The church was named Good News. Hundreds of members killed in cult massacre that haunts survivors

MALINDI, Kenya (AP) — Shukran Karisa Mangi always showed up drunk at work, where he dug up the bodies of doomsday cult members buried in shallow graves. But the alcohol couldn’t dull his shock the morning he found the body of a close friend whose neck had been twisted so badly that his head and torso were turned in opposite directions.

The violent deaths upset Mangi, who had previously unearthed the bodies of children. The body count has been steadily rising in this community off the coast of Kenya, where extremist evangelical leader Paul Mackenzie is accused of urging his followers to starve to death so they could meet Jesus.

Mangi recently said that while he sometimes sees the remains of others when he tries to sleep, the recurring image of his friend’s mangled body haunts him while he is awake.

“He died in a very cruel way,” said Mangi, one of several gravediggers whose work was suspended earlier this year as bodies piled up at the morgue. “I still think about how he died most of the time.”

In one of the bloodiest cult-related massacres, at least 436 bodies have been found since police raided Good News International Church in a forest about 70 kilometers (40 miles) inland from the coastal city of Malindi. Seventeen months later, many residents of the area are still shaken by what happened, despite repeated warnings from the church leader.

Mackenzie has pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering 191 children, multiple murders and other crimes. If convicted, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Some Malindi residents who spoke to The Associated Press said Mackenzie’s confidence while in custody shows the wide reach of power some evangelists exert, even when their teachings undermine the authority of the government, break the law or harm followers desperate for healing and other miracles.

It’s not just Mackenzie, said Thomas Kakala, self-proclaimed bishop of Malindi-based Jesus Cares Ministry International, referring to suspected pastors he knew in the capital, Nairobi.

“You look at them. If you were sober and wanted to hear the Word of God, you wouldn’t go to their church,” he said. “But the place is packed.”

A man like Mackenzie, who refused to join the pastors’ community in Malindi and rarely quoted Scripture, could have succeeded in a country like Kenya, Kakala said. Six detectives were suspended for ignoring numerous warnings about Mackenzie’s illegal activities.

Kakala said he felt discouraged after trying to discredit Mackenzie years ago. The evangelist played a tape of Kakala on his television station and declared him an enemy. Kakala felt threatened.

“These were some of his powers, and he used them,” Kakala said.

Kenya, like much of East Africa, is predominantly Christian. While many are Anglican or Roman Catholic, evangelical Christianity has spread widely since the 1980s. Many pastors model their ministries on successful American televangelists, investing heavily in broadcasting and advertising.

Many African evangelical churches are run as one-man businesses, without the guidance of trustees or lay boards. Pastors are often unaccountable, deriving authority from their perceived ability to perform miracles or to prophesy. Some, like Mackenzie, can seem all-powerful.

Mackenzie, a former street vendor and taxi driver with a secondary education, apprenticed with a Malindi preacher in the late 1990s. There, in a quiet tourist town, he opened his own church in 2003.

A charismatic preacher who was said to perform miracles and exorcisms and could be generous with money, his followers included teachers and policemen. They came to Malindi from all over Kenya, giving Mackenzie a national reputation that spread the pain of death throughout the country.

“As a religious leader, I see Mackenzie as a very mysterious man because I can’t understand how he managed to kill all those people in one place,” said Famau Mohamed, a sheikh from Malindi. “One thing that is still mysterious, even now, is that he still speaks with such great courage. … He feels he has done nothing wrong.”

The initial complaints against Mackenzie centered on his opposition to formal education and vaccinations. He was briefly detained in 2019 for opposing government efforts to issue Kenyans with national identification numbers, saying the numbers were satanic.

Later that year he closed his church in Malindi and urged his congregation to follow him to Shakahola, where he had leased 800 acres of forest inhabited by elephants and big cats.

Church members paid small amounts to own plots of land in Shakahola and were required to build houses and live in villages with biblical names, such as Nazareth, according to survivors. Mackenzie became increasingly demanding, and people from different villages were forbidden from communicating or gathering, said former church member Salama Masha.

“What made me realize Mackenzie wasn’t a good person was when he said the children should fast to die,” said Masha, who fled after witnessing two children starve to death. “That’s when I knew I couldn’t do that.”

The grass-thatched, solar-paneled house where Mackenzie lived was known as an “ikulu,” or state house. Police found milk and bread in Mackenzie’s refrigerator as his followers starved nearby. He had bodyguards. He had informants. And, crucially, he had his aura as a self-prophetic “papa” to thousands of obedient followers.

“(He) is like a chief because they had a small village and my brother is an elder in that particular village,” said Robert Mbatha Mackenzie, speaking of his elder brother’s authority in Shakahola. “He went there and in just two years he created a big village. And a lot of people followed him there.”

Mbatha Mackenzie, a bricklayer who lives with his family and goats in a tin shed in Malindi, said that while Mackenzie was generous to his supporters, he never treated his extended family with similar kindness.

“My brother—he seemed like a politician,” he said. “He has a sweet tongue, and when he tells people something, they believe him.”

A former church member who fled Shakahola said she lost faith in Mackenzie after seeing how his men dealt with people on the verge of starvation. She said Mackenzie’s bodyguards would take a starving person away and never see them again.

The woman said that for security guards, the rape of women in villages is “as if routine.” She said she, too, was sexually assaulted by four men while she was pregnant with her fourth child. The Associated Press does not identify victims of alleged sexual assault unless they choose to identify themselves publicly.

Those who tried to leave the forest without Mackenzie’s permission were beaten, as were those caught breaking their fast, former church members say.

Autopsies of more than 100 bodies showed deaths from starvation, suffocation, strangulation and blunt force trauma. Mangi, the grave digger, said he believes more mass graves have yet to be discovered in Shakahola. At least 600 people have been reported missing, according to the Kenya Red Cross.

Priscillar Riziki, who left Mackenzie’s church in 2017 but lost her daughter and three grandchildren in Shakahola, was heartbroken when she recalled Mackenzie as “kind at first” but increasingly rude to his followers. Her daughter Lorine was not allowed to take her children on family visits without Mackenzie’s permission, Riziki said.

One of Rizika’s grandchildren was identified through DNA analysis and given a proper burial. Lorine and two of her children are presumed dead.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which witnesses say has fueled Mackenzie’s end-time vision, the leader has ordered stricter fasts, which have become even stricter in late 2022. Witnesses said parents have been banned from feeding their children.

Some church members who had escaped Shakahola had been spreading news of suffering there, said village elder Changawa Mangi Yaah. On one occasion, a fight broke out in the forest when strangers on motorbikes tried to carry out a rescue operation.

Two rescue bikes were burned in Shakahola, Yaah said, but police took no action beyond making brief arrests. He added that he realized “Mackenzie was stronger than I thought.”

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Associated Press religion coverage is supported by an AP partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.