[New post] September 30 2023 Who Stands Between Each of Us and the Infinite Serves Neither: the Case of Kenya’s Shakahola Massacre
jayofdollhousepark posted: " In Kenya as throughout much of Africa, theocratic American colonialist policies have been abetted by our puppet regimes to centralize authority to the carceral state and contain the regional insurgencies of Islamic fundamentalism" Torch of Liberty
In Kenya as throughout much of Africa, theocratic American colonialist policies have been abetted by our puppet regimes to centralize authority to the carceral state and contain the regional insurgencies of Islamic fundamentalism, and the Shakahola Massacre, like the savaging practices of the Lord's Resistance Army, reminds us that the Pentecostal Church is identical in all but its rhetoric to ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram, and equal as a terrorist threat wherever it finds a tyrant who has uses for fear as legitimation of authority in the subjugation of fellow human beings. .
Here we may witness the inevitable degeneration of the disease of faith weaponized in service to power, and its end result in dehumanization, brutality, perversions, crimes against humanity, atrocities, theft of the soul, and death.
This distant echo and reflection of the Pentecostal fundamentalist capture of the Republican Party in 1980 which engineered the Guatemalan Genocide to test its theories of state terror and control of the masses as slave labor, and for now reached apogee in the Stolen Election of 2016 and the capture of the state by the Fourth Reich under its figurehead Traitor Trump, this terror we have exported globally as imperial dominion must remind us that we here in America are not immune to its evils, for we have authored them.
As written by Elle Hardy in New Lines Magazine, in an article entitled In Tragedy's Wake, Kenya Grapples With How To Combat Dangerous Cults:
Over 400 died in the recent Shakahola Massacre, but regulating the world of American-inspired Pentecostal pastors is far from straightforward; n late June, Joseph Juma Buyuka died after a 10-day hunger strike at Kenya's Shimo La Tewa Prison. No ordinary prisoner of conscience, Buyuka had been detained along with 64 fellow followers of the radical preacher Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, leader of Good News International Ministries, the doomsday cult behind over 400 confirmed deaths in what has become known as the Shakahola Massacre.
Buyuka was reportedly one of Mackenzie's key lieutenants while they lived in the Shakahola Forest, a secluded area north of the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa. In one of the worst peacetime death tolls in modern African history, officials estimate that at least 800 victims starved themselves to death — with some of the 427 exhumed bodies showing signs of murder.
Authorities moved in on the rural encampment in April, after elders in nearby villages reported emaciated children arriving and begging for food, as wretched skeletal bodies began overwhelming the local morgue. Under Mackenzie's spell, Shakahola victims, largely impoverished young people and desperate young families, had undergone a regime of extreme fasting in an attempt to hasten a meeting with Jesus.
Reportedly already too weak to walk when he was first arraigned at court, Buyuka and 64 others were being investigated for, among other things, murder and manslaughter, attempted suicide, religious radicalization and cruelty and neglect toward children.
The Shakahola Massacre is possibly the worst cult mass suicide since Jim Jones' Peoples Temple saw 900 followers perish at "Jonestown" in Guyana in 1978. Both Jones and Mackenzie appear to have been inspired by the same obscure American preacher who died in the 1960s. An unalloyed tragedy in its own right, the events have many in Kenya as well as the wider African continent questioning the influence of rogue and radical preachers — and those from farther afield who have inspired them.
Mackenzie, who has denied culpability in the massacre, comes from the most extreme end of the evangelical Pentecostal-charismatic movement. In 2020, the World Christian Encyclopedia counted 644 million Pentecostals and charismatics worldwide, with 230 million of those on the African continent. One of the key factors in the rise of the movement, centered on the role of the Holy Spirit, is that it has no denominational hierarchy to provide oversight and vetting of pastors.
In the Pentecostal tradition, the only thing that pastors need to hold serious moral and spiritual authority is followers. The most charismatic, in both senses of the word, tend to rise to the top. On the one hand, this is a blessing, providing a more culturally and materially accessible form of faith to the developing world. But equally, this unfettered way of "doing church" has resulted in a new generation of extremist preachers.
Though undoubtedly a horrific outlier of Pentecostalism, Mackenzie is a self-taught pastor whose force of personality turned him into perhaps this century's most prolific cult leader — and, as Buyuka's recent death shows, one who still has a powerful hold over his followers from behind bars.
