The bodies were burned so badly that they couldn’t be counted precisely; it wasn’t clear whether Kibweterie himself had died. Some estimates put the number of dead at more than 235. As modern mass suicides go, it ranked second only to the 914 followers of an American cult leader, the Rev. Jim Jones, who died in Guyana in 1978. And in Uganda, a country racked by AIDS and atrocities dating back to the dictator Idi Amin, the horror was only too familiar.
