Everyone hopes for a miracle. And in Kenya—where evangelical Christianity is so popular that the President frequently prays with preachers during official events—the more miracles a pastor performs, the more followers he will gain. Some swiftly build large congregations and become multimillionaires. In 2018, Halua Yaa, a woman in the coastal town of Malindi, heard about a pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who, it was said, could heal the sick. Yaa’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Bright Angel, had mysterious symptoms: she had severe stomach pains and often threw up after eating. “She looked like she was going to die,” Yaa told me recently. Doctors gave her medicine and an I.V. drip, but nothing helped. “I went to the hospital for almost a year and a half, and there were no changes,” Yaa said. When she heard that Mackenzie was holding a “crusade” in Malindi—a kind of religious festival—she decided to attend. “You feel like, if Mackenzie can talk with Jesus for him to do miracles, he can also tell Jesus to take away this disease,” she said.
Yaa is fifty-four and petite, with full cheeks, cornrows, and a mischievous sense of humor. The previous decade had been difficult for her. After ten years of marriage, her husband left her for another woman, and she was forced to raise six children on her own. She developed a condition that caused her to lose sight in one eye. But she was smart and industrious; she started a café and eventually a farm in the countryside, built a home, and sent her children to school. Then, in 2010, one of her teen-age daughters got pregnant, and Yaa took on the responsibility of raising her granddaughter, too. She came to believe that this time in her life had been so painful because she was not devout enough, and found comfort going to a Catholic church. “Even if your heart is down, the word of God makes you hope,” she said.
Mackenzie ran a Pentecostal church called Good News International Ministries, on a spacious compound in Malindi, where he also lived. He was slender, with protruding eyes and a temperament that easily escalated from calm to fierce, and was known as a fervent preacher of the Gospels. He urged his followers to avoid television, sports, and other secular pastimes, to refuse Western medicine, and to take their children out of school. “I was told by the spirits to tell the people that education is evil—that it comes from man,” Mackenzie told me not long ago. He claimed to speak directly with God. When Yaa attended his crusade, she was impressed by his sermons, which promised that the apocalypse would bring believers eternal bliss. “I was not afraid of the end of the world,” she said. She was awed by the miracles she saw performed. One day, a girl was having a seizure, and when Mackenzie prayed over her the seizure stopped. Yaa heard afterward that her epilepsy had been cured. Another day, Mackenzie prayed over a man with a deep, infected wound; later that week, it seemed to have healed. Soon, she started attending his church.
In 2019, after getting into legal trouble for telling his followers not to send their children to school, among other things, Mackenzie closed his church in Malindi. But his assistant pastors contacted Yaa and told her that Mackenzie was starting a new community about forty miles away, in an eight-hundred-acre forest called Shakahola. Followers could move there, build a home, and worship every day. Yaa decided to bring her granddaughter; hundreds of others went, too. Many sold their possessions and donated the resulting money to the church. A flight attendant reportedly left her career and sold the land she owned for about fifty thousand dollars, which she gave to the pastor. Yaa sold her goat for almost fifty dollars, a significant amount for her family, and gave some of the proceeds to Mackenzie. “I was excited,” Yaa said. “I thought I was going somewhere good.”
The forest was vast and dense, and life there was quiet. Followers lived in mud huts on shambas—plots of communal land—in small villages that Mackenzie gave Biblical names: Bethlehem, Nazareth. Yaa was in Jericho. The pastor came to each village regularly to lead lengthy prayer sessions. “Everyone was in their village praying,” Yaa said. “No other activities.” Mackenzie told followers that they should fast, to bring them closer to Christ. She had never read anything like that in the Bible. She tried to obey, but sometimes she sneaked off to a nearby market to buy biscuits, rice, and milk for herself and her granddaughter. “You cook quickly, you eat, you hide, you take away the fire,” she said. Meanwhile, all that prayer appeared to be working: her granddaughter began eating porridge without vomiting, and gaining weight. After a month, they went back to Malindi. “Bright Angel was healed,” Yaa said. “I was feeling good.”
In early 2022, Yaa decided to return to Shakahola: she was suffering from a vaginal fistula, a condition that caused her pain and shame. She invited two friends to come along. One of her friends, Halifu, a thirty-five-year-old fruit-and-vegetable seller, hoped to get help for her depression after her husband died of a stroke. “I heard people were being prayed for, and they were healed,” she told me. The other friend, Remi, a twenty-seven-year-old who had grown up poor and dropped out of school, hoped to get relief for chronic chest pain and to improve her economic prospects. (Both women requested that I use only their first names, for their safety.) She had already attended Mackenzie’s church, and he had given her clothes. “When I went there, and Mackenzie prayed for me, all the problems I had in my home would disappear,” she said.