As authorities work their way through the bodies, the massacre is prompting serious questions about whether religious leaders ought to be subject to regulation and just where the boundaries of church and state lie. Kenya's President William Ruto, himself an evangelical, launched a task force to look into enacting new laws to crack down on rogue churches and pastors, which led to the National Council of Churches fearing an attack on their religious freedom.
Weeks after the initial discovery of bodies in April, survivors were being found hiding under bushes, still refusing food and water. At the rescue center that housed them, many continued to deny themselves sustenance. It was then that the authorities charged "the 65" with attempted suicide — a misdemeanor punishable by two years' imprisonment — and attempted to force-feed them.
In an August court appearance, Mackenzie held firm, telling journalists that those who want to see Jesus have to undergo trials while on earth.
"Go read John 12, which states that don't be afraid of what befalls you," he said. "However, be patient. This is in accordance with the preachings of Jesus Christ." The only earthly sin he had committed, Mackenzie claimed, was eating — and the moment he stopped eating, he too would join his heavenly father. Mackenzie's lawyer Wycliffe Makasembo stepped in to stop him from speaking further, advising journalists to not "quote any sentiments that my client has made, apart from Bible verses that he has mentioned."
Out on Shakahola's 800 acres of ochre fields, where authorities and families are still sifting through mounds of upturned dirt for remains, Mackenzie's biblical justifications are of little concern.
A pathologist working on the case said that the victims' remains showed signs of extreme starvation. Some appeared to have been murdered, with signs of smothering and blunt force trauma. Investigators say that autopsies have raised suspicions of organ harvesting among the deceased, while Kenya's Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki said there are fears that some of the scores of dead children may have been victims of sexual abuse.
An estimated 400 followers remain missing. Many of them had moved to the forest from around the country and, in a few cases, internationally, lured by Mackenzie's radical online preaching. Their families' trauma has been compounded by the incapacity of regional authorities to process the sheer number of bodies. Complex and lengthy identification processes, such as DNA testing, are placing a burden on relatives, most of whom have limited resources and need to travel to the remote region to give samples.
In the beginning, one former congregant told a local reporter, Mackenzie's sermons "were normal," but from 2010 "his 'End Times' messages began." It is unclear precisely what led to Mackenzie's radicalization during this period but he found many followers willing to move with him in that direction. Directed to retreat from the world to prepare for the end of days, Mackenzie's ministry pulled children out of school, entering followers into church-arranged marriages and disconnecting them from their communities.
Julius M. Gathogo, a theology professor at Kenyatta University, told New Lines that although Mackenzie had a stint as a televangelist, he was "virtually unknown" to most Kenyans before the Shakahola massacre came to light. Before founding his Good News International Ministry in 2003, Mackenzie had worked as a nighttime taxi driver in the capital of Nairobi.
During this time, Gathogo said, Mackenzie was "arrested four times for his controversial sermons, but acquitted after every time due to lack of evidence." In one such incident in October 2017, police rescued 93 children from his care and the preacher was charged with promoting radicalization. "The pastor has brainwashed residents" against schools and hospitals, one local official later told reporters, explaining that Mackenzie was teaching children an extreme form of Christianity in an unregistered church school. But again, Mackenzie was acquitted. A year later, residents in a town near the massacre site demolished one of his churches, protesting what they decried as false Christian teachings.
Mackenzie's increasingly public pronouncements saw him lock horns with a prominent local member of Parliament in the region of Malindi, Aisha Jumwa, now the government's secretary of public service and gender. Jumwa denounced the teachings that saw children leaving their allegedly "satanic" education and accused Mackenzie of bribing security agencies to turn a blind eye to his bizarre activities.
"It is absurd that despite having been arrested about three times and charged," she said at the time during a public rally, "the pastor is still scot-free and continues with his work of radicalizing schoolchildren."
Mackenzie, who preaches rejection of secular institutions, nevertheless replied that critics needed to go to court. "I am not afraid to serve my God," he said. In spite of the legal system's insistence of a lack of evidence, damning indictments of Mackenzie's preaching continued to emerge in public forums. One video surfaced on social media showing children aged 6 to 17 renouncing their secular education, declaring it ungodly.
In 2019, the preacher was again arrested for inciting his congregants against the new government identity card, called the "huduma namba" (service number). "Mackenzie called it satanic and likened it to the number of the beast, seen in the Book of Revelation," Gathogo said. By getting involved in a significant national issue, Gathogo said that Mackenzie "publicized himself for the wrong reasons."
