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Paul Mackenzie, a Kenyan cult leader who told members they would meet Jesus after starving themselves to death, was found guilty of murdering 191 people.
190 of his victims were kids.
When the story first broke in 2023, the headlines were horrific. 90 bodies were found in shallow graves, with the death toll getting higher with each passing day.
The victims were all members of the Good News International Church, led by Paul Mackenzie Nthenge. Police began looking into the graves after receiving a tip that the bodies were buried in the eastern part of the country.
Mackenzie was arrested by police on April 14, 2023, shouting “Praise Jesus” as he was escorted away. The televangelist began his church in 2003 and soon became a lightning rod for controversy, mostly because he had a habit of urging members to dissociate from the rest of the world. He told members to quit school, leave their jobs, stop eating “worldly food,” refuse medical treatment, and destroy their government documents (like IDs and birth certificates). They were also told not to speak with people outside the cult if they had any intention of getting to Heaven.
What made the whole tragedy even sadder is how Mackenzie could have been stopped earlier given that everyone seemed to know this guy was trouble. Earlier that year, he was arraigned in court after allegedly telling parents to starve and suffocate two children; he was then released on a $74 (USD) bond. He had also been arrested in 2019 on separate charges involving the death of children, but once again, he paid the bond and was set free. In 2017, he was arrested over his anti-education preaching, though that case didn’t go anywhere.
The mass killings seemed to be a logical extension of his preaching, and one quotation from a local politician was deeply haunting. It also explains why children were nearly all of the victims:
“The month of March was set aside for all the children to die. The month of April was set aside for the women to die. May was for the men to die,” said [representative to the county assembly Samson Zia] Kahindi, based on the questioning of a surviving cult member.
The children went first. The cult leaders insisted they’d go later. Typical.
Mackenzie claimed he shut the church down in 2019, as if that should have absolved him of any connection to the fatalities. There were unverified reports that some members of the group attempted to escape, only to be killed. (This was based on the fact that at least one body recovered from a grave appeared to be otherwise healthy and not emaciated.)
We didn’t know at the time what Mackenzie may have said to convince all those people to take their own lives as a precondition to meeting Jesus. That said, my fear was that a lot of people would treat this story like something that happens over there. Kenya has long fostered religious cults, yes, however there’s nothing strange about a religious leader convincing people to harm themselves in the name of Jesus.
President William Ruto said at the time that Mackenzie “pretends and postures as a pastor when in fact he is a terrible criminal.” But the truth is he can be both. What he did wasn’t “un-Christian.” It was just unorthodox.
And now Mackenzie and more than two dozen of his associates have been found guilty of those 191 deaths. (Approximately 429 bodies were found in the Shakahola Forest, but the cult leaders were only said to be responsible for those 191 deaths. Other charges may follow in the future.)
Their sentencing will take place on November 6. The cult leaders all face life in prison.
Mackenzie, who was convicted along with 28 associates, insisted that he did not force the victims to starve, but that was dismissed by the court in Mombasa, where the verdict was announced on Monday.
The defendants had pleaded not guilty and denied charges in other cases, including terrorism, radicalisation, and stopping children from attaining an education.
Regarding that last bit, the judge said that some of the victims “died from suffocation, neck compression or head injuries, rather than starvation alone.” Mackenzie’s lawyers argued the cult leaders never forced anyone to starve and that the deaths were all voluntary. Somehow, that wasn’t a very convincing argument, especially given what the court heard about the victims:
One of his co-accused said Mackenzie had told his followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.
Burials inside the forest where the cult was based were called “weddings”. Those who died “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”, the judge said.
One witness stated that a pregnant woman had been barred from nursing her new-born baby, who died 12 days later. “She was instructed to fast to death and follow her children,” the witness said.
You can see the full court hearing here (all seven hours of it). A media summary of the verdict can be read here.
If anyone ever asks why you don’t respect religion, there’s your answer. These cult leaders convinced parents to watch their own children starve to death because they believed it would grant them direct access to Jesus.
The idea that a religious leader could convince followers to put their own lives in danger, using faith as the brainwashing weapon, isn’t limited to cults or foreign countries. It happens in our backyard, too. It happened with David Koresh. It happened with Jim Jones. It’s not limited to one religion. It’s not limited to well-defined cults (which mix poisonous substances with food or drink rather than starvation). It may even be more pernicious in certain situations because some behaviors—like vaccine denial—put other people in harm’s way.
And that’s before we even get into the Christian Nationalists attempting to legislate their archaic beliefs in order to cause maximum damage.
Thankfully, in this case, religious freedom wasn’t considered an excuse for this kind of irreversible damage. But what Mackenzie did isn’t a stretch from what countless religious leaders do all the time. Using God as leverage to convince gullible followers to make terrible decisions is, unfortunately, all too familiar.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
The world has always had people like him, but what fills me with despair is knowing there are people who believe and follow those people. There never an idea so absurd there would not be people who believed it, and there has never been a leader so corrupt and incompetent there would not be people who willingly followed. I do not like the human race's chances of long-term survival.
𝑀𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑛𝑧𝑖𝑒, 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 28 𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑜𝑐𝑖𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠, 𝑖𝑛𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑐𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑣𝑒, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑀𝑜𝑚𝑏𝑎𝑠𝑎, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑑𝑖𝑐𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑑 𝑜𝑛 𝑀𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑎𝑦.
Jim Jones didn't "force" his victims to drink the Flavor-aid either, but here we are. Indoctrination is one hell of a drug.