SHAKAHOLA, Kenya >> Delirious from hunger, a believer who had brought his family to live with a Christian doomsday cult in a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya sent a distraught text to his younger sister this month. Though he begged her for help to escape, he was still in the grip of the preacher who had lured him there, promising salvation through death by starvation.

“Answer me quickly, because I don’t have much time. Sister, End Times is here and people are being crucified,” Solomon Muendo, a former street hawker, told his sister. “Repent so that you’re not left behind, Amen.”

Muendo, 35, has been living in the Shakahola Forest since 2021, when, like hundreds of other believers, he abandoned his home and moved there with his wife and two young children.

They were following the call of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a former taxi driver-turned-televangelist who, declaring that the world was about to end, marketed Shakahola to his followers as an evangelical Christian sanctuary from the fast-approaching apocalypse.

Instead of a haven, however, the 800-acre property, a sun-scorched wasteland of scrub and spindly trees, is now a gruesome crime scene, scattered with the shallow graves of believers who starved themselves to death — or, as Mackenzie would have it, crucified themselves so that they could meet Jesus.

As of this past week, 179 bodies have been exhumed and moved to a hospital mortuary in the coastal town of Malindi, around 100 miles east of Shakahola, for identification and autopsy. The government’s chief pathologists reported that though starvation caused many deaths, some of the bodies showed signs of death by asphyxiation, strangulation or bludgeoning. Some had had organs removed, a police affidavit said.

Hundreds more people still are missing, perhaps buried in undiscovered graves. Others are wandering the property without food like Muendo — whose wife and children are missing, his sister said.

The horrific scale of what the Kenyan news media called the Shakahola Massacre has left the government struggling to explain how, in a country that counts itself among Africa’s most modern and stable nations, law enforcement had for so long missed the macabre goings-on in an expanse of land located between two popular tourist destinations, Tsavo National Park and the Indian Ocean coast.

That so many people disregarded the most basic human instinct to survive and chose instead to die through fasting has raised sensitive questions about the limits of religious freedom, a right that is enshrined in the Kenyan Constitution.

Evangelical Christianity — and freelance preachers — have surged in popularity across Africa, part of a religious boom on the continent that stands in stark contrast to the rapid secularization of former colonial powers like Britain, which governed Kenya until 1963. About half of Kenyans are evangelicals, a far higher proportion than in the United States.

Unlike Roman Catholic or Anglican churches, which are governed by hierarchies and rules, many evangelical churches are run by independent preachers who have no oversight.

Kenya’s president, William Ruto — a fervent believer whose wife is an evangelical preacher — has been wary of imposing restrictions on religious activities, though recently he asked a group of church leaders and legal experts to propose ways to regulate Kenya’s chaotic faith sector.

For Victor Kaudo, a rights activist in Malindi who visited Shakahola in March, the freedom granted preachers like Mackenzie has gone too far. Tipped off by defectors from the cult, Kaudo found emaciated believers who, though in the throes of death, cursed him as “an enemy of Jesus” when he tried to help.

A starving woman, her head shaved on orders from the cult leadership, flailed angrily on the ground as Kaudo approached offering sustenance, a video he recorded showed.

“I wanted these starving people to survive, but they wanted to die and meet Jesus,” Kaudo recalled. “What do we do? Does freedom of worship supersede the right to life?”

Mackenzie has told investigators that he never ordered his followers not to eat and merely preached about the End Times agonies prophesied in the Book of Revelation, the final chapter of the New Testament. He was arrested in April, set free and then quickly rearrested. He is under investigation over accusations of murder, terrorism and other crimes. His lawyer declined to comment.

Appearing briefly before a court in Mombasa this month, Mackenzie, 50, wearing a pink jacket, cut a jaunty figure as he waved imperiously from inside a metal cage to get the magistrate’s attention. The magistrate ignored him and extended his detention.

‘A normal church at the beginning’

Mackenzie’s journey from destitute taxi driver to cult leader with his own television channel began in 2002 in a stone courtyard opposite a Catholic primary school in Malindi. The property belonged to Ruth Kahindi, who had met Mackenzie at a nearby Baptist church and invited him to preach at her home.

Together they formed their own church, Good News International, using Kahindi’s home as its base.

“It was a normal church at the beginning,” recalled Kahindi’s daughter Naomi, who remembers Mackenzie as a powerful speaker who initially stuck to the standard evangelical message of salvation through faith in Christ alone and the Bible as the ultimate spiritual authority.

After years of close partnership, Ruth Kahindi split with Mackenzie around 2008, the daughter said, after he grew increasingly apocalyptic in his preaching.

There were also quarrels over cash, Kahindi’s daughter said, adding that Mackenzie was suspected of pocketing tithes.

In response, the daughter said, “He started accusing my mother of witchcraft.”

Barred from using Ruth Kahindi’s home for preaching, Mackenzie, no longer a pauper, built himself a big, concrete prayer hall on a plot of land he had purchased in Furunzi on the outskirts of Malindi and declared this the new home of Good News International Church. Word spread of his warnings of the coming Battle of Armageddon.

A peanut seller named Titus Katana, who joined the Good News church in 2015 and rose to become deputy pastor, said he initially had great admiration for Mackenzie and his preaching. “He changed because of his false prophecies” about the end of the world, Katana said. “His main interest became making money, not preaching to the world.”

By 2017, he recalled, Mackenzie had started telling worshippers not to see doctors or send their children to school. He set up his own unregistered, fee-paying school at his church. He also claimed divine healing powers, for which he also charged.

“He told me he had received a revelation from God” about education and medicine being sinful, Katana recalled. “Everything bad started with this.”

Mackenzie had by this time expanded his reach far beyond the Kenyan coast thanks to his establishment of Times TV, a gospel channel that beamed his increasingly fiery sermons over the internet and across Africa. Among those missing in Shakahola are a Nigerian citizen and a Kenyan flight attendant.

Elizabeth Syombua, the sister of the man now starving in the wilderness, said she and her brother had been entranced by Mackenzie’s television broadcasts. “You get addicted to what he says,” she said.