But, when they arrived at Shakahola, the mood of the community had changed. The fasting was more extreme. At first, they were given two slices of bread and a cup of tea every day. After three weeks, the women said, they were told that there would be no more food: followers had to starve themselves to death, in order to meet Jesus in Heaven. “I became afraid,” Yaa recalled. They wanted to leave, but were forbidden. Mackenzie had put together a security force, which patrolled the villages with machetes, hammers, and knives and prevented members from escaping. “It was crazy,” Remi said. “We were being locked up.” Yaa noticed that, when Mackenzie led prayer sessions, “even his eyes started to change. He was not like a human being.” She recalled him saying that the children would be the first to fast to death, then the women, then the men. “Whether you want to or not, there is no one who is going home,” he said. “You’re going to be buried here.”
The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds. The colonial government tried to suppress it, because a faction of pro-independence freedom fighters belonged to the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa, which included messages about decolonization in its hymns. But after independence, in 1963, Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Christianity spread. They emphasized charismatic forms of worship—visions, spiritual healing, speaking in tongues—and a gospel that promised prosperity to the faithful. “If you want your church to be full, do what I call ‘spiritual gymnastics,’ ” Martin Olando, a scholar of African Christianity at the Bishop Hannington Institute, in Mombasa, told me. “Jump up and down, prophesize good tidings, tell people what they want to hear.” By the nineties, Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, enjoyed a beneficial relationship with Arthur Kitonga, an influential Pentecostal bishop. “President Moi has been appointed by God to lead this country,” Kitonga said at the time. William Ruto, Kenya’s current President, and its first evangelical one, brought gospel singers into his campaign team and party, and has donated cars, and thousands of dollars, to evangelical churches. His wife, Rachel, invited the U.S.-based televangelist Benny Hinn to preach with her at a crusade. (This year, Hinn apologized for giving fake prophecies. “There were times when I thought God had showed me something that He wasn’t showing me,” he told the Christian podcast “Strang Report.”)
Mackenzie was born in 1973, in Kwale County, on the Kenyan coast. His father, a shop manager, and his mother, a housewife, raised him and his nine siblings as evangelical Christians. “He was a good boy, he loved to go to church,” Robert, one of his brothers, told me. Mackenzie sang in the choir and gave guest sermons as a child. At home, he danced to gospel music. But he could quickly turn violent. When he was sixteen, Robert said, he got into an argument with another boy during a game of hide-and-seek and began viciously hitting him. “When you get him angry, he can beat you,” Robert said. After graduating from secondary school, Mackenzie worked as a street hawker in Mombasa, then drove a taxi in Malindi. He attended a Baptist church and began delivering popular sermons. In 2003, he founded Good News International, in the home of a follower. Joseph Katana, an early church member, said, “He was this person who, even when he just talked to you and gave you advice, you would end up feeling better.”
Initially, Mackenzie’s church reminded Robert of the one they grew up in, which focussed on careful reading of the Bible. But over time Mackenzie’s teachings became more severe. Julius Gathogo, who teaches religious studies at Kenyatta University, told me, “He was very eloquent. But he went to the extremes.” Mackenzie began arguing that hospitals and schools were demonic. “Even Jesus never went to school,” he said in one sermon. “Peter was never learned.” Mackenzie seemed able to see the future. “He told us that there was a sickness coming and that everything would be closed down,” Robert said. “After two years, Covid-19 came.”
In 2015, Mackenzie started a broadcasting company to spread his sermons, and eventually acquired a local station, which he called Times TV. He had married a woman named Agnes, with whom he had a son and a daughter, but she died in 2009, of complications related to asthma. He got married again, to a woman named Joyce, but she died in 2017—of pneumonia, Mackenzie told his brother. By then, hundreds of followers attended his church every day, but his teachings about school were also generating controversy. Aisha Jumwa, then Malindi’s member of Parliament, publicly denounced him. Samson Zia Kahindi, Shakahola’s representative in the county assembly, told me, “He knows how to write, he knows how to speak English, he knows how to read. Why are you denying it for others?” In 2017, Mackenzie was charged with promoting radicalization through the church, and failing to send his own children to school. He was acquitted. Two years later, he was arrested again, and found guilty of running an unlicensed TV studio.
According to a Kenyan parliamentary report, Mackenzie may have been influenced by the teachings of Dave and Sherry Mackay, the Australian founders of a fringe religious movement known as A Voice in the Desert, started in 1981. The Mackays preach about the “end times” and instruct their followers to surrender their earthly possessions and relocate to an isolated community to serve the group’s leaders. In 2019, according to the report, Mackenzie hosted an associate of the Mackays, who gave sermons to his congregation, telling them to follow Mackenzie to a “promised land.” (The Mackays have denied any contact with Mackenzie.) Then, for a time, Mackenzie seemed to go silent. One of his former employees told me that he was searching for a new home for the church. “He wanted a sacred place, a huge place,” he said. The employee said that Mackenzie’s closest deputy, Smart Mwakalama, suggested that they could get land cheaply in Shakahola. “We are living in the last days,” Mackenzie said, in a sermon released on his YouTube channel in 2020. “The wrath is strong on this earth. . . . We don’t have much time.”
