Margot Kiser
The Elephant
January 26, 2024
After a time equal to the gestation period of a human pregnancy, the prosecution of parties associated with the Shakahola massacre is underway. Charges range from terrorism, radicalization, murder, manslaughter, torture and cruelty to children to illegally operating a film studio. The trials will proceed in courts in Mombasa and Malindi.
In Mombasa, court clerks took 4.5 hours to read to the main suspect, Paul Nthege Mackenzie, and his 94 co-defendants, the 475-page charge sheet's 238 counts of manslaughter.
Mackenzie had for some time appeared to have dropped out of the news cycle. Kenyans were left to wonder whether the doomsday preacher believed to have led hundreds of his followers to their deaths through starvation, was dead, had been disappeared, or had been released into unmanned space.
It had been a long time since, in April, just weeks after the discoveries at Shakahola, Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki told reporters, "The government has nothing to hide and will ensure we convict Mackenzie with the most severe punishment available." In making this big commitment to the Kenyan people, Kindiki used strong language: "radicalisation," "terrorism," and even "genocide."
These would be the biggest and most far-reaching charges the government could bring. Possibly the cabinet secretary was playing the "Guantanamo card," casting the widest net possible for indictments and buying law enforcement open-ended time to build a case while keeping suspects in remand without charge.
Kenya's laws against terrorism and radicalisation have, until now, not been applied to Christian clergy.
In scale, the Shakahola massacre surpasses the most deadly terrorist attacks perpetrated in Kenya: the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi, which caused 220 deaths, and the 2015 al-Shabaab attack on Garissa University College, which claimed 148 lives.
Shakahola's death toll approaches those of other notorious cults: In 1978, 909 individuals died in Jonestown, Guyana, by apparent cyanide poisoning, in an event that the American cult leader, Jim Jones, called "revolutionary suicide". When Joseph Kibweteere purposely set fire to his Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God church in Uganda, in March 2000, the deaths ran to at least 770, and possibly as many as 1,000.
Kenyans waited another eight months to learn what charges the pastor would face. In early January, a Mombasa court gave prosecutors an ultimatum: Unless charges were lodged within fourteen working days, the judge would consider releasing Mackenzie and the dozens of others being held.
Cult observers regard Mackenzie as among the most destructive cult leaders in modern history. And he is arguably the most reviled man in Kenya. Others assert that the preacher, who took his followers to a wilderness to die, on the pretence of farming and promises of spiritual nourishment, is a hero. Many of these are in detention with him, but considerable numbers of his followers are not. Judging by posts and comments on social media, clearly many of them remain loyal.
The court's ultimatum precipitated the reading of charges in less than ten days. Brought against a total of 94 defendants the charges, encompassed organized crime activities, radicalisation, and facilitating the commission of a terrorist act.
Prosecutors left murder charges to be determined, pending mental-health assessments.
429 bodies have so far been exhumed at the Shakahola Forest and stored, many in refrigerated mobile morgues, for nearly as long as Mackenzie and his codefendants have been held.
Of the 429, 191 are children. Reports from Mackenzie's "wilderness" say that a dozen or more of his followers participated in the direct killings of victims. However, there is also considerable reason to believe that children died at the hands of, or with the connivance of, their own parents. Autopsies have revealed that some of the victims, including children, were strangled, beaten or suffocated.
Limitations in the DCI's forensics efforts have made the identifications of individual victims slow. DNA analysis has been employed, but the DCI reports that supplies for the chemical processes are not available in sufficient quantities (Nation). The number of bodies exhumed would arguably overwhelm any medical-legal operation.
The degree and severity of forthcoming murder charges will, by law, depend in part on intention and premeditation. Numerous sources connected with Shakahola assert that those who died chose to do so. However, this cannot legally apply to children, who do not have the power of choice. The premeditation question, equally vital, is in fact addressed by Mackenzie himself.
At least two years before the starvation, he told a group of his followers: "There are people who do not want to preach Jesus, because their children are crying of hunger. Let them die. Is there any problem?" He delivered this instruction in a "seminar" at his tented church in Luanda, Western Kenya.
His talk was recorded on video, and posted to YouTube in March 2020.
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It's very hard to square Mackenzie's public image with the soft-spoken, almost delicate man I have met and spent time with.
I paid McKenzie a visit at Mombasa's Shimo La Tewa maximum security prison last July. Dressed in a grey-blue button-down shirt with matching trousers, he sat with an air of sunlit ease in the visiting room. Only his handshake corresponded with his circumstances; although firm, yet his grip felt like that of someone falling into a void. Mackenzie was pallid and thin. Then nearly 90 days in remand, he appeared to be wasting away, a shadow of the firebrand preacher seen on television and the internet, his signature raspy voice now a mere whisper. He came off as mannerly and even obedient.
When MacKenzie rose to greet me, I was surprised to note that he didn't quite reach my height, 5′6″, and that he was not handcuffed. There were two guards present in the room, one male and one female. During our conversation he expressed the hope that the state would set a bond for his release. "If I am released, I'm going to need assistance to go somewhere else." He wore a pleading look; mob justice is not uncommon here, and Mackenzie seemed well aware that he was at one kind of risk in detention and facing charges, and another if released.
