Ghosts of Kanungu: fertility, secrecy and exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa by Richard Vokes (review)

Richard Vokes has written a remarkable book. It is not one he could have foreseen writing when he began his doctoral fieldwork in Uganda in March 2000. But a week after he arrived in Kampala, while watching a football match one evening, a newsflash announced a mass suicide in the heart of his proposed research area of southwest Uganda. Vokes takes us on his journey as he put together a network of informants and documents over the eight-year period during which he endeavoured to make sense of this cataclysmic event.

The heart of his study is a new religious movement, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. It was at its headquarters in Kanungu that a fire broke out in a locked building, leaving at least 400 people dead. A calendar in an adjoining building contained what appeared to be a brief, but revealing, suicide note. On 16 March someone had written ‘world’send’,and on 17 March, the day of the fire, ‘bye’. A large body of evidence of the sect’smillenarian beliefs was quickly gathered, but no sooner was Kanungu categorized by the world’s media as another Jonestown than five further mass graves were found on MRTC properties, containing perhaps another 450 bodies. When postmortems indicated that some of the deaths seemed to have been due to strangulation, stabbing or head trauma, police and media began to speculate whether this was in fact a case of mass murder, or a combination of murder and suicide. The media furore soon died down as little further evidence emerged, motives remained unclear, and the chief suspects, the leaders of the cult, were never found. Uganda’s authorities encouraged this global forgetting, embarrassed at both this further tarnishing of the country’s reputation as a growing tourist destination and the international criticism of its failures to respond to successive warnings about the group’s activities. The promised commission of enquiry was never established, Kanungu was made a district headquarters to compensate the local population, and all religious movements were required to accept intrusive state regulation.

While the aftermath of the catastrophe is revealing on a number of levels, Vokes’ real contribution comes from his analysis of the MRTC’s origins and evolution. The Movement emerged out of the Roman Catholic devotional organization the Legion of Mary, but the MRTC’s priestly leadership was soon displaced by a peasant woman, locally famed for receiving visions of the Virgin Mary at the primary ritual site associated with the ancient fertility spirit Nyabingi. The MRTC was immediately distinctive in the history of Catholic schismatic movements in its displacement of the clerical elite and in its overt melding of Christian and indigenous belief. In this latter characteristic it was building on a long tradition of local Catholic syncretism, for the missionaries and catechists who brought Christianity to the Kiga of southwest Uganda between the wars explicitly and implicitly sought to incorporate as much as displace Nyabingi beliefs. The appropriation of indigenous spiritual terminology was common within the mission story, but in Kigezi it was taken to an unusual level. The Rukiga words for the Virgin Mary, confessionals, penance, sins and heaven, for example, were all taken from vocabulary associated with Nyabingi. Vokes argues that networks of debt arising from spiritual misfortune and redemption were maintained but reoriented, and were still characterized by secrecy. Mission Catholicism, he believes, was successful because it exuded power due to its externality, even as it took on Nyabingi’s role as a guarantor of survival during economic crises.

Vokes argues that the MRTC broke away from the Catholic Church when Africanization saw the replacement of missionaries with Ugandan clergy. These indigenous priests, lacking direct ties with generous donors in the West, were no longer able to provide material relief...