It took Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache more than eight hours to read her judgment in Mombasa on Monday, and at the end the answer was unambiguous. Paul Mackenzie, the self-styled pastor whose followers starved to death in Kenya’s Shakahola forest, is guilty of 191 murders. All but one of the victims in this case were children. Twenty-eight members of his inner circle, among them his wife, were convicted with him.
The defence had argued that no one was forced to fast and that every death was a personal religious choice. The court rejected that. Mackenzie and his helpers, the judge found, ran and enforced a regime of fasting in which parents were told to stop feeding their children, water was later banned as well, and those who wanted to leave were held back. The dead were buried in the bush in ceremonies the sect called “weddings”.
A onetime taxi driver, Mackenzie founded the Good News International church in 2003 and spread his end-of-the-world sermons through his own TV channel. He taught that schooling and medicine were evil. When police closed the church in 2019, he moved his followers into the bush near Malindi. The horror only came to light in 2023, and investigators eventually exhumed over 400 bodies from the forest, of which just 26 could be identified.
For relatives, Monday brought some relief. Stephen Mwiti, who lost all six children and whose former wife is among the convicted, said outside court that he was “a happy man” that everyone had been found guilty.
The case is far from over. Sentencing is set for 6 November, and Mackenzie still faces charges of terrorism and of having directed another 52 deaths in the village of Kwa Binzaro from his cell, which he denies. The verdict has also reopened a national debate about whether religious groups need closer state supervision. As early as 2023, President William Ruto accepted that the authorities had failed these families.
