A court in Mombasa on Friday sentenced Paul Mackenzie, the self-proclaimed pastor at the center of Kenya’s Shakahola forest tragedy, to 200 years in prison. Last month he was found guilty of killing 191 people, only one of them an adult. They died after he ordered his followers to fast so they could “meet Jesus” before the end of the world.
The judge split the punishment in two. Mackenzie received 100 years for the 183 victims who starved to death and another 100 years for eight children who were suffocated, strangled or beaten after they resisted the fast. Terms within each group run concurrently, but the two groups are served one after the other. His 28 co-defendants, among them guards who enforced the fasting and men who dug the graves, were given terms ranging from 10 to 160 years.
Prosecutors had pressed for capital punishment. The judge refused, arguing that execution would hardly deter people who see death as a route to heaven. Capital punishment remains legal in Kenya, yet nobody has been executed there since 1987.
A former taxi driver, Mackenzie built a following through sermons on his own TV channel that branded schooling and medicine as evil. After closing his church in Malindi in 2019, he led devotees into the forest. Police arrested him in April 2023, when relatives and a rights group raised the alarm and the first shallow graves were uncovered.
The verdict covers only part of the horror. Over 400 bodies were dug up in the forest in total, and many victims still have no name. Mackenzie still faces separate trials, including terrorism charges and a case over 52 deaths at another site, all of which he denies. Kenya’s human rights commission has also found that local officials repeatedly ignored warnings about the cult, a failing that Friday’s sentence does not address.