If the huduma namba helped bring Mackenzie to prominence, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have accelerated his doomsday message and further radicalized his followers. For many among them, it was confirmation that the world was coming to an end and that Mackenzie was the prophet of the End Times. More and more followers began to quit their jobs and move to the forest, where some bought plots of land for $80 — about the price of a sheep, though the land was probably worth around 40 times this — in sections with names such as Galilee and Bethlehem.
Another act of God appeared to be the final death knell for many in the community. One victim, whose husband had bought a small plot of land and moved the family to the massacre site in 2020, said that they used to eat and drink but things changed when drought set in. Since October 2020, season after season of failed rains in East Africa have created the worst drought in 40 years. Mackenzie began telling his followers that they needed to "fast to meet Jesus."
Though Mackenzie's was clearly a fringe group, Kenya has proven fertile ground for new religious movements, many of which have emerged from Pentecostalism. In one of the most devout countries on earth, more than 85% of Kenyans identify as Christian. In the 21st century, Gathogo explained, the Afro-Pentecostal movement has become one of the dominant religious movements in the country — with about one-third of the population, or some 15 to 20 million people, adhering to it. In order to keep up, Gathogo notes, more traditional denominations such as Catholicism and Anglicanism are engaging in Pentecostal-style practices, such as faith healing and speaking in tongues.
"The British colonial government did not encourage Pentecostalism before 1963 when colonialism ended," Gathogo said, which helps explain the first wave of the movement as something more localized and authentic. A key part of the appeal of this strand of evangelical faith is "its ability to easily resonate with indigenous cultures," he added.
"This is in terms of their vibrant modes of worship," Gathogo said, "their noisiness, their forms of hospitality appear to reach the lowest in society." Pointing to the singing and dancing that gets worshippers inside the tent, he noted that these are part of indigenous African religiosity. "Hence, postcolonial Africa has to dance with the rhythms of Pentecostalism, which are influential across the social-religious divides."
Here, the lines between church and state are often blurred. At political rallies, Gathogo said, it is common to see performances from Pentecostal gospel artists. They are "influencing political events" by putting on a good show and appealing to the deep Christian beliefs, flecked with African spirituality, that flow through the country.
In this regard, Good News International was very much a wolf in sheep's clothing.
"Paul Mackenzie's religio-cultic outfit initially poses as an African Pentecostal church, that displays communality, hospitality and care for the lowly and needy in society, and vibrant drama-dancing-singing outfits," Gathogo said. Looking like other African-Pentecostal churches, "Mackenzie's Good News International Ministries impresses you with evangelical faith that takes the Bible seriously and believes in Jesus Christ as savior and lord."
Kapya John Kaoma, an expert on U.S. influence in East African churches, told New Lines that the second wave of American evangelical missionaries in the 2000s made a significant contribution to faith in the region. U.S.-funded groups opened schools and imported Christian television. Through this, both local and international fundamentalists found opportunities to set up shop in places where the regulation of education was weak.
One particular offshoot of Pentecostalism, the American-founded New Apostolic Reformation, "dumped" traditional pastors "in favor of this new group of people who felt they were neglected by the demands of the academy," Kaoma said. Disreputable institutions offered theology doctorates "within three months."
The new breed of pastors began pulling members away from mainline Christian denominations. "They are highly focused on the people who are in need of help, those who are economically disadvantaged, those who are sick or unemployed," he said. Their particular pulling power was healing and miracles. "As long as you're charismatic enough, you are able to control a group of people," Kaoma added, "and whatever you tell them to do, they do."
In the George W. Bush era, hardcore American evangelical groups were encouraged to push their ideology on USAID-funded programs in Africa. Kaoma said that, in turn, these groups began to "monopolize" print media, radio and, eventually, television. Mainstream Pentecostal churches began using American talking points, including vehemently anti-LGBT and anti-abortion views, opening the door for extremist preachers such as Mackenzie to push ever more radical ideas.
While indigenous African churches had their own theology, which wasn't necessarily opposed to these outside views, many local leaders, who had historically focused on healing, were invigorated by taking on "the modernity of the American Christian right, which they could watch on television," Kaoma said. The prosperity gospel, that most American of ideas, also became a powerful force.
Pastoral networks, not to mention sympathetic political figures, benefited greatly from this "health and wealth" brand of Christianity. As the saying goes, if a preacher can name it, he can claim it. Kaoma added that among many Christians in Africa, word from the West is highly revered. "Anything that is associated with whiteness in Africa has legitimacy," he said. "When Mackenzie is reading a book or citing something written by a white person, that has power."