On a hot day last November, I drove from Malindi to Shakahola. By the time I got out of the city, rain was falling heavily on the lush, green countryside. The roads became mush, and I had to stop several times to determine whether I could pass through pools of water without being submerged. I came to a village bordering the forest. Beyond the thickets of trees, where birds sheltered from the rain, lay mud huts built by Mackenzie’s followers. The forest seemed like a fortress.
Many parishioners had been excited to follow Mackenzie to Shakahola. Joseph Katana, the early member, said that joining Mackenzie’s church, in 2012, “saved me from madness.” Joseph had suffered from mental illness since childhood, sometimes having manic shouting fits during which his parents had trouble restraining him. When he was twenty-four, his parents took him to Mackenzie for help. He lived at the church for two years, with other parishioners dealing with mental illness. The church leaders tied his arms and feet with rope, he said, and kept him on a mattress in the church’s main space. “They feared I would run away,” he told me. “They freed me to eat.” During services, he and the others were moved under a tree outside, so that they wouldn’t disturb other church members. Mackenzie often prayed over Joseph, and it seemed to work. “Within three or four months, I was feeling free,” Joseph said. He could relax and sleep through the night, and visit his family without problems. He spent the next several years renting an apartment from Mackenzie and working as the church’s watchman. “Mackenzie told me that, when I go back home, maybe the sickness will attack me again, so I have to serve God all of my life,” he said. Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth, went to Shakahola with their five small children, while Joseph remained in Malindi and worked part time as a tour guide. Elizabeth had seen Mackenzie perform miracles, including the healing of a mentally ill woman who seemed, she said, to be “possessed by demons.”
By 2020, Mackenzie had begun telling his followers to fast for the sake of their souls. He may have been inspired by the teachings of William Branham, an American evangelical preacher who became known in the forties and fifties for his doomsday theology. (Kenyan investigators found copies of Branham’s sermons in Shakahola.) Branham gave tirades against the health and education systems, and encouraged fasting as a way of achieving “atomic power,” a form of spiritual strength. He later mentored Jim Jones, the cult leader who orchestrated the 1978 murder-suicide of more than nine hundred followers in Jonestown, Guyana. According to former followers and the parliamentary report, Mackenzie eventually told his people that the world was ending, and that everyone would soon die; the only way to insure a place in Heaven was to starve to death. “Getting to Heaven is not as easy as bread and margarine,” he said, in one sermon. “You have to deny yourself and go against yourself. You have to get to the point of ending your life for the sake of Jesus.” Children would also have to fast. “Let them die,” he said. “Is there any problem? It’s Jesus who gave you those children.” He tasked a group of security officers with enforcing the fast, according to former accomplices and Kenyan prosecutors, and put Mwakalama, his deputy, in charge. Mwakalama is trim and bearded, with small-boned features, and had previously been an accountant at a hotel. “He was very close to Mackenzie,” Elizabeth said.
Elizabeth tried to fast, but she was nursing a baby and began to sneak food at night and get water from streams where animals drank. Soon, though, she learned that people were truly starving themselves. The security force punished people who resisted or tried to escape by tying them to trees outside, according to witness testimony and reports from the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights. When people seemed close to dying, some were told that it was their “wedding day”; Mackenzie and members of the security force would show up at their homesteads and strangle them, to send them to Heaven. (In the case of children, mothers or aunts were sometimes given this final task.) Mackenzie watched the strangulations, Elizabeth and other followers said, and made others watch as well. “I felt hurt and powerless,” she said. When Joseph visited his family in Shakahola, he was distressed by what he saw. A woman who had H.I.V. had stopped taking her retrovirals and soon died. Children had fevers and ringworm. Many people were dying of starvation, or in “wedding” ceremonies. He persuaded his wife to escape with their kids, but others refused to go with them. “Some stayed and are dead,” he said. “They believed that was the way to see Jesus.”
Some followers were as fervent as Mackenzie. One of the church’s earliest members was Mary Kahindi, a shopkeeper in her forties. Mackenzie’s church had initially held services in her parents’ home; her family eventually left the church, but Mary became more deeply involved. She married Mwakalama, the deputy, closed her shop, and took her children out of school. She insisted that the TV be turned off when she was around, her sister Betty recalled; everything was “satanic.” She moved to Shakahola with her husband and children, saying that it was the end times. “She had beautiful kids,” Betty told me. In the end, Mary and Mwakalama came out of the forest, but none of their children did. When Betty asked her recently what happened to them, Mary started crying and refused to answer. Betty suspects that Mary and Mwakalama let their children die in Shakahola. “I’m still thinking, till today, how my sister got to that point,” Betty said. “She was a good mother. How the heart changed.”
Robert Mwakwaya, a chef in Malindi, told me that his wife, Delena Kafadzi, went to Shakahola in 2021, with her sister. Two things prompted her to go. First, the government had introduced a controversial digital-I.D. system called Huduma, which collected biometric data; Mackenzie told members that this was “the mark of Satan.” Then, when Covid-19 arrived, Kafadzi was resistant to taking the vaccine, and came to believe that the pandemic was a sign of the end times. She told her husband that she had bought a farm a hundred miles away and had to be there for months at a time; in fact, she was in Shakahola. “She was my wife. I trusted her,” he told me. When she returned, she had shaved her head and was thin and dirty. “Even when she faced me, she never wanted to maintain eye contact,” he said.
