? Faith promised miracles. And if you were desperate enough, you’d take a whispered prophecy over a doctor’s diagnosis.

It was in this religious upheaval that the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC) was born. The group that had been fully registered with the Government under the NGO Act of 1997. It was led by Joseph Kibwetere, a former catechist and his two associates, Fr Dominic Kataribabo and Sr Credonia Mwerinde.

Kibwetere’s background

Kibwetere was born in 1932 and is believed to have died with the rest in the March 17, 2000 inferno. Nevertheless, the Police issued a warrant for arrest against him and other leaders of the group shortly after.

Was Kibwetere a monster?

Jacob Katumusiime, a PhD research fellow at Makerere University Institute of Social Research, refuses to call Kibwetere a monster, arguing that one must put him in the context of his time.

The headquarters of the cult at Kanungu.

“Placing Kibwetere in the historical and political circumstances that produced him helps us to debunk his sensationalist narratives about him,” he explains.

Katumusiime explains that it is only after experiencing the disillusioning and marginalisation of the postcolonial nation-state that he found himself at the heart of the religious movement.

He continues: “Kibwetere sought to make a change. He was a frustrated reformer.

His reform agenda drew inspiration from the Biblical theology of the decalogue — the Ten Commandments of God. Together with fellow Marian apparitionists, he faced opposition from the institutionalised Catholic Church.

The identity politicisation within the same religious institution produced renegade priests, such as Fr Dominic Kataribabo, who gave the Marians impetus. It is this history we need to understand before we can castigate Kibwetere.”

The start of the movement

In 1984, Kibwetere claimed to be experiencing sightings of the Virgin Mary. This vision had been brought to him by Mwerinde, whom he met around 1989. Apparently, she was a prostitute who claimed she was looking to repent for her sins. She had a background of claimed Virgin Mary experiences dating back farther than Kibwetere.

Mwerinde claimed that she was visited by Virgin Mary.

By 1989, she and her sister, Ursula, were traveling through Uganda spreading the Virgin Mary message. When she met Kibwetere, he welcomed her with open arms and shared his own experiences. Both agreed to form the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.

Mwerinde’s father, who claimed to have started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary from as early as 1960, was the first leader of the movement. Upon his death, Kibwetere became the official leader of the group.

In the 1990s, the movement strongly emphasized apocalypticism in their booklet A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Time.

Hence, he led an elite circle of six men and six women deemed to be the “new apostles.” The presence of female apostles was to emphasise the instrumental governance of the Virgin Mary.

The group declared several dates upon which the end of the world would arrive. But when these dates would come and go with no sign of an apocalypse, they finally zeroed on the year 2000.

I knew Mwerinde

The mayor of Kanungu town council, Godfrey Karabenda, says he knew Mwerinde.

“Credonia Mwerinde used to sell beer in this town. This is the truth! In Rwengabo’s house around that place.

(L-R) Ursala Komuhangi, Credonia Mwerinde, Joseph Kibwetere and Domnic Kataribabo.

“Later, they built their church and started to persuade their followers to sell off their property, if they wanted to go to heaven. Their message was: Sell whatever you have, come and follow Jesus, because very soon around the year 2000, the world shall come to an end! That message spread to Rwanda, Burundi and, in Uganda, especially the Kingdom of Toro. Actually, they captured many people from Toro,” Karabenda narrated.

According to Karabenda, few people in the Kanungu area joined, because most knew Mwerinde’s past.

“Only her family members joined. Others knew her past as a prostitute and said no to this nonsense. Maybe someone else, but not Credonia!” he said.

Built on fear and silence

At first glance, it seemed like a noble mission: a call to return to the pure, uncorrupted teachings of Christianity.

But beneath the surface, the movement was built on fear, control and an obsession with obedience.

What began as a spiritual awakening, quickly twisted into something far more sinister — a suffocating regime that demanded total submission and sacrifice.

For the followers, obeying the Ten Commandments wasn’t just a moral duty — it was a matter of life and death. The group believed that even the smallest sin could bring down divine wrath. And so, they took their rules to extreme lengths.

Silence was one of their most disturbing practices.

Speaking was seen as dangerous — after all, one could accidentally bear false witness and break the Ninth Commandment. To avoid this, members were discouraged from talking at all. On certain days, communication was reduced to eerie sign language, turning their communities into ghostly, whisperless societies.

Their devotion extended to physical suffering. Fasting was mandatory, with only one meal permitted on Fridays and Mondays. Sex was strictly forbidden, even for married couples — it was seen as an earthly distraction from spiritual purity. But perhaps the most bizarre rule of all was the ban on soap.

In a tragic irony, a movement obsessed with spiritual cleanliness forbade physical cleanliness. And then, there was AIDS — a crisis sweeping Uganda at the time.

The cult didn’t see it as a virus, a tragedy, or a call for medical intervention. To them, it was God’s punishment for breaking the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The disease wasn’t to be treated, only feared.

The apocalypse is coming

If there was one message that defined the MRTC, it was this: The end is near.

The group’s teachings revolved around the certainty of the world’s destruction.

They preached that Judgment Day would fall on December 31, 1999. It was not a vague prophecy or a symbolic warning — it was a fixed date. And only those who strictly followed the Ten Commandments would survive.

The series continues with details of the investigations that spanned decades.