When they sold their homes all over the country and headed for Malindi, believers thought that they were going to live a beautiful life of fellowship and communion with other believers, to make wonderful music as the righteous do in heaven, and pray, waiting for the Messiah to come and take them to Paradise. Instead they found death, untold fear and suffering beyond measure.
An old woman kneels outside a mud-and-thatch cabin deep inside Shakahola Forest in Kilifi County. In her arms is an eight-year-old-child, weak and dying. The boy is dressed in new “special clothes”.
Four strangers burst into the clearing, startling the old woman.
In the distance, a crowd is approaching and two of the strangers – members of the boy’s extended family – can make out the child’s mother and father in the group. They too are dressed in their best, as if for an occasion. They are also rattled by the strangers. They take to their heels and disappear into the bush. Two of the strangers, police officers from Langobaya Police Station, respond swiftly and snatch the boy from the old woman. Confused and scared, she too flees into the forest.
The boy is weak and can barely talk. The strangers give him glucose and some water and he appears to regain some strength.
“Where are your brothers?” they ask him.
“They went home to see Jesus,” the child answers, pointing at two fresh flat graves where his siblings are buried.
Two of the strangers are the boy’s cousins and the rescue party was organised by his grandfather. They got there just in time for this day, March 17, 2023, the designated day of his death.
His younger brother, Seth, died the previous day; Imani, the lastborn, a day earlier.
“They have come for my wedding,” the child says of the crowd that has scattered.
‘Wedding’, in the language of Good Life Christian Church, is a celebration of a follower’s supposed reunion with Jesus Christ, achieved through fasting to death. The sect has a system, called maombi, or prayers, of fasting. It is also described as “kufunga bila kushuka”, fasting without relenting.
The rescued child was among the lucky few.
Some 453 sect members are confirmed dead, among them 182 children, in one of Kenya’s worst mass casualty incidents.
Fifty mass graves are now being exhumed and more bodies are being found, though not in the same numbers as previously, which means the final death toll will be higher. Some starved from fasting, others were strangled or bludgeoned, according to government postmortem examination of the exhumed bodies.
Traumatised families
The family believes Seth was suffocated by his mother. He was weak and suffering. She covered his mouth and nose until he died, they claim. Such fears are common among traumatised families who have lost loved ones, especially children. But the truth will only be established by the trial of sect members and leaders now going on in Malindi.
At some point, the cult members adopted a slightly different approach to maombi. Evah, whose full name is withheld to protect the identity of her children, lived with her two sons in what she termed ‘New Eden’.
She said during fasting, the family would stop cooking altogether and no one was allowed to eat or even take a sip of water.
The entire family was to be ‘cleansed’ through fasting until they would all ‘ascend’ to meet Jesus. They had to fast until one of the children, usually the youngest, was on the verge of death.
On that day, the family was expected to cook and everyone had to eat, except the weak one. Once the weakest died, the programme would be repeated for each child, then the mother and ultimately the father.
Eve and her children survived because they fasted only for a couple of days, then they broke the rules and ate.
Eventually, she fled the forest, mobilised help and rescued her children. Eve was a practising Christian before she joined Good News and even though she was a fervent believer in its teachings, loved its leader and was deliriously happy in the forest – “I was happy here, I was free” – she said the earlier teachings of her church stopped her from going to the extent of killing her children.
“We were taught to fast for a few days, not to death,” she said.
Salama, 30, was in the forest with her husband and five children, the youngest of whom was born without medical attention in the hovels of Shakahola. Her fasting formula involved denying children food in pairs, starting with “hawa wa haraka haraka”, the very young who would “sleep” after only two days of fasting. After she gave birth, she attempted to fast her child in accordance with cult teachings.
“I breastfed the newborn once, then put it on a fast for a day. “The baby cried the whole night, non-stop. I didn’t have the heart to continue,” she said. The children being fasted were simply locked up in a room without food or water.
The older ones probably understood the concept of dying to go and meet Jesus; the young ones did not.
Next: Children chosen to die first