This may help to explain why investigators believe that Mackenzie's radical turn came about when he became a devotee of William Branham, an American doomsday preacher prominent in the 1940s and '50s who, until Shakahola, was most notable for influencing Jim Jones.
Branham emerged from a small postwar movement called the New Order of the Latter Rain, which took on the established Pentecostal authority, itself not even 50 years old at the time. Latter Rain leaders wanted to practice the powers gifted by the Holy Spirit to Jesus' disciples — such as casting out demons, healing the sick and raising the dead — and, critically, they wanted to do it on demand rather than waiting for these gifts to be bestowed upon them.
The effect of Latter Rain on present-day Christianity cannot be understated, with direct descendants of the movement influential on many events, including the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and on prominent Brazilian and Korean megapreachers, among other personalities. Those influenced include mass murderers, such as Mackenzie. Though Branham is rejected by the vast majority of the Latter Rain movement's modern-day disciples and is not a popular figure in Kenya, according to Gathogo, his works managed to captivate this small group as it moved toward the most tragic of ends.
Called "the Message," Branham's sermons and books were churned out from his Indiana headquarters and distributed globally. He adopted a doctrine central to early Latter Rain preachers called "atomic power," which could be achieved through 40 days of fasting and prayer. In one 1961 revival sermon, Branham conceded that some of his followers had put their lives in danger from the extreme practice. Pregnant women, he said, "lose their mind" and "go into insane institutions from that."
In an interview with New Lines, Douglas Weaver, a religious studies professor at Baylor University, said that Branham was a leading divine healer in the United States in the 1940s and '50s who also launched "crusades" overseas. Branham began calling himself "the second John the Baptist," after the prophet who foreshadowed Christ, and predicting the second coming, which saw him become a favorite of doomsday preachers. The rogue preacher had so many "nutty doctrines," Weaver said, that by the 1960s, Pentecostals in the U.S. began to shy away from him. Yet the fact that Branham's ministry has continued to hold sway is an example of how some fundamentalist publications "are considered to be infallible interpretations of the Bible."
Weaver said that anybody who reads Branham and "wants to be what I would call an authoritarian prophet" can appeal to the preacher's legacy and say that God continues to speak through them as we reach the End Times. In a 1965 sermon shortly before his death in a car accident, Branham delivered a sermon in which he warned listeners that "no one wants to die" but that some among them would have to "die in martyrdom."
Though Branham was "eccentric," Weaver said, his sermons were variations of the idea that "we're in the end days and you need to have a prophet." Followers see him as an "infallible authority" who talks about the end, with generic prophecies about wars and other apocalyptic events. "He made pronouncements that people are simply supposed to follow," Weaver said, "so it could become cultic." Chief among them was that, if you believed his message, you would be raptured: that is, transported from Earth to heaven on the second coming of Christ. "You can take Branham's theology and go as far off the deep end as you want," Weaver added.
In Kenya and well beyond its borders, esoteric belief systems and new religious movements emerging from Pentecostal thought highlight the movement's lack of institutional oversight. The advent of social media also offers perverse incentives. Kenya is "awash with online recruitments where targets are incentivized to go to the extreme," Gathogo said. Believers are enticed with "promises for a better life, for a job" and told that they may find a spouse.
Gathogo explained that, in East and Central Africa, "failure to offer sound theological training" and "poor vetting in Afro-Pentecostal leadership" have seen warlords and drug runners like Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army establish theocratic enclaves with extremist beliefs. Unscrupulous pastors are offering "breakthroughs in all dimensions of life," Gathogo said, including visas for overseas work, or offering exhausted mothers ways to get their teenagers to behave. "A church where the founder cannot be disciplined by a higher authority or by established structures," he said, "cannot be trusted." After all, "we are all sinned and fallen short of God's glory."
There exists a spiritual marketplace of people seeking solace and support in pastors who offer solutions. Preachers like Mackenzie "take advantage of that," Kaoma said. Any success becomes the leader's success. Once followers find work, or love, they will often attribute that to the church, and donate money in kind, oiling the wheels of the pastor.
What is unusual in the case of the Shakahola Massacre, Kaoma noted, is that preachers like Mackenzie tend to hold the most sway in urban areas, where cost-of-living pressures and isolation from traditional communities are common. In rural areas, African-initiated religious movements, which are tied to health and community, are usually much more persuasive. The fact that Mackenzie took many followers with urban concerns and moved them to isolation in the forest, where they became willing to die for their newfound beliefs, might have contributed to the deadly success of his movement.
