When the Apocalypse Didn’t Come: The Nightmare of Uganda’s Ten Commandments Cult
They preached the apocalypse. When it didn’t come, they made their own.
The sun rose on January 1, 2000. Birds sang. The air smelled like rain and burnt hope. In a remote Ugandan village, hundreds of people stared at the sky, waiting for it to crack open. Their leaders had promised them rapture—a fiery ascent to heaven—if they obeyed every rule, every word, every twisted commandment. But the world didn’t end. The sky stayed blue. And in that silence, something darker began.
By March 2000, over 700 bodies would be found in pits and burned churches. Some had lips stitched shut with fishing wire. Others lay with hands bound behind their backs, as if praying had become a crime. This wasn’t salvation. It wasn’t suicide. It was a slaughter dressed in scripture. How did a cult preaching God’s laws become a death sentence for its own believers? Let’s start where the rot began: in the shadows of a broken nation.
Uganda in the 90s: A Pressure Cooker of Despair
The 1990s in Uganda were not kind. The country bled from decades of dictatorship, war, and an AIDS epidemic that hollowed out villages. One in three children lost a parent to the disease. Jobs vanished. Faith in government crumbled. In the vacuum, new prophets rose—men and women who traded miracles for money, hope for obedience.
Churches sprouted like weeds. But the Ten Commandments cult wasn’t just another weed. It was a venomous vine, wrapping itself around the desperate. Credonia Mwerinde, a failed businesswoman turned “visionary,” claimed the Virgin Mary told her to purge sin. Joseph Kibweteere, a disgraced politician, sold himself as a holy redeemer. Together, they offered a simple deal: “Give us everything, and God will spare you.” In a land where “everything” meant a chicken, a patch of dirt, or a child’s future, people paid.
This was Uganda’s curse—a nation so thirsty for hope, it drank poison.