He complained about the prison conditions: being kept in isolation, sleeping on a concrete floor, walking to the toilet wearing only one shoe. He said he subsisted primarily on milk and bread, although his rations do include meat three times a week. Mackenzie raised a pinky to indicate the size of the serving. He delivered his complaints in a soft, humble voice, apparently oblivious to the irony of voicing such grievances in light of accusations against him.
The visit left me wondering even more about Paul Mackenzie. Who or what had radicalised him? Conversations with him and his family provided a chronology of the decades that brought him to his position of influence with his cult's adherents.
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Well before the retreat to Shakahola and the mass starvation, Mackenzie had the leanings of a destructive cult leader, and visible, known connections to radical religious influences.
Paul Nthenge Mackenzie was born in 1973, the fourth of ten children in a conservative Baptist family living in Lunga Lunga, a town at the border with Tanzania. His family, of the Kamba ethnic community, were practicing Baptists. His father spent much of his time away from home, working in Mombasa as a government bureaucrat, a cog in the wheels of the dictatorial Moi regime.
He achieved a form 4 (the US equivalent of a 12th grade) education, stood out as a voice in the church choir.
In his early twenties, MacKenzie made his way 200 km north from Lunga Lunga, to Malindi, a tourist destination on the Indian Ocean coast. His sister lived there and was married to a Belgian. The couple bought Paul a Toyota Corolla. After some driving lessons, he was in business, and in a town full of three-wheeled tuk-tuks, the Corolla had the swank of a limo.
He was living as good a life as many Kenyans could hope for. Then his taxi was stolen. In his efforts to recover the stolen vehicle, the police were of no use. Fellow taxi drivers say Mackenzie was furious. Paul's youngest brother, Robert, who lives in Malindi, claims their sister bought Paul another car, but no one else has that recollection. Malindi taxi driver, Japheth Charo, told local reporters that MacKenzie's attitude towards authorities was unusually combative, adding that once he went to court to dispute a fine over a minor traffic violation. "Mackenzie hated losing," Charo recalled. "He always stood his ground."
Events subsequent to the loss of the taxi are unclear, but what's apparent is that Paul was soon experiencing, or at least professing, a resurgence of his Christian faith and pursuing religion as an open door to greater opportunities.
A former preacher who asked to remain anonymous described Mackenzie as being similar to himself – not terribly good in school but blessed with street smarts. He could fit or adapt to any situation be it religion or business. "When it comes to the Bible," said this one-time preacher whom we'll call Joseph, "it's different." "You can't outsmart the Bible, and that's why he is where he is today."
Still in his 20s, Mackenzie became active not in the Baptist church in which he'd been raised, but in a "tape church" that met in the pastor's Malindi home.
Charles Paisley, an American researcher who focuses on the preachings distributed on these tapes concludes that Mackenzie repurposed the recordings, and delivered the sermons live, in his own voice. This adaptation would have played to the fledgling preacher's talents, and built on his charisma.
By all indications, his sermons were effective, and won him a growing number of followers.
Early in the new millennium Mackenzie left that church for another, the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God, operating in the residence of Ruth Kahindi, where he gained the rank of assistant preacher.
According to Kahindi, he began telling churchgoers that he had direct communication with Jesus. People thronged the tiny courtyard of her home church in Malindi to listen, but Mackenzie eventually aroused the displeasure of some of the congregants, including the pastor. Reading from Isaiah, he likened the pastor to the King of Judah, and prophesied his death – in which event Mackenzie would take his place. The pastor cast Mackenzie out.
But the maverick still had an ally in Kahindi, who saw something in this controversial preacher. She proposed a partnership, and provided funds for a land purchase on the outskirts of Malindi, at a place called Furunzi.
Coming from a background of powerlessness, he'd found his road to power, not in a taxi, but at the pulpit. In 2003, Paul and Ruth opened the doors of Good News International Ministry on the road that leads to the Shakahola Forest.
Kahindi also helped her fellow minister, still single, find a wife. In 2002, Agnes Mackenzie bore a son that she and her husband named Daniel. The couple also had a daughter, Virginia.
At just thirty years of age, Mackenzie had advanced to being co-pastor of a dedicated place of worship with space for hundreds of congregants – and had a direct line to Jesus.
According to Ruth Kahindi, Mackenzie at this time joined a fellowship whose preachers were required to enter the church walking backwards. Dan Mackenzie says he has no knowledge of this practice, which various Kenyan clergy say would be a satantic practice.
By 2010, Mackenzie's presence on the religious stage was growing. He had his own twice-monthly program on KBC government radio as a Sunday preacher and soon founded a second church in Ruiru, Nairobi.
At this time Mackenzie's father died. His body was still in the mortuary when, just a few days later, his wife, Agnes, died of unknown causes.