In this blurring of urban and rural religious divides, Mackenzie's movement is far from alone. Shakahola is the latest and most high-profile example of extreme African Pentecostal movements in rural communities exercising undue influence over their parishioners. In 2014, South African "professor" Lesego Daniel encouraged his congregation to drink poisonous chemicals as a form of communion, claiming that he had the gift of turning "petrol into pineapple." Two years later, his protege, pastor Lethebo Rabalago, gained infamy as the "Prophet of Doom" after he was found guilty of assault for spraying churchgoers with Doom-brand insecticide to help cast out demons that presented in the form of AIDS. Earlier this year, a Ghanaian pastor ordered church members to strip naked so that the Holy Spirit could move freely through them.
The rise of extremist preachers spanning the continent has amplified the voices of some religious leaders. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame championed a law that recently came into effect requiring pastors to have a theology degree before they can start their own congregations. It is said to have resulted in the closure of some 6,000 churches.
In the wake of Shakahola, Kenya's President Ruto launched a task force to review the legal and regulatory framework governing religious organizations, asking the public to submit their proposal on changes required to curtail religious extremist organizations. The 17-member committee is currently reviewing the public submissions. "The operation on criminals hiding behind religion is not a war against any faith or institution," Kindiki, the interior secretary, said at its establishment. "Crime knows no religion."
The task force's key responsibilities are identifying gaps that have allowed extremist religious organizations to set up shop in Kenya, as well as putting together a legal framework that prevents radical religious groups from operating in the country. This could include education standards for pastors — going against the grain of churches and movements emerging from Pentecostalism, which have traditionally flourished in poor communities where formal training can be hard to come by.
"As far as I'm concerned, it is necessary," Gathogo said. Yet for some, the government drawing the line on what can and can't be preached is a fraught development. Opponents of new regulations say that "churches should be left to reveal themselves," he added. Others have argued that the massacre was a one-off affair and that the state should have intervened in the case earlier but that, in general, churches should be left to self-regulate in order to gain communities' respect.
Reconciling deeply spiritual matters with political concerns is difficult in a country so steeped in faith. Many argue that the separation of church and state is a colonial idea that doesn't reflect the values of a modern African state. There is also the very real chance that "outlawed" preachers would attract followings by virtue of being subversive.
Those arguing for regulation, such as Gathogo, are urging Parliament to take their time on consulting and drafting an appropriate law, as rushing will see it fail in both the court of public opinion and the supreme court, where there is a risk that it will be deemed unconstitutional.
But no matter what laws are brought into place, whether they can effectively come to grips with a changing culture of faith is another issue entirely. Gathogo noted that Mackenzie is representative of the rise of new religious movements in 21st-century Africa.
"They interpret the Bible from an extremist position, and even avoid theological training, as they claim that the Holy Spirit is sufficient trainer," he said. "They reject decency and eventually end up as con artists."
Among this strain of preachers, "The leader is elevated to a deity, his word is law, and people are psyched to fear him," he added.
If successful, Kenya's laws may be looked at around the world as a way of reining in rogue operators, but they open up a legal and ethical minefield, not to mention the risk of turning pastors such as Mackenzie into martyrs.
For Gathogo, bringing in new standards for religious leaders speaks to broader issues of governance on the continent, where preachers are stepping in to fill the void left by states unable to meet people's material needs, let alone their spiritual ones.
"Africa does not need strong men," Gathogo said, "but strong institutions."
As written by Barbara Plett-Usher in the BBC, in an article entitled Pastor Mackenzie's Kenyan cult: The mother who fled Shakahola forest to save her children; "Salema Masha speaks softly, but her slender frame is animated by an inner strength that saved the lives of her five children.
One day in March she walked them out of a remote wilderness where followers of a Kenyan televangelist were starving themselves to death in the belief that they could meet Jesus faster.
Among the horrific stories emerging from the Christian doomsday cult in the East African country, Salema's stands out.
More than 200 bodies have been recovered so far from mass graves in the vast Shakahola forest on the southern coast of Kenya, and more are being dug up every day. Survivors are still being found hiding under trees and bushes in the 800-acre territory.
Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie opened the Good News International Church in 2003. He repeatedly attracted police attention with his claims that children should not go to school, and that medical treatments should be rejected.