Kafadzi tried to persuade him to sell some of their land, presumably to give the money to Mackenzie. She took things from their house to the forest: chairs, a table, a mattress, their children’s bicycles. One day, she took their kids—a fourteen-year-old girl and nineteen-year-old twin boys. When he spoke to the kids over the phone, they said that they were at the farm. “She brainwashed them,” he said. In the end, her sister, Joya, was the only one who made it out of the forest. All she would tell him was that his wife was no longer alive. “She knows that they are all dead,” he said. (Joya did not respond to requests for comment.) When I visited him at a café that he runs, he told me that he felt betrayed by his wife. “In my dreams, those kids, they call me when they are suffering and tell me that they are hungry,” he said.
Halua Yaa and her friends were trapped in Shakahola for months. Every day, followers gathered outside to pray for hours with one of Mackenzie’s assistant pastors. The three women survived on wild fruit that they covertly foraged in the forest. “At times, I’d get so dizzy to the point of shortness of breath,” Remi said. They feared the security force, which roved from house to house, dragging out those who refused to fast. “Security beat them to death, or attacked them with machetes, or strangled them,” Yaa said. She saw a woman and her children killed because they tried to escape. Around six months into their time in the forest, the women helped another parishioner who was going into labor. The woman had complications during the birth, and decided to seek medical help outside the forest, but the security officers stopped her. “They came to our homestead and tried to take the baby,” Remi said. “When the mother refused to hand over the baby, they hit it with a hammer on the head, and it died immediately.” They killed the mother afterward, Remi added. Yaa questioned why God would allow such suffering. “We cried at night, we cried in the afternoon,” she said.
One member of Mackenzie’s security force was a man named Lucky Chanzera, who had joined the church in 2018. He quickly came to believe that Mackenzie’s miracles were fake: he once saw Mackenzie plotting to stage one with a parishioner. “He used to go to specific people, touch them, and then have them pretend that they’ve been healed,” Chanzera told me. By then, though, he was making money from the church for doing odd jobs and for recruiting other members. When he joined the security force in Shakahola, he found that, though others lived in harsh conditions, officers were treated like kings. His family wasn’t expected to fast; instead, he was given sacks of maize during the harvest and paid a stipend of roughly seventeen dollars every two months. “In Kenya, it’s very hard to find a job,” he said.
Chanzera patrolled the villages each day with a machete to make sure that no one tried to leave. “Once you go to that place, you’re not supposed to come out again,” he said. He took his orders from Mwakalama, a “heartless animal,” who selected the team’s next victims for strangulation—“mostly women and children.” He saw one colleague strangle a woman as Mwakalama watched. Another day, he saw five or six people lying dead on the ground—some of whom were likely killed in a similar manner. He saw security officers rape women in the community, but he claimed that he didn’t participate, telling me, “I have a wife.” He also claimed that he never personally took part in the killings. “What I regret so much is, there was a day some women were running away, and they had already escaped, but we took them back,” Chanzera said. “We never saw them again.” At the end of 2022, Mwakalama told Chanzera that he would have to give up one of his own children to be sacrificed. According to Chanzera, Mwakalama said that he had done so himself already. “That’s why I had to run away,” Chanzera said. He escaped with his family after Christmas, pretending that they were on their way to a wedding.
Another man, named Eunity Charo, spent about two years on the security force. He was paid well and ate meals of meat, rice, and ugali, a maize dish. If he recruited a group of between ten and twenty people to Shakahola, he could receive a bonus of four to seventeen dollars; he told me that the security officers were also paid for killings. “If you strangled anybody in that church to death, you were given money,” he said. “That was, like, a sacrifice to Mackenzie.” As the months went by, he stopped believing in Mackenzie’s teachings and prayed only to escape the forest. But members of the security force were themselves being monitored, he thought—including their use of cell phones—by Mackenzie’s most loyal deputies. “If we went against his will or his law, we’d also be killed,” Charo said. “So, we did those things.” At first, he told me that he didn’t want to think about his role in the killings, because it was “very painful.” Then he backtracked, saying, “I thank God I didn’t kill, but I know I put three families in that place.” (Victor Kaudo, the head of the Malindi Community Human Rights Centre, was skeptical of both men’s claims of innocence.)
In mid-2022, four security officers arrived at Remi’s hut, took her away, and raped her. “There, in the bushes,” Remi told me. “I was very scared.” She had initially felt that her time in Shakahola was proving beneficial: her chest pains seemed to be getting better. But after the rape the women began making plans to escape. They studied the routes that Mackenzie and his officers walked while on patrol. Remi, who was pregnant, ate wild dates to get enough energy for the journey. In February, 2023, they ran into the forest. “We left the others in dire conditions,” Remi said. “Because of the hunger, some were very confused—they just sat in a corner and cried.” The women walked at night and slept under trees during the day. They knew that, to the west, the forest was thicker and easier to hide in, so they travelled in the direction that the sun set. They drank from watering holes with their hands. Shakahola borders a national park, so they had to take care to avoid lions, hyenas, and leopards.
