A Kenyan preacher told his followers to starve to meet Jesus. Why did so many do it?

SHAKAHOLA, Kenya – Delirious from hunger, a believer who had brought his family to live with a Christian doomsday cult in a remote wilderness in south-eastern Kenya sent a distraught text to his younger sister this month.

While he begged her for help to escape, he was still in the grip of the preacher who lured him there, promising salvation through death by starvation.

“Answer me quickly, because I don’t have much time. Sister, End Times is here and people are being crucified,” Mr Solomon Muendo, a former street hawker, told his sister. “Repent so that you’re not left behind, Amen.”

Mr Muendo, 35, has been living in the Shakahola Forest since 2021, when, like hundreds of other believers, he abandoned his home and moved there with his wife and two young children.

They were following the call of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a former taxi driver turned televangelist who, declaring that 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, however, the 320ha property, a sun-scorched wasteland of scrub and spindly trees, is now a gruesome crime scene, scattered with the shallow graves of believers who starved themselves to death – or, as Mackenzie would have it, crucified themselves so that they could meet Jesus.

As of this past week, 179 bodies have been exhumed and moved to a hospital mortuary in the coastal town of Malindi, around 160km east of Shakahola, for identification and autopsy.

The government’s chief pathologists reported that while starvation caused many deaths, some of the bodies showed signs of death by asphyxiation, strangulation or bludgeoning.

Some had organs removed, a police affidavit said.

Hundreds more people are still missing, perhaps buried in undiscovered graves. Others are wandering the property without food like Mr Muendo – whose wife and children are missing, his sister said.

Chaotic faith sector

The horrific scale of what the Kenyan news media called the “Shakahola Massacre” has left the government struggling to explain how, in a country that counts itself among Africa’s most modern and stable nations, law enforcement had for so long missed the macabre goings-on in an expanse of land located between two popular tourist destinations, Tsavo National Park and the Indian Ocean coast.

That so many people disregarded the most basic human instinct to survive and chose instead to die through fasting has raised sensitive questions about the limits of religious freedom, a right that is enshrined in the Kenyan Constitution.

Evangelical Christianity – and freelance preachers – have surged in popularity across Africa, part of a religious boom on the continent that stands in stark contrast to the rapid secularisation of former colonial powers like Britain, which governed Kenya until 1963.

About half of Kenyans are evangelicals, a far higher proportion than in the United States.

Unlike Roman Catholic or Anglican churches, which are governed by hierarchies and rules, many evangelical churches are run by independent preachers who have no oversight.

Kenya’s President William Ruto – a fervent believer whose wife is an evangelical preacher – has been wary of imposing restrictions on religious activities, though last week he asked a group of church leaders and legal experts to propose ways to regulate Kenya’s chaotic faith sector.