Global Partners 2003
East Africa Travel Grant Report

Emmanuel K. Twesigye, Ohio Wesleyan University

Fax number: 1-740-368-3299

The Research travel grant of $ 3,000 was very important and well-utilized for the intended purposes. It made the research trip to Uganda possible. It was mainly used for air and ground travel purposes. Supplementary funds from my OWU travel funds were used primarily for room and board purposes.

I have had a successful and safe research travel to East Africa June 12 to August 13, 03. I traveled to Uganda and spent most of the research time traveling between Kanungu near the border with Rwanda and Congo and Kampala, the capitol of Uganda where most universities, newspaper and library archives are located. I hired a four-wheel drive truck, with a driver and an armed guard for the journeys. There had been serious concern about the security in the region and the US and Uganda Embassies had travel warnings to those areas. The British Airways had suspended flights and service to neighboring Kenya for the same reasons. I also had taken out travel insurance in case more serious problems developed while I was there.

To ensure safe travel to Uganda, I arranged for a meeting of the representatives of Uganda Government and the Ministry of Defense and the Kanungu Administration. Mutual friends arranged for the mediation meeting in May. I was screened and cleared of suspicions of any associations with rebel groups and their activities. As a result, I was able to travel freely unharassed by the Uganda Government security officers. The concern remained the reported dangerous activities of rebel groups operating in the area that may wish to embarrass the Uganda Government and the International community by taking a US Professor hostage or killing him. Thankfully, none of that happened. My research trip was a great success. I successfully traveled to remote parts of Kanungu District interviewing relatives and the survivors of the AKanungu Cult@ church inferno, and mass murders of 2000.

The Roman Church officials in Mbarara Archdiocese cooperated fully. The Most Rev. Archbishop Paul Bachenga gave me full audience for a number of hours. His Diocesan Chancellor did the same and most generously released material and documents that had been deemed classified and confidential. These documents will shed new light on the Catholic=s administrative procedures for handling the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God which had started as a Mariologist Movement within the Catholic Church by Roman Catholic lay people (Joseph Kibwetere and Keledonia Mwerinde) and priests (Fr. Dominic Kataribabo and Fr. Paul Ikazire).

I also had the greatest privilege to be granted a full audience, interview and disclosure by Mrs. Theresa Kibwetere, one of the original apostles and founding members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. She is credited with visions from the Blessed Virgin Mary and disclosure of the new rosary that was most devoutly recited by the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. She declared to me that she never directly saw the Virgin Mary nor received instructions for a new rosary. She had read the material in religious magazines and taught it to the followers of the Movement.

The other revelations from God and the Blessed Virgin Mary as ascribed to her in the Movement=s holy book, called, A Timely Message from Heaven, are lies. The serious implication of this important finding is that much of the teachings of the Movement which were conveyed as new revelations by God to the world through the Blessed Virgin Mary as conveyed to the leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, including the supposed revelation that God was going to bring this world to an end on December 31, 1999 which was extended to March 17, 2000 when more than 700 people, mainly women and children were locked in a church building in Kanungu and set on fire, were all religious lies and hoaxes. It is therefore, not surprising that following the Kanungu church inferno, more than 500 bodies were found ritually killed and buried naked in mass graves at the various sites where the Movement had camps and offices, including Buziga, a very rich and respectable suburb of Kampala, near Ggaba.

Although, I finally found much material to demonstrate that the majority of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God were truly devout people and people of great faith, their leaders were crooks, con people and criminals who defrauded their followers and taught lies as God's revelations including the imminent end of the world, which never came and were therefore, forced to end the world for their own followers and maybe themselves through mass murders and an apparent mass suicide on March 17, 2000.

For additional information, please contact Matt Horstman at horstman@glca.org or 1-734-761-4833.