Ondetto: The ‘Messiah’ who founded Legio Maria

By Kenneth Kwama

Kenya: When the founder of the Legio Maria sect Melkio Simeo Ondetto died in 1992, his followers camped by his grave in Got Kwer, Migori County, and engaged in fervent prayer, awaiting his resurrection.

Unlike Christians who are still awaiting the second coming of Jesus Christ, followers of Legio Maria believe that Christ has already come in the form of Ondetto, who they refer to as the messiah.

The idea of Ondetto’s resurrection was rooted in the sect’s belief that the ‘messiah’ would come back for the third time to collect his followers and take them to heaven.

When Ondetto ‘refused’ to resurrect, his followers left his gravesite. They still visit the place, which they renamed ‘Calvary’ for pilgrimage, as they await Ondetto’s third coming.

Interestingly, Legio Maria was founded around the same time that Kenya attained independence.

In 1960, Ondetto and 37 followers of the sect were beaten up by colonial police officers and locked up at Kodiaga prison in Kisumu. He was tried in Kisii and Kisumu law courts and found guilty of holding illegal meetings.

Passing the judgement, Senior Magistrate at the Kisumu Law Courts John Abraham described Ondetto and his followers as “a collection of lapsed Catholics and pagans practising heresy that is a mockery to Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church”.

 But instead of seeing this as a setback, sect members saw it as the fulfillment of a tribulation that had been prophesied in the Bible.

 In his book, Believing in the Black Messiah, Matthew Kustenbauder notes  that Legio Maria was founded by Roman Catholic Luos in western Kenya between 1962 and 1963, marking a transition from colonial rule to independence by Gaudencia Aoko and Simeo Ondeto.

 “Ondetto established his headquarters on the mountain of Got Kwer, which he and his followers referred to as the New Jerusalem and the Holy City. Aoko, meanwhile, drew thousands into the movement through her charismatic preaching, and she conducted mass baptisms according to the instruction of Ondeto and his mother,” states the author.

 Within a year, the fledgling church had accumulated close to 100,000 members who hailed Ondetto as Baba Messias (Father Messiah) and “the living God.”

According to legend, Ondetto would later stick with the name ‘Melkio’, a nickname that meant ‘the scratcher’ because lice and jiggers caused him to scratch his body continuously in his childhood.  Ondetto is said to have performed a number of miracles. 

Once as a child, he allegedly took some soil and molded it into the form of a bull. Then he blew his breath into it, and the bull came to life, a miracle reportedly witnessed by other children.