A year after Agnes's death, Mackenzie met and fell in love with Joyce Muikamba, a receptionist at The White Elephant, a beachside hotel-restaurant in Malindi owned by a flamboyant Italian artist and conspirophile. Joyce continued with her job as a receptionist for another two years before leaving to marry Paul. She and Paul would go on to have three children.
The 2010s saw Mackenzie expand his local ministry to a national scale, and then via televangelism to an international one. Comments posted to his YouTube channels profess origins ranging from DRC, Uganda, and Tanzania to Australia.
According to documents found on the premises of the now-defunct Good News International Ministries, Mackenzie and Joyce established Good News Media KE, listing its business address as The White Elephant.
Mackenzie's career as a televangelist took off. His brother Robert said he noticed a marked difference in his televised preaching. Emphasizing end-times gospel and anti-government sermons, he updated Biblical prohibitions to apply to all manner of modern habits. He forbade followers from going to hospital when they were ill, branding such institutions satanic. Women were to wear traditional Swahili kangas (sarongs), or skirts below the knee, shave their heads, and eschew make-up and jewelry. A key message was that education was evil, and children should be pulled out of state-run institutions.
Mackenzie's anti-establishment messages began to go on permanent record once he established Good News Media. And they appear to have accelerated and amplified.
In 2017, Mackenzie built a church in Bombolulu, a suburb of Mombasa, and established a YouTube channel, End Times TV.
Increased visibility drew the attention of authorities. Paul and Joyce were charged twice in a Malindi law court for radicalisation and for providing education at an unregistered institution, his church. The charge of operating an unlicensed TV studio did result in a conviction, for which Mackenzied was sentenced to one year, on 1 December 2023.
Member of parliament for Malindi, Aisha Jumwa, criticised the pastor – then out on bail – for inciting children to drop out of school and urging parents to keep children out of school.
Mackenzie was further charged with radicalisation. In 2019, despite Jumwa's opposition and abundant evidence to support charges, a Malindi court acquitted him, in a decision that highlighted the challenges of convicting rogue preachers on such charges
Up to this point, few if any had noted that Mackenzie, while preaching standard end-times theology, was adding his own spin. One influence to this development, his videos make clear, was the Australia-based Jesus Christians. A splinter sect of Jeff Berg's [sic] The Children of God – famed chiefly for sexual abuse–the Jesus Christians are also reputed to have engaged in organ trafficking, and so are known as The Kidney Cult.
The key influence on Mackenzie, however, was the taped sermons he had learned and delivered himself, distributed by an enterprise called Voice of God Recordings. VOGR is a US organization.
A turning point came when the Kenyan government introduced a biometric ID system, the Huduma Namba, launched in 2017. Mackenzie decried this as "the Mark of the Beast" named in the Book of Revelation. This echoed conspiracy theories criticising chip-based ID systems common among fundamentalist Christians, and caught the attention of the Jesus Christians.
Mackenzie was arrested in 2018 for his anti-Huduma Namba campaign, and received the support of other Kenyan churches and pastors, most of whom did not agree with his theology and theories but saw in his arrest a violation of religious liberty. Joining the protesters were members of the Jesus Christians. When Mackenzie was freed, he expressed his gratitude to those who had supported him. A member of the Jesus Christians contacted Mackenzie who permitted the Australian to preach in his Nairobi church.
The Jesus Christians acknowledge these activities, but claim that their connection to Mackenzie related only to supporting him on the Huduma Namba issue. However, one of the Jesus Christians is on record, via YouTube, advocating at one of Mackenzie's "seminars" that the faithful go into the desert and fast. On their website the Jesus Christians deny having had any knowledge of Mackenzie's intention of instigating "a suicide fast."
While an expanded media presence had served Mackenzie by bringing him more followers, it had drawn once again the attention of his great adversary, the government. More vehemently anti-government than ever, Mackenzie went so far as to call the Somali-based militant group al-Shabaab "Jesus's Army." He did this in the wake of a long spate of al-Shabaab's attacks.
In 2018, Mackenzie's wife, Joyce Mwikamba, died of unknown causes. In reaction to being ostracised in Malindi, the widowed preacher began delivering sermons at his branch in Nairobi, as well as in other far-flung parts of Kenya. He now became involved with Rhoda, a young woman who recalled her dreams on stage at the Nairobi branch of his church. She would become his third wife.
"I heard the voice of Christ telling me that the work I gave you to preach end-time messages for nine years has come to an end," Mackenzie said in a video posted on YouTube in March 2019.
In December of that year, possibly as a response to government pressure, he shut down the Good News International Ministry and renounced his position as a pastor. He also closed down Good News Media, but went on posting to YouTube.
Dan Mackenzie says his father continued to pore over the media for "signs that the world was ending."
Late in that pivotal year, Mackenzie told the faithful that a divine voice had commanded him to move to a desert wilderness and await the end of the world. While this may have looked like a manoeuvre to stay ahead of the law, in the wake of news soon coming out of Wuhan, China, his decision to withdraw would seem prophetic indeed.
https://www.theelephant.info/investigations/2024/01/26/cult-leader-mackenzies-beginnings-and-shakahola-end-times/
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