‘My wife starved my children in a death cult. How can I forgive?’

‘Any time I think about Rukia, I just cry,” Boniface Masha Karesa said as rain hammered on the tin roof of his clothes shop in the village of Shakadulo in Kilifi county. “I had a lot of hope for my girl. She was bright: she wanted to be a doctor.”

In April 2023, his daughter Rukia’s body was found in a mass grave in the remote forest of Shakahola with those of at least 191 other children. The 16-year-old’s hands were bound, and she had starved to death. The bodies of her siblings, Pilly, 13, and Sarah, ten, have yet to be identified.

Judith Siri Yeri, Rukia’s mother, is charged with manslaughter alongside 94 other people who were part of the Good News International Church, a Pentecostal cult run by Paul Nthenge Mackenzie.

Mackenzie, a taxi driver turned preacher, is charged with 191 counts of murder, 238 counts of manslaughter, as well as charges of radicalisation and child abuse.

The accused have been on trial for more than two years, and the judgments are expected this month. At the conclusion of the manslaughter section of the trial on September 17, Mackenzie and his former followers filled the public gallery of Mombasa’s court, shackled and surrounded by armed guards. Mackenzie, who denies all charges, chatted and laughed with lawyers and journalists.

The judge said there had been a delay in the verdicts. Lady Justice Diana Rachel Kavedza conceded last week: “I underestimated the weight of the case … it’s really, really heavy.”

The Shakahola Forest massacre has been described as a mass suicide, orchestrated by Mackenzie. His followers, believing the world would end in April 2023, were instructed to begin a fatal fast in a strict order: children first, then women and men. Mackenzie and his family would be last.

About 429 bodies have been exhumed from several shallow graves in Shakahola, Malindi, which is colloquially known as “the place you go to meet Jesus”. Nearly half of those found had died of starvation, but post-mortem examinations indicated a number were strangled or beaten to death.

Mackenzie is also charged in connection with a further 52 deaths in Binzaro, 16 miles from Shakahola Forest, after followers allegedly carried out another mass starvation in August last year under orders he issued from prison.

Siri Yeri, who is awaiting sentencing at Shimo La Tewa Maximum Security Prison, has never fully revealed what happened to her children. “It was like she was possessed,” Masha Karesa, the father of her children, said. “She was saying the children had gone to be with the Lord.”

Also among the accused is Joan Bahati, who was pregnant when she moved to the forest with her five children in August 2022. Only the body of her seven-year-old son, Samuel, has been identified; he was strangled.

Steven Mwiti, the father of her children, was at work when they disappeared. “[Samuel’s] grave had about ten or 20 people in it,” he said. “When we exhumed the bodies, they were light; they weren’t even 5kg. I wasn’t able to look because I knew that once I did, I wouldn’t even be able to walk.”

The bodies of his children — Hellen Karimi, nine, Jacob Kimathi, three, Lillian Gatumbi, 18 months, Angela Gatumbi, seven months, and the son Bahati was carrying when she left for the forest — have never been found. Bahati is believed to have given birth in the forest, and Mwiti said his youngest died three days later.

Mackenzie’s apocalyptic preachings painted education and vaccinations as satanic. He told his followers that Huduma numbers, the unique identification number given to Kenyan residents, were the “sign of the beast” and that the Covid-19 pandemic signalled the end of the world.

“[Bahati] said the Covid vaccine was straight from the devil,” Mwiti said. “When I asked her why she ran away with the kids, she told me, ‘You have already registered for the Huduma number, the symbol of the devil, and I want to save my children.’”

Bahati first came across Mackenzie on his television channel in about 2016. She eventually took her children out of school and denied them access to healthcare. She also stopped taking contraception, in line with Mackenzie’s preachings, and “started giving birth every year” without medical check-ups or treatment, Mwiti said.

Ultimatums and interventions from other family members did nothing to persuade her. “If you want to join the church, just go, but leave my children behind,” Mwiti told his wife. “But she didn’t accept. She stole the kids. I searched for her, but I didn’t find her.”

Four months later, she called him asking for money. He refused and offered her a food parcel instead. She asked for it to be sent to the Shakahola Forest.

Mwiti went there, desperate to find his children, but nothing could prepare him for what he saw. “We came across people who were malnourished. When we tried asking for directions to Mackenzie’s place, they didn’t respond … We saw kids, and they ran away.”

Mackenzie’s hundreds of followers were split into villages with biblical place names including Bethlehem, Judea, Nazareth and Jerusalem. Followers lived in makeshift mud huts with polythene sheeting, while Mackenzie’s house had a thatched roof, furniture and a tiled bathroom.

After hours of searching, Mwiti found a house with a white saloon car outside. “We knocked, but there was no response,” he said. “There was no way to enter, so we removed the fence. When we got inside, we found about 70 children and approximately 30 women, all with shaved heads. They were locked inside.”

On the other side of the room was Mackenzie.

“I had a picture of my family. I introduced myself and told him the reason I was there — I just want my children. He asked me, ‘Are you sure they are here at Mackenzie’s? … because I’m famous, everyone says they are at Mackenzie’s. I can’t help you, and I don’t know your children.’”

Attempts to report Mackenzie to the police were met with indifference. “[The police] told me they were tired of Mackenzie cases. I told them I had been to Shakahola and found people in a terrible state, and that kids were being held hostage. They told me I should calm down.” The police are not able to comment on the case until after the judgment.

The police and the government have been heavily criticised for not acting soon enough to prevent the massacre. Mackenzie was arrested multiple times but released because of a lack of evidence. In March 2017, police found 43 children during a raid of Mackenzie’s property, all of whom were not attending school.

Kipchumba Murkomen, the interior cabinet secretary, acknowledged the government’s failure but added: “We cannot yet say whether specific individuals are culpable. I do not want to cast blame on those who served at the time until we have proper evidence. The Shakahola killings should never have happened. It was a failure by the government to protect its citizens.”

There has also been public condemnation of the slow return of bodies to their families for burial. In the days after the exhumation, families provided DNA samples to identify missing loved ones, but only 34 bodies have been claimed. The rest remain in Red Cross mobile refrigerators outside the morgue in Malindi.

On September 17, the government issued a public disposal order, which gave the public 21 days to “identify and collect the 443 human bodies and 45 body parts exhumed” from both massacres.
Masha Karesa believes the bodies of his remaining children are at the morgue, but cannot afford to collect them.

The defence hopes the judge will evaluate each manslaughter case individually, instead of giving the kind of sweeping punishment sought by the prosecution. If their wish is granted, many of Mackenzie’s followers could be released.

Officers asked Mwiti and Masha Karesa if they would take their wives back upon release. “Someone has killed your six innocent children; how do you forgive them and welcome them back home? I can never forgive her,” Mwiti said. “I don’t want to meet her because I’ll end up in jail.”

He plans to leave Malindi before his wife is released. “I’m hurting so badly. Any time I’m walking on the road and I see a kid who resembles mine, I just become emotional.”

Her decision to take them to the forest haunts him. “I would like to ask her just one question: since you believed this journey was heading to heaven, why did my children go while you’re still here? Do you now believe the journey was a lie?”