In 2019 he shut down the church and invited his followers to move with him to Shakahola, a place he called a new "Holy Land".
Salema's husband was among those who heeded the call.
As she tells her story, she breastfeeds one-year-old Esther, who was born in the forest. Her eldest, a boy named Amani, is eight.
The mass suicide started in January. Salema says she followed instructions to begin fasting so that she could "get to heaven".
Mackenzie had been telling his followers for some time that the world was coming to an end. Initially he offered the forest as a sanctuary from the approaching apocalypse. But in a grisly twist it became a last stand to get to heaven before the "End of Days".
After seven days of fasting, Salema says she heard a voice from God telling her this wasn't his will and that she still had work to do in the world, so she stopped.
People around her were dying though - at one point she attended a funeral of eight children. It was called going to "sleep".
But they said: "If my children won't die, I should stop attending other peoples' funerals," she tells me.
Survivors say children were supposed to be the first to go, according to a macabre order drawn up by Mackenzie. Then the unmarried, the women, the men, and last of all, church leaders.
"When the child cries or asks for food or water, we were told to take a cane and beat them so that they could go and eat in heaven," Salema explains. "So I thought about it and I said I cannot go on with this situation, I can't eat while my child is starving. I told myself, if I feel this bad when I fast, how about my child?"
A BBC analysis of Mackenzie's sermons on video do not show him directly ordering people to stop eating. However, according to Salema, he was explicit in weekly gatherings on Saturdays.
"At first, the pastor dug... water wells [in the forest] and told us to wait for Jesus and we waited. But then, suddenly, he told us we should fast and go to heaven," she says.
When they questioned the order, as Salema did, they were told that if they delayed their deaths, heaven would be full: "The gate would be closed."
Much of Mackenzie's preaching focused on a new Kenyan national identity card that will include personal data encoded in an electronic chip - the "sign of the beast" he called it, to be avoided at all cost.
The cost was very high, and Salema discovered that her husband, one of Mackenzie's deputies, was involved in managing it. A friend told her that when he went to work, he was actually going to bury the dead.
One day in March he put his foot down, forcing the family to fast. Four days later he left for work and Salema saw her chance. She grabbed the children and left.
"My children fasted for four days without food and water, and they were crying," she says. "So, when I saw they were so weak, I gave them water and I told myself I couldn't allow my children to die."
The children were guided by the steely will of their mother and protected by her status as the wife of a Mackenzie aide.
Salema says she was challenged by other cult members but not stopped, and when she reached the main road after walking for several kilometres, got a lift from "a good Samaritan" to a safe place.
But other runaways were stopped. A group of male enforcers bearing machetes chased, beat, and dragged them back to the forest, in accounts told by survivors and former cult members.
Mackenzie surrendered to the authorities on 15 April. He denies ordering his followers to starve themselves. But the search and rescue operation found many dead children buried in his compound.
Police told local reporters they had learned from aides who had been detained that this was meant to be a way for Mackenzie to identify with Jesus' command to "let the little children come unto me," says journalist Marion Kithi.
Police also said that before Mackenzie left, he ordered his deputies to continue enforcing the mass starvation and burying those who died, according to Kithi.
It is the surviving children who've provided a lot of the information about what happened, says Victor Kaudo, a human rights activist from Haki Africa who first tipped off the police that young boys were dying in Shakahola.
Some of the adults refuse treatment even after they've been rescued. And there is suspicion that members of the cult are continuing to exert influence beyond the forest, quietly telling survivors to refuse food and medicine.
Kaudo says two people his group rescued and regarded as victims were actually "part of this militia that Mackenzie had," and needed to be separated from the others.
Former cult member Titus Katana says he knows most of Mackenzie's aides and the majority have been arrested. But this week a body was discovered lying in the forest, not buried beneath it. That makes him suspect some of the enforcers are still "supervising the process of people to fast".
Salema says Mackenzie's deputies came looking for her a week after she left and advised her to return, but did not threaten her.
But she knows others were not treated as kindly.
A woman came to her, asking for help to escape the cult with her children and find the money for transport back to their home village. Salema promised she would do so.
The woman went back to the forest to get her children and was never heard from again."
As written by David McKenzie and Bethlehem Feleke in CNN, in an article entitled How faith turned deadly for Kenyan cult followers who chose starvation as path to salvation; "The reddish soil of the Shakahola forest is still giving up its terrible secrets. Two hours drive from Kenya's coastal tourist town of Malindi, forensic teams turn off the tarred road into a thicket of thorn bush, entering a crime scene that came to light in mid-March.
