It is a decade now since the ‘mass suicide’ by fire involving members of the Uganda Kanungu cult. Richard Vokes's book succeeds in unravelling some of the hitherto mysterious elements surrounding those tragic events. The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments (MRTC) comes across as a ‘Hebraist’ religion that seceded from Ugandan Catholicism in an attempt to pursue a purer form of the faith. The MRTC is a millennial movement that followed a similar path to those of ‘Jonestown’ (Guyana 1978), ‘Solar Temple’ (Switzerland 1994) and ‘Heaven's Gate’ (San Diego 1977). One of its key figures, Joseph Kibweteere, had claimed that his ‘boss’ Jesus Christ ‘had appeared to him in a dream’ with a message that, contrary to speculations that the current generation was to end on 1 January 2000, it was rather to end at the end of that year and that no other year was to follow (p. 6). Following the mass suicide episode, it was later discovered that many other members – dissenters and the sick who had died – had been buried in mass graves on the compounds where the movement was located (p. 9).

In the chapters that follow the introduction, Vokes explains the growth of the MRTC in terms of a survival strategy within an African context of misfortune. One of the most important factors was the devastating effects of the HIV AIDS pandemic in that part of the continent. In the 1990s south-western Uganda had experienced a great social misfortune as a result of the AIDS pandemic and ‘it was as people attempted to come to terms with this new disease, and to deal with its worst effects’, Vokes notes, ‘that they increasingly turned to the MRTC for support’ (p. 11). In seven very lucidly written and well set out chapters, Vokes carefully explains how things developed within the MRTC, a movement that succeeded in shrouding a lot of its activities in great secrecy.

A major insight of the work is Vokes's understanding of the MRTC in that it was a movement for the transformation of a locally meaningful set of logics and practices initially associated with a local fertility cult called Nyabingi. Contrary to the popular academic view that the Nybingi cult was a colonial resistance movement, Vokes argues perceptively that it served a broader role as a cult for addressing many other types of misfortunes, especially sickness and infertility (p. 50). In an African context in which things do not happen by chance and in which etiology and diagnosis seeks to understand misfortune in supernatural terms, it is understandable that Nyabingi dealt with these problems. Most indigenous new religious movements, in addition to whatever else they represent, also serve as alternative locations for dealing with issues of health and deprivation. In the indigenous context, spirit-possession is an important part of diagnosis. It is therefore not surprising that the Catholic Church, as an institution that believes in apparitions, used Marian apparitional experiences as a bridge to reach the indigenous people. Thus Vokes, in chapter iii, draws attention to how the Catholic missionaries projected an image of Catholic theology that reconstructed the Virgin Mary ‘as a divine female similar to Nyabingi’ (pp. 18, 79).

Through this reconstruction Mary was integrated into indigenous religious culture and began to reveal herself to those suffering misfortunes in the same way that Nyabingi, the local cult, previously did. This is how Vokes explains why the MRTC, following its break from the Catholic Church, came to function around the activities of a ‘Marian seer’ called Ceredonia Mwerinde. Thus the formation of the MRTC was an attempt by some indigenous Catholics to reinvigorate or revitalise ‘a prior symbolic connection between the Virgin Mary and the old Nyabingi’ (p. 102). It is a major contribution of the work of Vokes that the encounter between western Christian missions and indigenous religions produced different kinds of new religious movements, many of which were syncretistic in outlook. This is a well written book but the classification of the MRTC as an African independent Church is too farfetched (p. 101). The MRTC is definitely a movement that emerged under African religious ingenuity but its nature and characteristics do not fit into those usually classified as AICs and that description should not have been forced on the movement.