Uganda

3 profiled groups with documented operations in Uganda — 1 Extreme-band, 1 High-band, 1 Moderate or below. Presence here describes documented operations, not a judgement about Uganda or its communities; many listed groups also operate elsewhere.

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Christian

Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG, Uganda)

Apocalyptic Marian-influenced Catholic-offshoot movement founded in 1989 in Kanungu, South-Western Uganda. The movement ended on 17 March 2000 with the Kanungu fire and subsequent mass-grave discoveries totalling approximately 778 deaths — one of the deadliest cult-related events on record.

Other

Holy Spirit Movement (Alice Lakwena)

The Holy Spirit Movement was the spirit-medium military-millenarian movement led by Alice Auma — called Lakwena after the spirit she channelled — among the Acholi of northern Uganda in 1986–87. Rising amid the Acholi's defeat and dislocation after Museveni's takeover, Alice preached purification from witchcraft and sin and raised the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, whose fighters — ritually anointed and bound by strict codes — were taught that obedience made them impervious to bullets and that stones would burst like grenades. The movement won startling early victories and marched to within about a hundred kilometres of Kampala before machine-gun and artillery defeats destroyed it in late 1987; thousands of fighters died. Alice fled to Kenya, where she died in a refugee camp in 2007; the movement's milieu and template passed to Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, whose atrocities defined the following decades.

Christian

Legio Maria (Legio Maria Church of Africa Mission)

Legio Maria is a large, long-established African Initiated Church founded in Kenya's Nyanza region in 1962-63 by Simeo Ondeto, Gaudencia Aoko and a woman styled 'Mama Maria' after breaking from the Catholic Church. Formally registered in 1966 with government estimates of roughly 90,000 followers, it grew into one of Africa's largest African-initiated churches, spreading across East and Central Africa. Members venerate founder Simeo Ondeto (d. 1991) as an incarnation of Jesus ('Baba Messiah'). A 2009 succession schism between rival 'Pope' claimants has produced over a decade of litigation and periodic factional violence, and academic ethnography documents a communal physical-discipline practice ('chwat') for speech judged spiritually false — together the core of a comparatively narrow adverse record for a movement of this scale and longevity.

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