On the fourth day of walking, they reached a road and flagged down a car, which took them to a village. “We broke down and started crying,” Yaa said. Residents gave them clean water to drink and food to eat. Eventually, members of the Malindi Community Human Rights Centre brought them back to Malindi. The women refused to tell anyone about the fasting or the strangulations; Yaa was still afraid that Mackenzie might track them down and have them killed. But they told Kaudo, from the Human Rights Centre, that sexual violence was happening in the forest. “They still had some belief in Mackenzie, so they felt they needed to protect him,” Kaudo told me. “But they gave us the crucial information that led to everything.”
Recently, I met Kaudo on a street in Malindi. He is short with a full beard, and possesses an aura of sadness. Kaudo had first visited Mackenzie’s church, out of curiosity, in 2019. “It was packed full,” Kaudo said. Mackenzie told him that he would need to shave his beard if he wanted to become a member, and that an Arsenal soccer jersey he was wearing was satanic. He told Kaudo’s female colleague that she would have to cut off or cover her hair; braids were forbidden. After the service, Kaudo was summoned by church elders, who, he said, showed him videos claiming that the Illuminati had taken over the world, and urged him to quit his job, turn over his identity documents, and attend church seven days a week. “ ‘If you’ve decided to join the church, you should now forget about the world,’ ” Kaudo recalled them saying. “It was so hectic for me.”
By early 2023, stories about the forest community were slowly getting out to the wider world. “There was news that this guy had brought a church, that there were people who were fasting,” Changawa Mangi, the elder of a nearby village, told me. In February, two boys, aged ten and twelve, escaped from Shakahola to the village. They told Mangi that they had been eating sand to survive, and that one of their mothers had died of starvation. Mangi’s wife cooked for them, but they had diarrhea and vomited after each meal. “They got so used to me they started calling me Dad,” he said. In March, two hundred villagers ventured into the forest to investigate, but men from the security force attacked them with machetes and bows and arrows, and burned some of their motorbikes. Mangi had to run about two miles back to the village.
That same month, a pastor named Titus Katana visited Kaudo’s office. Titus had been a deputy of Mackenzie’s in Shakahola, but, in 2022, he became alarmed by what he was witnessing: rampant starvation, beatings, and public killings. “Women were told to fast every day with the kids,” he recalled to me. “I saw some being strangled to death.” Mackenzie told Titus and the security officers that they were entitled to rape the female followers. “The teachings of Mackenzie say that, if you fast, you can do that, because you are holy,” Titus said. (Kithure Kindiki, Kenya’s interior secretary, has said that postmortem examinations of women who died in Shakahola showed signs of sexual abuse.) Titus confronted Mackenzie, taking him through the Bible to show him that it didn’t condone any of this behavior. But, Titus said, “he wouldn’t listen to me.” Titus tried to persuade others to run away, but they didn’t heed him, either. Eventually, he fled, and he is still in hiding.
Titus showed Kaudo a video of a woman and two children being punished for eating. “I saw people being surrounded, like how we keep our cows in Africa,” Kaudo said. “Then people were hitting them with crude weapons, like huge sticks, and punching them on the head. It was very painful to watch. Mackenzie was sitting like a king, just sitting and watching.” Soon, Kaudo met Francis Wanje, a sixty-year-old lecturer at a teachers’ college, who was trying to track down his daughter Emily and her three sons. “Emily was a very good girl—a very committed Christian,” Wanje told me. She had joined Mackenzie’s church with her husband, Isaac Ngala, and their children. Her parents disapproved, and in 2022 she told them that she had left the church. But in mid-March, 2023, Wanje got a call from one of Ngala’s relatives, who said that Emily was in Shakahola. The relative described the horrors there and said that he had fled, but that Emily had refused to leave. “It was just a shock,” Wanje said. Kaudo, Wanje, and Titus each went to the police, but they were told that more evidence was needed for officers to take action. (Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigation did not respond to requests for comment on this matter.) Kaudo began hearing from others: one man was looking for fourteen family members in Shakahola. “So I decided, Let me take the risk,” Kaudo said. He would help stage a rescue operation.
One morning, according to the parliamentary report, Kaudo and others—including two of Wanje’s nephews—headed into the forest. “You could just hear birds singing,” Kaudo said. They came upon mud huts and then found one of Wanje’s grandsons tied to a tree with wire. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was so skinny that his rib cage stuck out. That day was supposed to be his “wedding day,” he told them. Kaudo untied him, and the boy held on to him and cried. They asked where his brothers were, and the boy pointed to two graves. He later told Wanje that his mother had strangled one of his brothers. “It’s something which you cannot imagine,” Wanje said.