CNN has traveled here as investigators uncover what could become one of the worst mass suicides in recent memory.
Detectives say that the cult community was split into eight separate settlements with biblical names such as Galilee and Bethlehem. In site after site, shallow graves disturb the dirt. Many of the graves were unmarked.
Already, more than 300 sets of bodies have been recovered. But Kenyan interior ministry officials say that scores of mass graves remain.
The cult was preparing for the end of the world under the instruction of their its powerful pastor, say investigators.
Followers believed that starvation was their ticket to their salvation
A charismatic leader
The revelation of mass graves has dominated headlines and shaken the collective psyche in a country where faith and religion are central.
Many find it difficult to comprehend the dark path that Pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie allegedly took his followers along.
But the trajectory it is all too familiar for cult specialists and psychologists. They contend that the "Shakahola Massacre," as it has been dubbed, bears all the hallmarks of destructive cults past and present.
"The pastor called me. He called me and said, 'my daughter, you are being left behind. When the ark is closed, you will be too late,'" says Agnes, as her children play on a reed mat in her yard in Malindi.
Like many former cult members, she was unwilling to share her full name.
Agnes, now 26, joined Mackenzie's church when she was still in high school along with other members of her family.
In Kenya, there is an old joke that if you lose your job, start a church or a charity. And sometime in the early 2000s, Mackenzie abandoned his job as a taxi driver and launched the Good News International Ministry.
Mackenzie became known for his fiery sermons. He drew a significant following, says an assistant pastor who worked with him for years until they had a falling out.
He did not wish to be named as he said he is a witness in the investigation.
"In the beginning, the church was good, there were no issues. The sermons were normal, but from 2010 his 'end time' messages began. It happened step by step," he says.
The assistant pastor says Mackenzie told his followers to pull their children out of school, discard their national IDs, avoid hospitals, and start preparing for the end of the world. Investigators say they have corroborated those details.
He drew in flight attendants and social workers; paramilitary police and professionals from all across Kenya.
At a recent hearing Mackenzie denied all knowledge of the horrors that witnesses, inspectors, and survivors believe happened in the Shakahola forest.
"I can tell nothing about that. Because I have been in custody for two months. So, I don't know what is going outside there. Have you been there?" he asked CNN.
When asked about the accusations that followers of his group had starved their children following his instructions, Mackenzie said he had "never seen anybody starving."
The pastor and his closest followers have been in custody since the mass graves were discovered, although they are yet to be charged as prosecutors continue to ask the court to extend the custody period to allow further investigation.
'Intoxicating power'
To understand the Shakahola cult, the focus must be on Mackenzie, says Rick Ross, a leading American cult expert who has studied destructive cults for decades.
"It's not the group; it's the leader. The more power they have, the more it becomes intoxicating," he says.
Ross says that from Charles Manson and David Koresh to Ugandan cult leader Joseph Kibwetere, the desire is to control.
"My feeling is Mackenzie was the same. He was a man that no matter how much control and power he had over his followers, it was never enough," says Ross.
Mackenzie exerted that control using his pulpit – and his charismatic oratory both in his church in Malindi and online.
"Look what will befall all nations of this world. Anger, frustration, and many things, and many disasters will make human beings cry without help. That is what will cover the world," he prophesied to his followers in early 2020 in a nearly three-hours harangue.
Mackenzie's prophecies had an impact. He persuaded Agnes and many like her to leave school.
Agnes says she shaved her head and entered a church-arranged marriage.
"Some of his preaching turned into reality. He said that diseases would come and then the Coronavirus came," she says.
Last year, she moved her whole family to the forest.
Finding a purpose
While cult leaders are central to their cults, they still need to amass a following.
Dr. Geoffrey Wango, a professor of psychology at Nairobi University, says that, paradoxically, destructive cults give people hope.
"The psychology of it is simple. The cult leader offers hope and promise and seeks easy targets," he says.
In the case of Mackenzie, he says, the hope is one of salvation and to turn your back on the stresses of daily survival.
While the draw of cults is universal, Wango believes that you can't separate the central position of religion in Kenya.
Religion permeates right through the highest echelons of government. Kenya's President Ruto became the country's first evangelical president last year and built a place of worship in the presidential compound.
