"Anyone can start a religion. They just need the need of others."
The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead
As you rounded a bend in a highway in Putnam County, Georgia, the tops of two pyramids came into view above the pine trees. Then, the sphinx, the temple, and groves of fake palm trees. This was Tama-Re, the compound of the cult called the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors.
The Nuwaubians were (are?) headed by Dwight “Malachi” York, currently serving 135 years in a federal supermax prison for child molestation. They moved to Georgia from Brooklyn in 1993. Why they moved is a mystery. One theory is that the Nation of Islam came to regard York as a heretic and began to threaten him. Putnam County Georgia was far from Nation of Islam strongholds.
Nuwaubian theology was a product of the whims of York, and grew ever more baroque over time. It began as a branch of Islam, but eventually incorporated elements of Native American culture, Christianity, Judaism and the dominant stylistic influence: ancient Egypt.
Once they settled in Georgia, the Nuwaubians turned their corner of the South into a version of Egypt as garish and impermanent as a Mardi Gras float.
At Nuwaubia’s height, more than a hundred people lived in Tama-Re, most in mobile homes painted to resemble stone temples. York himself lived in a ranch-style house accessorized with domes and minarets.
Not surprisingly, rural Putnam County was an uneasy host to an exotic cult, especially when the Nuwaubians declared Tama-Re a sovereign country and attempted to open a nightclub. A series of confrontations with the sheriff ensued. Law enforcement staged a massive raid on the compound, which, remarkably, occurred without violence.
York was convicted of child molestation and the federal government seized Nuwaubia. These replicas of the millennia-old monuments of Egypt collapsed with little more than a tap from a bulldozer. These photographs were made in 2006, shortly before Tama-Re was demolished.
