A Kenyan court has sentenced cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murder of 191 people — 190 of them children — in the Shakahola Forest starvation cult, one of the deadliest cult tragedies in Africa’s history.
Justice Diana Kavedza handed down the sentence at the High Court in Mombasa on Friday. She gave Mackenzie 100 years for the murders by starvation — 183 counts covering 182 children and one adult — and a further 100 years for eight murders by direct homicide, in which children were strangled, suffocated or beaten. The two terms run one after the other, making 200 years in total. The judge named Mackenzie the principal figure bearing criminal responsibility, as leader of the Good News International Ministries and of the Shakahola settlement.
Mackenzie and 28 co-accused were convicted on October 19 on all 191 murder counts, for deaths between January 2021 and September 2023 in Shakahola Forest, Kilifi County. The co-convicts were sentenced on Friday as well, most receiving between 100 and 160 years each; two men who pleaded guilty under a bargain with prosecutors received 10 years each. Prosecutors had asked the court for the death penalty, citing the scale and brutality of the killings. The court declined to impose it, and Mackenzie’s defence lawyer told Reuters the sentence will be appealed.
Mackenzie’s followers had settled in the forest under his teaching that fasting would take them to heaven to meet Jesus before the end of the world. The court found an organised system behind the deaths: followers were forced to keep fasting, guards watched their movements and blocked anyone who tried to leave, and children were restrained, denied food and punished for trying to eat or escape.
The 191 deaths covered by this trial are only part of the Shakahola horror. Police began uncovering bodies in the forest in April 2023, and more than 400 bodies were recovered in total; many children have never been accounted for. Mackenzie still faces separate proceedings, including a case over 52 deaths at another site and terrorism-related charges, and he has pleaded not guilty in that case.
For the victims’ families, Friday’s sentence closes the main trial but not the search: relatives still do not know where many of the missing children are, and the court kept Mackenzie alive in part so that answers about the missing can still be pursued. For everyone else, the case stands as the extreme warning of where unchecked cult control leads — a preacher ran a settlement for years in which children starved behind his guards, in the open, before the state finally moved in.
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