Credonia Mwerinde was a former bar owner in southwestern Uganda who reported, in 1989, visions of the Virgin Mary in a cave near Kanungu. She joined with Joseph Kibweteere, a former politician and Catholic school administrator who reported similar visions, and together they founded the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
The doctrine was simple and dated: the world would end at the millennium, and only those who kept the commandments perfectly would survive.
The movement's most distinctive practice was silence.
Members communicated as far as possible by sign language. Speech was restricted, on the doctrinal ground that the tongue leads to sin — one cannot bear false witness, blaspheme, or gossip in silence. Members are reported to have gone for long periods without speaking aloud at all.
Set against the mechanisms in this part of the guide, that practice is extraordinarily effective, and it is worth spelling out why.
Every case in Part 6 depends on preventing members from comparing notes. Boonville used chaperones. Jonestown used loudspeakers and exhaustion. The FLDS used information closure. What all of these are doing is suppressing lateral communication, because dissent does not form in an individual mind — it forms when one person's private doubt meets another's and each discovers they are not alone. Asch's finding is that a single ally collapses conformity, and an ally can only be found by talking.
Enforced silence removes the channel structurally. A member could hold a doubt for years and never learn that the person beside them held it too.
The economics did the rest. Members sold property and possessions and gave the proceeds to the movement, in preparation for an end that made ownership pointless. That produces a sunk cost of the most total kind: a person who has given away everything cannot afford, in any sense, for the prophecy to be false.
The end date passed on 31 December 1999. When nothing happened, the leadership announced that the date had been recalculated. This is the Festinger pattern of chapter 177 — escalation rather than admission — and it was accompanied, according to survivors and investigators, by increasing pressure from members who wanted their property returned.
On 17 March 2000, hundreds of members gathered in the movement's church at Kanungu for what was described as a celebration. The doors and windows had been boarded and nailed shut from outside. The building was set alight, and everyone inside died.
Police then exhumed further bodies from movement properties elsewhere, many showing signs of poisoning or strangulation, and predating the fire. The total is generally put at around seven hundred and seventy-eight.
The leaders were never found. The case remains formally open.