As the group began retracing its steps, Kaudo said, it was surrounded by security officers carrying machetes, sticks, and bows and arrows—“strong men, huge men, people who were armed. The only weapon I had was my phone.” Then Ngala, the boy’s father and one of Mackenzie’s followers, arrived. He spoke with Wanje on the phone and finally agreed to let the group leave. Wanje was reunited with his grandson at a hospital in Malindi. Soon afterward, he hired men to look for Emily and Ngala in Shakahola, but neither was found. “They have not been seen,” he told me. “To us, it’s like they are no more.” He begged for help from local media outlets and the police. He later had a mental breakdown from the stress and spent two weeks in a hospital. He sometimes mistook other women for Emily.
In late March, police officers arrested Mackenzie at his home in Malindi. He was initially released on bail. But the next month he was rearrested, and dozens of heavily armed officers raided Shakahola. Kaudo went with them as a guide, using directions from Yaa and others. Some church members heard them coming and escaped into the forest on motorbikes. Others were near death. “They were true believers,” Kaudo said. An elderly woman and her granddaughter protested as Kaudo and a police officer took them out of the forest, saying that they were being prevented from meeting Jesus. Kaudo saw several mass graves. “It wasn’t even a decent burial,” he said. “The graves were not deep, like three feet down. All of these bodies were very thin. The women were naked.” In a single grave, he saw a woman, a man, and six children. Four people who Kaudo tried to bring to the hospital died on the drive there; one of them, a child, died in his arms. He felt grief and anger. “If the government had coöperated from the very beginning, we could have rescued hundreds of people,” Kaudo said.
Nearly four hundred and fifty bodies have been recovered from Shakahola so far, and many more are likely still in the ground. The government has not given an estimate; one worker at the site guessed that hundreds remained. The victims were mostly women and children. “That is the bitter and sad story of Shakahola,” Sebastian Muteti, who works on children’s issues for the Kenyan government, said. Many of the bodies that Kaudo saw were missing organs. “They didn’t have kidneys,” he said. “They didn’t have eyes.” It’s unclear why these organs would have been taken, if they were. In an affidavit last year, Chief Inspector Martin Munene said that “postmortem reports have established missing organs in some of the bodies,” and added that it was “believed that trade on human body organs has been well coordinated.” In response, Kindiki, the interior secretary, said that talk of missing organs was merely a rumor. But a police officer working on the investigation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that at least two hundred of the bodies he saw—almost half of those recovered—were missing organs. “Kidneys were being harvested,” he said. (Kenya’s interior ministry did not respond to several requests for comment.)
James Karisa has been exhuming bodies in Shakahola since last year; he and other men dig up the corpses, put them into body bags, and transfer them to the hospital in Malindi, for DNA testing. If there is a DNA match, the families can take the bodies home with them. “They’re in bad condition, Madam,” he told me. He has seen bodies with missing eyes, kidneys, and genitals. Karisa’s own ex-girlfriend went to Shakahola, after they broke up. He found her body in one of the graves, wearing clothes that he had bought for her. Her corpse, too, was missing its genitals. “I have never experienced such a thing in my whole life,” he said. “I’m twenty-five.” He regularly had nightmares about the victims. Recently, the exhumations were paused. When I visited Shakahola with Kaudo, we had to stay near the perimeter. Kaudo thinks that some of Mackenzie’s accomplices are still hiding in the forest or in the adjacent national park. He told me, pointing into the brush, “We believe those people are there.”
Mackenzie is not the only one of his kind. In Kenya, promising miracles has proved lucrative. A preacher named David Owuor is said to have brought a woman who had been dead for two hours back to life. He travels in a fleet of luxury cars and was gifted a private jet. In 2014, the Nairobian, a Kenyan publication, accused a pastor named Thomas Wahome of telling congregants that, for a fee, he could find out whether their names were in the “Book of Life,” where, some believe, God records who will go to Heaven. He also allegedly charged them to touch his clothes, an act that he said would heal them. (Wahome denied these allegations to the Nairobian.) That same year, a popular pastor named Victor Kanyari was accused by the Kenyan media outlet KTN News of faking miracles, including curing people of H.I.V., so that congregants would give him money. (Kanyari denied the allegations to KTN.) His preaching has made him rich; another news outlet, Citizen Digital, reported that he has claimed to have so many cars that he doesn’t have room to park them all. In 2017, Gilbert Deya, a Kenyan televangelist based in the United Kingdom, was extradited to Kenya after being accused of falsely claiming to create miracle babies for several women who couldn’t get pregnant. In fact, according to a BBC investigation, his wife, Mary, had taken one infertile woman to a clinic in a poor Nairobi neighborhood, where she was told that she had gone into labor and then given a baby; a subsequent BBC report raised the possibility that the Deyas were engaged in child trafficking to find Kenyan babies for the infertile women. (The Deyas denied wrongdoing and insisted that the miracle births were real.) In 2007, Mary was convicted of stealing a baby and was incarcerated; in 2011, she was convicted of stealing another child. Last year, a Kenyan court acquitted Gilbert of child trafficking, for lack of evidence. As of this month, he was still preaching in Kenya.
