Inside a Kenyan starvation cult

This is the moment Kenyan cult leader Paul McKenzie was being escorted out of police station. The 50-year-old former taxi driver has been accused of ordering his followers to starve themselves to death. Sources say he told his adherents the world was going to end on April 15 and Satan would rule for a thousand years. His cult became the focus of national horror with the recent discovery of more than a hundred bodies, mostly children, in mass graves in the Shakahola Forest of southeast Kenya. From called records and interviews with relatives of the victims, medical workers and a police investigator, Reuters has pieced together a comprehensive picture of McKenzie and his cult. McKenzie grew up in Ruwokwale County in southern eastern Kenya. In the early 1990s, he moved to the coastal town of Malindi, where he worked as a taxi driver.

Fellow driver Jafeth Charo said McKenzie became increasingly focused on religion and started his own church in 2003. Charo said he and his family joined the church for two years until McKenzie's sermons became alarming. In March 2017, police searched McKenzie's compound in Malindi and found 43 children live in there without attending school. That's according to called documents at the time. McKenzie's brother says the cult leader believed education was evil. In 2019, the authorities ordered his church to shut down. That's when McKenzie relocated to the Shakahola Forest, home to his Good News International church.

There, he lived with hundreds of his followers in makeshift homes of polythene sheeting and thatch. McKenzie's wife says his wife joined the cult two years ago. McKenzie's daughter says McKenzie's mother, who was a Christian, died in the mass starvation. McKenzie told his adherents the world as they knew it was going to end on April 15 and ordered them to starve themselves and their children to death so that they could meet Jesus in heaven. That's according to relatives of his followers. Rebecca Mbetza, the mother of 31-year-old Mercy Chai, searched for her daughter's remains at the hospital mortuary in Malindi. McKenzie planned the mass starvation of cult members in three phases, first children, then women and young men, and finally the remaining men and he himself.

That's according to six of the people, including the investigator. The investigator also said McKenzie denied that he told anyone not to eat, adding that the cult leader said he himself had been eating.

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