The Cult in the Forest

Everyone hopes for a miracle. And in Kenya—where evangelical Christianity is so popular that the President frequently prays with preachers during official events—the more miracles a pastor performs, the more followers he will gain. Some swiftly build large congregations and become multimillionaires. In 2018, Halua Yaa, a woman in the coastal town of Malindi, heard about a pastor named Paul Mackenzie, who, it was said, could heal the sick. Yaa’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Bright Angel, had mysterious symptoms: she had severe stomach pains and often threw up after eating. “She looked like she was going to die,” Yaa told me recently. Doctors gave her medicine and an I.V. drip, but nothing helped. “I went to the hospital for almost a year and a half, and there were no changes,” Yaa said. When she heard that Mackenzie was holding a “crusade” in Malindi—a kind of religious festival—she decided to attend. “You feel like, if Mackenzie can talk with Jesus for him to do miracles, he can also tell Jesus to take away this disease,” she said.

Yaa is fifty-four and petite, with full cheeks, cornrows, and a mischievous sense of humor. The previous decade had been difficult for her. After ten years of marriage, her husband left her for another woman, and she was forced to raise six children on her own. She developed a condition that caused her to lose sight in one eye. But she was smart and industrious; she started a café and eventually a farm in the countryside, built a home, and sent her children to school. Then, in 2010, one of her teen-age daughters got pregnant, and Yaa took on the responsibility of raising her granddaughter, too. She came to believe that this time in her life had been so painful because she was not devout enough, and found comfort going to a Catholic church. “Even if your heart is down, the word of God makes you hope,” she said.

Mackenzie ran a Pentecostal church called Good News International Ministries, on a spacious compound in Malindi, where he also lived. He was slender, with protruding eyes and a temperament that easily escalated from calm to fierce, and was known as a fervent preacher of the Gospels. He urged his followers to avoid television, sports, and other secular pastimes, to refuse Western medicine, and to take their children out of school. “I was told by the spirits to tell the people that education is evil—that it comes from man,” Mackenzie told me not long ago. He claimed to speak directly with God. When Yaa attended his crusade, she was impressed by his sermons, which promised that the apocalypse would bring believers eternal bliss. “I was not afraid of the end of the world,” she said. She was awed by the miracles she saw performed. One day, a girl was having a seizure, and when Mackenzie prayed over her the seizure stopped. Yaa heard afterward that her epilepsy had been cured. Another day, Mackenzie prayed over a man with a deep, infected wound; later that week, it seemed to have healed. Soon, she started attending his church.

In 2019, after getting into legal trouble for telling his followers not to send their children to school, among other things, Mackenzie closed his church in Malindi. But his assistant pastors contacted Yaa and told her that Mackenzie was starting a new community about forty miles away, in an eight-hundred-acre forest called Shakahola. Followers could move there, build a home, and worship every day. Yaa decided to bring her granddaughter; hundreds of others went, too. Many sold their possessions and donated the resulting money to the church. A flight attendant reportedly left her career and sold the land she owned for about fifty thousand dollars, which she gave to the pastor. Yaa sold her goat for almost fifty dollars, a significant amount for her family, and gave some of the proceeds to Mackenzie. “I was excited,” Yaa said. “I thought I was going somewhere good.”

The forest was vast and dense, and life there was quiet. Followers lived in mud huts on shambas—plots of communal land—in small villages that Mackenzie gave Biblical names: Bethlehem, Nazareth. Yaa was in Jericho. The pastor came to each village regularly to lead lengthy prayer sessions. “Everyone was in their village praying,” Yaa said. “No other activities.” Mackenzie told followers that they should fast, to bring them closer to Christ. She had never read anything like that in the Bible. She tried to obey, but sometimes she sneaked off to a nearby market to buy biscuits, rice, and milk for herself and her granddaughter. “You cook quickly, you eat, you hide, you take away the fire,” she said. Meanwhile, all that prayer appeared to be working: her granddaughter began eating porridge without vomiting, and gaining weight. After a month, they went back to Malindi. “Bright Angel was healed,” Yaa said. “I was feeling good.”