People in vulnerable emotional and material circumstances can more easily end up in cults. “Maybe they had a loved one who died. Maybe they have an illness. Maybe they had some trauma earlier in their life,” Steven Hassan, an American psychotherapist who works with cult survivors, told me. “Nobody thinks they’re joining a cult. They get deceived. It’s a systematic, step-by-step seduction.” Those who join do so in search of possibility, stability, and a sense of meaning. Jim Jones promised an egalitarian commune free of racism and classism. He seemed to work miracles in which people who claimed that they couldn’t walk threw away their crutches or jumped out of wheelchairs after his “healing.” Members of Heaven’s Gate, a doomsday cult in California, believed that they were preparing to become higher beings through a monastic life style; in 1997, dozens of them died in a mass suicide. Mackenzie’s indoctrination also started benignly. He began by promising to cure his followers’ ailments and end their hardships. By the time he allegedly told people to submit to their own deaths, they were already deeply enmeshed with the group and isolated in the forest. “They were promised hope,” Julius Gathogo, the religious-studies professor, said.
Some observers believe that Mackenzie viewed the church as a path to riches. “In Kenya, if you want to get money, there are three ways: education, religion, and politics,” Geoffrey Wango, a psychology professor at the University of Nairobi, said. “Mackenzie picked religion.” His followers sold land, houses, livestock, and cars to give him the proceeds, and emptied their bank accounts; Titus, his former deputy, estimated that these assets amounted to more than seven hundred thousand dollars. While his followers starved, Mackenzie apparently lived well. Mangi, the village elder, saw him come to town in his car to buy flour, maize, and beans. “Mackenzie was not fasting,” Titus said. Chanzera, the security officer, saw him drinking Coca-Cola. “He was after money,” Titus said. “Money is everything—he used to tell me that.” Others have argued that, to go to the lengths he did, Mackenzie must have come to believe in his own fantasy. “Cult leaders are typically malignant narcissists, and they surround themselves with true believers,” Hassan said. “They start to believe their own stuff in a way that is pathological.”
Ninety-four of Mackenzie’s accomplices are now in custody, including Mwakalama. (According to press reports, all ninety-four have pleaded not guilty. James Mouko, who is defending six of the defendants in one of the trials, including Mackenzie and Mwakalama, said that the two men have denied all charges.) But many remain at large. I met Chanzera at a secluded spot in the countryside. He told me that he regretted his involvement in the church. “I came to learn that it was kind of a business,” he said. “Most of the people are so desperate for salvation. Even me, I would like to meet Jesus one day, if possible.” His wife had been an early member of the church, but she divorced him when she learned of his role in the violence at Shakahola. He was now moving from place to place, worried about being attacked by followers who remained loyal to Mackenzie. “Those people who were arrested are not the only people who are associated with Mackenzie,” he said. Later, I visited Charo, the other security officer, at an apartment outside Malindi, where he was in hiding. I asked him what he thought Mackenzie’s mission was. “Killing,” he said.
Mackenzie has been charged with the manslaughter of two hundred and thirty adults, through suicide pact, and the murders of a hundred and ninety-one children. “Mackenzie will not get out of jail,” Kindiki, the interior secretary, said, adding, “He will age in there” and “meet the wrath of God.” Residents of Malindi were so angry after Mackenzie’s arrest that they vandalized the building that once housed his church. Wycliffe Makasembo, another of Mackenzie’s lawyers, told me that he was innocent. He said that the state was compelling church members to make statements against their will. “They’re fake stories,” he said. He claimed that the government was dumping bodies from around the country in Shakahola, as part of a setup. “Any person who has disappeared in Kenya is being blamed on Mackenzie,” Makasembo said. “They’re fixing him.” (When contacted later about accusations that Mackenzie staged fake miracles, made money from followers, ate while they fasted, and encouraged sexual violence, Makasembo refused to comment unless he was paid for it. “I’ll give you a much bigger story, deeper secrets,” he said.)
Not long ago, I visited Mackenzie in a holding cell at a courthouse in Malindi. Several of his family members were visiting, including his mother; his third wife, Rhoda Maweu; and some of his children. When he saw me, Mackenzie smiled and beckoned. “Come in, it’s O.K.,” he said. He was wearing a blue-and-green striped shirt and a red baseball cap. He was calm and immediately engaging. I sat next to him on a bench; we were so close that our legs and arms were touching.
He said that he had advised his followers not to go to hospitals or schools, but that he had not forced them to do anything. His wife noted that he was not the only one concerned over the types of things that children were being taught in schools—including L.G.B.T.Q. issues—and that in Florida the government was censoring textbooks. Mackenzie said that he had stopped preaching in 2019, after his arrest, and that he had never set up a formal place of worship in Shakahola. “There is no church there,” he said. “There was nothing. It was just shambas.” He had lived there as a member of the community. “It was sort of like a village,” he said.
