It took more than a year for the Kenyan Public Prosecutor's Office to bring to trial the controversial preacher Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, founder of the 'Good News International Church', better known as the 'Fasting Sect', an extreme cult that preached abstention from food in order to ascend to Heaven and see Jesus before the world was conquered by Satan.
This was the word of the self-styled pastor, who had already come under the legal knife in the past for trying to convince young people to leave public school to embrace his church and its teachings. Evidently, he was not taken too seriously, and his fidelity-building activities were not monitored, to the extent that more than five hundred followers moved between 2022 and 2023, to a plot of land he owned (or competence) in the Shakahola forest, 70 kilometres from Malindi on the road to the Tsavo National Park. Here they allegedly started fasting, leaving all their few possessions to the preacher and his accomplices (according to the prosecution, 94 people including his wife) in exchange for a hut.
Some moved there with their families, even with small children.
In March last year, witnesses pointed out to the police a grave in which four corpses were found in a clear state of physical decay, before death. From there, after the preventive arrest of Mackenzie and the first collaborators found in Shakahola, searches in the forest led to the discovery of an impressive number of bodies, in mass graves. According to investigators, those traceable to the macabre ritual number 429, investigators put the number of victims at more than 450, and for the Red Cross, the number of missing members would be as many as 610. A massacre, as it has been called, for which the prosecution has at the end of the investigation laid 238 counts of manslaughter, incitement to suicide, child abuse and violence. Last autumn, President William Ruto also filed charges of genocide and terrorism. Last Monday, the trial finally started. The State, through prosecution lawyers Yamina Jami and Peter Kiprop, will present what it calls 'irrefutable evidence' against the Shakahola cult leader and his alleged accomplices.
The case has been widely reported in the media and not only in Kenya. Since the discovery, other unrecognised churches and deviant creed-related sects have come under the scanner and now the rules for obtaining licences to profess other cults are much stricter. There are more than a thousand churches in Kenya, mostly related to Protestantism. But there are also cults of preachers who, being a kind of taskmaster and moving possible votes in elections, are financed by politics.
The hope is that the sentence for the 'fasting sect', when it comes, will be able to change this perverse system that, not only in Africa, is much closer to the concept of Satan, than the fears of simple and naive souls.