“It says, ‘This enormous medical bill is being sent to you on the off chance that you might go ahead and pay it.’ ”

Cartoon by Barbara Smaller

In early 2022, Yaa decided to return to Shakahola: she was suffering from a vaginal fistula, a condition that caused her pain and shame. She invited two friends to come along. One of her friends, Halifu, a thirty-five-year-old fruit-and-vegetable seller, hoped to get help for her depression after her husband died of a stroke. “I heard people were being prayed for, and they were healed,” she told me. The other friend, Remi, a twenty-seven-year-old who had grown up poor and dropped out of school, hoped to get relief for chronic chest pain and to improve her economic prospects. (Both women requested that I use only their first names, for their safety.) She had already attended Mackenzie’s church, and he had given her clothes. “When I went there, and Mackenzie prayed for me, all the problems I had in my home would disappear,” she said.

But, when they arrived at Shakahola, the mood of the community had changed. The fasting was more extreme. At first, they were given two slices of bread and a cup of tea every day. After three weeks, the women said, they were told that there would be no more food: followers had to starve themselves to death, in order to meet Jesus in Heaven. “I became afraid,” Yaa recalled. They wanted to leave, but were forbidden. Mackenzie had put together a security force, which patrolled the villages with machetes, hammers, and knives and prevented members from escaping. “It was crazy,” Remi said. “We were being locked up.” Yaa noticed that, when Mackenzie led prayer sessions, “even his eyes started to change. He was not like a human being.” She recalled him saying that the children would be the first to fast to death, then the women, then the men. “Whether you want to or not, there is no one who is going home,” he said. “You’re going to be buried here.”

The vast majority of Kenyans are Christian, a faith that arrived with early colonization. A group of Finnish missionaries brought Pentecostalism in the nineteen-hundreds. The colonial government tried to suppress it, because a faction of pro-independence freedom fighters belonged to the African Independent Pentecostal Church of Africa, which included messages about decolonization in its hymns. But after independence, in 1963, Pentecostalism and other forms of evangelical Christianity spread. They emphasized charismatic forms of worship—visions, spiritual healing, speaking in tongues—and a gospel that promised prosperity to the faithful. “If you want your church to be full, do what I call ‘spiritual gymnastics,’ ” Martin Olando, a scholar of African Christianity at the Bishop Hannington Institute, in Mombasa, told me. “Jump up and down, prophesize good tidings, tell people what they want to hear.” By the nineties, Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, enjoyed a beneficial relationship with Arthur Kitonga, an influential Pentecostal bishop. “President Moi has been appointed by God to lead this country,” Kitonga said at the time. William Ruto, Kenya’s current President, and its first evangelical one, brought gospel singers into his campaign team and party, and has donated cars, and thousands of dollars, to evangelical churches. His wife, Rachel, invited the U.S.-based televangelist Benny Hinn to preach with her at a crusade. (This year, Hinn apologized for giving fake prophecies. “There were times when I thought God had showed me something that He wasn’t showing me,” he told the Christian podcast “Strang Report.”)

Mackenzie was born in 1973, in Kwale County, on the Kenyan coast. His father, a shop manager, and his mother, a housewife, raised him and his nine siblings as evangelical Christians. “He was a good boy, he loved to go to church,” Robert, one of his brothers, told me. Mackenzie sang in the choir and gave guest sermons as a child. At home, he danced to gospel music. But he could quickly turn violent. When he was sixteen, Robert said, he got into an argument with another boy during a game of hide-and-seek and began viciously hitting him. “When you get him angry, he can beat you,” Robert said. After graduating from secondary school, Mackenzie worked as a street hawker in Mombasa, then drove a taxi in Malindi. He attended a Baptist church and began delivering popular sermons. In 2003, he founded Good News International, in the home of a follower. Joseph Katana, an early church member, said, “He was this person who, even when he just talked to you and gave you advice, you would end up feeling better.”

Initially, Mackenzie’s church reminded Robert of the one they grew up in, which focussed on careful reading of the Bible. But over time Mackenzie’s teachings became more severe. Julius Gathogo, who teaches religious studies at Kenyatta University, told me, “He was very eloquent. But he went to the extremes.” Mackenzie began arguing that hospitals and schools were demonic. “Even Jesus never went to school,” he said in one sermon. “Peter was never learned.” Mackenzie seemed able to see the future. “He told us that there was a sickness coming and that everything would be closed down,” Robert said. “After two years, Covid-19 came.”

