SHAKAHOLA, Kenya — Delirious with hunger, a believer who had taken his family to live with a doomsday Christian cult in a remote Kenyan desert sent a distraught text message to his younger sister recently.. As he begged her to help him escape, he was still in the clutches of the preacher who had lured him here, promising salvation via starvation.
“Answer me quickly, because I don’t have much time,” Solomon Muendo told his sister. “Sister, the End Times is here and people are being crucified. Repent so that you are not left behind, Amen”.
Muendo, 35, has lived in the Shakahola forest since 2021, when, like hundreds of other believers, he moved there with his wife and two young children.
They were following the call of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a televangelist who, declaring the world was about to end, marketed Shakahola to his followers as an evangelical Christian sanctuary from the fast-approaching apocalypse.
Instead of a haven, though, the 800-acre property is now a gruesome crime scene, dotted with the shallow graves of believers who starved or, as Mackenzie would say, crucified themselves so they could meet Jesus.
As of earlier this month, 179 bodies had been exhumed and transferred to a hospital morgue for identification and autopsy. Leading government pathologists reported that while starvation caused many deaths, some bodies showed signs of death by suffocation, strangulation or beating. Some had had their organs removed, according to a police report.
Hundreds more are still missing, perhaps buried in undiscovered graves. Others wander the property without food like Muendo — whose wife and children are missing, her sister said.
The “Shakahola Massacre”as it has been called by the Kenyan media, has left the government scrambling to explain how, in one of Africa’s most modern and stable nations, law enforcement had gone so long unaware of the gruesome events on land located between two popular tourist destinations, the Tsavo National Park and the Indian Ocean coast.
The fact that so many people chose to die fasting has raised sensitive questions about the limits of religious freedom, a right enshrined in the Kenyan constitution.
For Victor Kaudo, a rights activist in Malindi who visited Shakahola in March, the freedom granted to preachers like Mackenzie has gone too far. Tip off by defectors from the cult, Kaudo found emaciated believers who, though on the verge of death, cursed him as “an enemy of Jesus” when he tried to help them.
“What do we do?” he said. “Is religious freedom greater than the right to life?”
Mackenzie has told investigators that he never ordered his followers not to eat and simply preached about the End Times agonies prophesied in the New Testament. He was arrested in April, released, then promptly arrested again. He is under investigation on charges of murder, terrorism and other crimes.
Mackenzie, according to Titus Katana, former co-pastor at Mackenzie Good News Church, said he would stay alive to help lead his followers to “meet Jesus” through famine, but once that work was done, he too would starve before what he said was the imminent end of the world.
In a video posted online in March, Mackenzie said there was “heard the voice of Christ telling me that ‘the work that I entrusted to you to preach the end-time messages for nine years has come to an end’”.
Katana said that she had already broken up with Mackenzie and was not at Shakahola when the suicide program began. He went to the police to report that “children are dying” in the forest.
“They never took any action until it was too late,” he said.
In April, Muendo phoned his sister and told her that “we are beginning a fast so we can go see Christ on Golgotha,” a reference to the site of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Bible.
“He was happy, because he thought he would die soon for Jesus,” said Elizabeth Syombua, the sister.
As for Mackenzie, he added, “he’s a killer.”
Simon Marks contributed reporting to this article.
By: ANDREW HIGGINS
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6718046, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-05-17 22:40:08
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