Mackenzie denied that he had told his followers to fast: “No! No! No, no, no!” He said that allegations that his security force had killed followers were false. “There’s nothing,” he said. I asked him about the accounts of mutilated bodies found in graves in Shakahola, and he said that these stories were lies. I mentioned that more than a hundred children had reportedly been found in the ground there, and he claimed ignorance. “The thing is that I’m just hearing it,” he said. Government officials “have never taken me there.” When I said that there seemed to be substantial evidence that people had died in the forest, he responded, “Maybe. Maybe.”
He then claimed that, if his followers had died, it was because Jesus Christ had come and raptured them away. “Jesus himself did it,” he said. “Nobody killed anybody. I did nothing. And nobody can stand anywhere and say, ‘Mackenzie did this and this.’ ” His wife, who said that she had never been to Shakahola, was more careful; she said that there seemed to have been a “mixture of some fights and conflicts,” and that she was “convinced” this was the cause of the deaths. When I asked if she, like her husband, believed that people had been raptured, she said, “I don’t—I don’t have a view of that because I wasn’t there.” (Since my visit, she has been charged as an accomplice to manslaughter, child negligence, and radicalization. She has pleaded not guilty, and Makasembo, her lawyer, declined to comment on her case.) Mackenzie argued that his religious beliefs were being repressed. “What I can say is that they are trying to fight my faith,” he said. “The government doesn’t want what I believe, and what I used to preach.” His expression was clear-eyed and assured. “I’m very O.K., because I know where I’m going,” he continued. “I know my destiny—Heaven. So, I fear nothing.”
Some months back, I visited Yaa at her simple homestead in the countryside outside Malindi. When I arrived, she was preparing dinner with Halifu and Remi, who were living there with their children. While I was there, Yaa’s granddaughter, Bright Angel, now thirteen and healthy, came home from school, smiling. The child that Remi was pregnant with in Shakahola, a baby girl, was almost a year old. Remi and Halifu said that they wanted to get back to work and provide for their children. “I’m taking care of them,” Yaa said. “If I care for these ones, I know God is there. He will help me.” The government had put many survivors, including Yaa, into mandatory “rescue centers,” and had released them only when they said that they would testify. Yaa had reluctantly agreed, but she now feared retaliation from Mackenzie’s supporters. “I’m afraid my life will be in danger,” she said. Halifu and Remi are in hiding from Mackenzie’s sympathizers.
The country is still reeling from the tragedy. Sebastian Muteti, the government officer, compared the event to 9/11. “It was a great test for us,” he said. Some people have been reunited with loved ones. Wanje said, of his grandson, “He’s everything to us.” Some are still waiting to learn the fate of their relatives. Mwakwaya, the chef in Malindi, gave a DNA sample to government officials, and just heard that they found a match for one of his twin sons. “It’s terrible,” Mwakwaya told me. “It is now a reality that my children are all dead.” Kaudo said that, even in a rescue center, Mary Kahindi, Mwakalama’s wife, had tried to persuade other survivors to continue fasting. (Makasembo, who also represents Mary, declined to comment on her case.) She recently called her family from jail, asking that they take responsibility for her so that she could be released. “She was telling me the kids escaped in the forest,” Betty, her sister, said. “But with all the search operations those kids have not been found.”
Trials for Mackenzie and his co-defendants have now begun. One man testified that, on a trip to look at land near the Shakahola community that he was considering buying, he and a group of associates came across four emaciated, naked women crying for help; men from Mackenzie’s security force then chased the group away. One of Mackenzie’s former followers described having to let his daughter starve to death. Another said that Mackenzie tasked the force with surveilling followers, and that he decided which members should be killed next.
Kenyans seeking a salve in religion remain in danger of exploitation. “There are so many Mackenzies in Kenya—people who take advantage of ignorance and poverty,” Martin Olando, the scholar of African Christianity, said. Mackenzie’s TV station was taken over by a pastor named Ezekiel Odero, who claims that he can make infertile women conceive and sells holy water and handkerchiefs that he says have the power to heal the sick. The wife of Kenya’s Deputy President has attended his crusades. Last year, the police reported that fifteen people had died at his church after coming there to be healed. The pastor, through his lawyers, told the Kenyan newspaper the Nation that they had been critically ill when they arrived for their “spiritual interventions.” He has denied any wrongdoing.
Yaa regrets going to Shakahola, and feels guilty that she took Halifu and Remi with her. She considers it her duty to take care of them, even though she barely has the means to provide for her own family. She sometimes sees the faces of people who died in the forest in her sleep. The other women are also haunted; Remi occasionally sleeps in Yaa’s bed. She told me that she doesn’t blame Yaa: “We were just following salvation. It was our decision to go with her.” Today, Yaa doesn’t let pastors pray for her; she does it herself. “I know my God,” she said. She no longer believes in Mackenzie’s teachings. Still, she told me that she continues to fast, off and on, to ask for God’s forgiveness. “I know how to read a Bible—there is nowhere in the Bible saying that we fast until we die,” she said. “But I needed to see a miracle.” ♦