In 2015, Mackenzie started a broadcasting company to spread his sermons, and eventually acquired a local station, which he called Times TV. He had married a woman named Agnes, with whom he had a son and a daughter, but she died in 2009, of complications related to asthma. He got married again, to a woman named Joyce, but she died in 2017—of pneumonia, Mackenzie told his brother. By then, hundreds of followers attended his church every day, but his teachings about school were also generating controversy. Aisha Jumwa, then Malindi’s member of Parliament, publicly denounced him. Samson Zia Kahindi, Shakahola’s representative in the county assembly, told me, “He knows how to write, he knows how to speak English, he knows how to read. Why are you denying it for others?” In 2017, Mackenzie was charged with promoting radicalization through the church, and failing to send his own children to school. He was acquitted. Two years later, he was arrested again, and found guilty of running an unlicensed TV studio.

According to a Kenyan parliamentary report, Mackenzie may have been influenced by the teachings of Dave and Sherry Mackay, the Australian founders of a fringe religious movement known as A Voice in the Desert, started in 1981. The Mackays preach about the “end times” and instruct their followers to surrender their earthly possessions and relocate to an isolated community to serve the group’s leaders. In 2019, according to the report, Mackenzie hosted an associate of the Mackays, who gave sermons to his congregation, telling them to follow Mackenzie to a “promised land.” (The Mackays have denied any contact with Mackenzie.) Then, for a time, Mackenzie seemed to go silent. One of his former employees told me that he was searching for a new home for the church. “He wanted a sacred place, a huge place,” he said. The employee said that Mackenzie’s closest deputy, Smart Mwakalama, suggested that they could get land cheaply in Shakahola. “We are living in the last days,” Mackenzie said, in a sermon released on his YouTube channel in 2020. “The wrath is strong on this earth. . . . We don’t have much time.”

On a hot day last November, I drove from Malindi to Shakahola. By the time I got out of the city, rain was falling heavily on the lush, green countryside. The roads became mush, and I had to stop several times to determine whether I could pass through pools of water without being submerged. I came to a village bordering the forest. Beyond the thickets of trees, where birds sheltered from the rain, lay mud huts built by Mackenzie’s followers. The forest seemed like a fortress.

Many parishioners had been excited to follow Mackenzie to Shakahola. Joseph Katana, the early member, said that joining Mackenzie’s church, in 2012, “saved me from madness.” Joseph had suffered from mental illness since childhood, sometimes having manic shouting fits during which his parents had trouble restraining him. When he was twenty-four, his parents took him to Mackenzie for help. He lived at the church for two years, with other parishioners dealing with mental illness. The church leaders tied his arms and feet with rope, he said, and kept him on a mattress in the church’s main space. “They feared I would run away,” he told me. “They freed me to eat.” During services, he and the others were moved under a tree outside, so that they wouldn’t disturb other church members. Mackenzie often prayed over Joseph, and it seemed to work. “Within three or four months, I was feeling free,” Joseph said. He could relax and sleep through the night, and visit his family without problems. He spent the next several years renting an apartment from Mackenzie and working as the church’s watchman. “Mackenzie told me that, when I go back home, maybe the sickness will attack me again, so I have to serve God all of my life,” he said. Joseph’s wife, Elizabeth, went to Shakahola with their five small children, while Joseph remained in Malindi and worked part time as a tour guide. Elizabeth had seen Mackenzie perform miracles, including the healing of a mentally ill woman who seemed, she said, to be “possessed by demons.”

By 2020, Mackenzie had begun telling his followers to fast for the sake of their souls. He may have been inspired by the teachings of William Branham, an American evangelical preacher who became known in the forties and fifties for his doomsday theology. (Kenyan investigators found copies of Branham’s sermons in Shakahola.) Branham gave tirades against the health and education systems, and encouraged fasting as a way of achieving “atomic power,” a form of spiritual strength. He later mentored Jim Jones, the cult leader who orchestrated the 1978 murder-suicide of more than nine hundred followers in Jonestown, Guyana. According to former followers and the parliamentary report, Mackenzie eventually told his people that the world was ending, and that everyone would soon die; the only way to insure a place in Heaven was to starve to death. “Getting to Heaven is not as easy as bread and margarine,” he said, in one sermon. “You have to deny yourself and go against yourself. You have to get to the point of ending your life for the sake of Jesus.” Children would also have to fast. “Let them die,” he said. “Is there any problem? It’s Jesus who gave you those children.” He tasked a group of security officers with enforcing the fast, according to former accomplices and Kenyan prosecutors, and put Mwakalama, his deputy, in charge. Mwakalama is trim and bearded, with small-boned features, and had previously been an accountant at a hotel. “He was very close to Mackenzie,” Elizabeth said.