Ruto condemned the grim discovery at Shakahola in the strongest terms, saying "we must as a nation continue to be on the lookout for those who abuse even the religious sector," adding that Mackenzie belongs in jail.
Poverty is also a significant factor in driving people to more extreme preachers, Wango said.
"People are looking for a way out of their poverty, a way out of their desperation. And here is a religion that offers them a way out," he says.
Of course, there are extensive examples of the wealthy joining cults. The recent Nxivm cult in the US drew in the rich and powerful.
But Ross, who helped expose Nxivm, says cults exploit individual vulnerabilities.
"It could be anyone, but if someone is going through a difficult time in their life, or you lose your job, or do badly in school, or struggling financially, you are feeling unfulfilled, then a group like this comes along and it can be very alluring," he says.
Once inside a cult, both agree that isolation – physical and mental – is a critical factor that helps drive the horrors of doomsday cults.
An isolated community
2018, Kenyan authorities started cracking down on Mackenzie. They arrested and detained him for his anti-government stance – but never prosecuted him.
"That is when he said that God had told him to close his church and that he was no longer a pastor," says his former assistant pastor.
Mackenzie would soon start his forest scheme. Agnes says he charged them around $80 for a patch of land.
"There were more than a thousand people living in the forest," she says.
The assistant pastor believes it was around 300 families.
Many people had no idea where their loved ones had disappeared to.
When Francis Wanje got wind earlier this year that his daughter and her family were inside the Shakahola forest with other cult members, his first reaction was that it had to be wrong.
"I could not even believe it. I was told something bad was happening in the forest. But I couldn't understand how she could be there," he says.
Wanje's daughter and son-in-law both had decent jobs.
He knew that they were attending Mackenzie's church. But when they moved to the forest, they told him they were relocating to a different part of Kenya.
"The social isolation is critical and has striking similarities with other destructive cults," says Ross.
It's in the forest that investigators say Mackenzie's cult took on its final form.
In a court affidavit obtained by CNN, inspectors wrote that Mackenzie told his followers sometime early this year that the end of the world was imminent and that they should start fasting.
"He stated that fasting would start with the children until the last child died then followed by the youth, then women and lastly men and that he would be the last to die and ascend to heaven," the affidavit reads.
Kenya's state pathologist says many of the remains found show signs of extreme starvation, some were smothered, and a few showed blunt force trauma. There were scores of children amongst the dead.
After Wanje received his disturbing call he organized a private rescue mission to the forest where he says they found his oldest grandchild.
He was deeply malnourished – his two siblings were already dead.
Wanje says they were suffocated by their parents.
"It's so painful, I could not even explain it because it's something that I didn't even think of in my life," he says.
"And I wonder how my child, my daughter, could change to be such an animal to kill her own children just because she wanted to go see Jesus."
Aftershocks of Shakahola massacre
Village elders in a nearby forest say they notified the authorities that starving children were escaping the forest from as early as late last year.
The president and other senior leaders have apologized to Kenyans for the slow response and made promises to regulate religious sects.
"Without a doubt, I can say definitively, had the police responded sooner, then lives would have been saved. I feel as a country we have failed these Kenyans," says Khalid Hussein, the director of Haki Africa, a group that helped expose the cult.
Agnes says that as time went on, the life in the cult became more extreme.
"Each month there were meetings where he told us what Jesus had said. It was heartbreaking," she says.
Agnes says she escaped the forest in September last year when she was told she couldn't get help from another woman to deliver her third child. Mackenzie's spell was broken.
But the aftershocks of the Shakahola massacre could be long-lasting. Police pulled scores of followers from the forest – many of whom didn't want to be rescued.
Even those who were dying.
"When they got to the hospital some gave false names and others refused to be treated, they didn't want to be helped, they didn't want to miss out," says Dr. David Man'ong'o, medical superintendent of the Malindi subcounty hospital.
Eventually, they had to hand them back to police.
The rescued followers, many of them either witnesses or still under suspicion, are being kept in a nearby rescue center where therapists are trying to break their emotional and psychological ties to Mackenzie.
Last week, the Director of Public Prosecutions said that 65 people rescued from the forest were charged with attempted suicide for refusing to eat.
Rick Ross says it could be a months-long process to "deprogram" cult members.
For loved ones of those who survived, it will also be a painful road. Wanje says he will get his grandson back in a few weeks.
"He went through hell. He went through hell. When he was rescued, he told them that if you had come maybe a bit later, he would have already gone to see Jesus because his grave was already there," he says.
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