How I saved my 5 children from the apocalyptic sect in which more than 200 people died

Salema Masha speaks quietly, but her slender figure is animated by an inner strength that saved the lives of her five children.

One day in March, she led them out of a remote desert where the followers of a Kenyan televangelist were starving, in the belief that that way they might know Jesus more quickly.

Among the horrific stories emerging from the Christian sect of the end of the world in the East African country, Salema’s stands out.

So far they have recovered more than 200 bodies from mass graves in the vast Shakahola forest on the southern coast of Kenya, with more being unearthed every day.

Survivors are still found hiding under trees and bushes in the territory of more than 300 hectares.

The self-proclaimed pastor paul mackenzie opened Good News International Church in 2003.

He repeatedly attracted the attention of the police with his claims that children should not go to school and that medical treatment should be refused.

In 2019 he closed the church and invited his followers to move with him to Shakahola, a place he called a new “Holy Land”. Salema’s husband was among those who answered the call.

As she tells her story, she breastfeeds 1-year-old Esther, who was born in the woods. Her eldest child, a boy named Amani, is 8 years old.

The mass suicide began in January. Salema says that she followed the instructions to start fasting in order to “get to heaven”.

Mackenzie had been telling her followers for some time that the world was coming to an end.

He initially offered the forest as a sanctuary from the approaching apocalypse. But, in a hair-raising twist, the spot became the last point to reach heaven before the “End of Days.”

After seven days of fasting, Salema says she heard a voice from God telling her that this was not his will and that she still had work to do in the world, so she stopped.

People around her were dying: at one point she attended the funeral of eight children. It was called going to “sleep”.

She says she was told, “If your children don’t die, you should stop going to other people’s funerals.”

Survivors say the children were supposed to be the first to go, according to a macabre order drafted by Mackenzie. Then singles, women, men, and lastly, church leaders.

“When the child cried or asked for food or water, they told us that we took a cane and hit it so that they went to eat in heavenSalem explains.

“So I thought about it and said, ‘I can’t go on with this situation, I can’t eat while my son is starving.’ I said to myself, ‘If I feel so bad when I fast, what about my son? ‘”.

A BBC analysis of videos of Mackenzie’s sermons does not show him directly ordering people to stop eating. However, according to Salema, he was explicit in the weekly meetings on Saturdays.

“In the beginning, the shepherd dug… wells of water [en el bosque] and told us to wait for Jesus, and we waited. But then all of a sudden he told us we should fast and go to heaven,” he recounts.

When they questioned the order, as Salema did, they were told that, if they delayed their deaths, the sky would be full: “The door would be closed.”

Much of Mackenzie’s preaching focused on a new national identity card to be used in Kenya that will include personal data encoded on an electronic chip.

He called it the “sign of the beast” and said it was to be avoided at all costs.

Salema’s husband was Mackenzie’s assistant. A friend told her that when she went out to work, she actually went to bury the dead. One day in March she stood up and forced his family to fast.

Four days later he went to work and Salema saw her opportunity. He grabbed the children and left.

“My children fasted for four days without food or water, and they were crying,” she recalls. “So when I saw that they were so weak, I gave them water and told myself that I could not allow my children to die.”

The children were guided by their mother’s steel will and protected by her status as the wife of a Mackenzie helper.

Salema says other members of the sect challenged her but did not stop her, and when she reached the main road after walking several kilometres, “a good Samaritan” led her to safety.

But other fugitives were arrested. A group of men armed with machetes chased them, beat them and dragged them back into the forest, according to accounts told by survivors and former members of the group.

Mackenzie turned himself in to authorities on April 15.

He denies ordering his followers to starve themselves. But the search and rescue operation found many dead children buried in his compound.

Police said detained helpers said this was Mackenzie’s way of identifying with Jesus’ command to “let the children come to me,” says journalist Marion Kithi.

Police also noted that before Mackenzie left, he ordered his aides to continue applying the mass starvation and burying the dead, according to Kithi.

It is the surviving children who have provided much of the information about what happened, says Victor Kaudo, a human rights activist from Haki Africa, who first alerted the police that young children were dying in Shakahola.

Some of the adults have refused treatment even after being rescued.

And there is a suspicion that members of the sect continue exerting influence beyond the forest, quietly telling the survivors to refuse food and medicine.

Kaudo says that two people his group rescued and considered victims were actually “part of this militia that Mackenzie had” and should have been separated from the others.

Former cult member Titus Katana says he knows many of Mackenzie’s aides and that most have been arrested.

But this week a body was discovered dumped in the woods, not buried. That makes him suspect that some of the enforcers are still “supervising the fasting process of the people.”

Salema says Mackenzie’s agents they came looking for her a week after she left and they advised her to come back but did not threaten her. She knows that others were not treated as kindly.

A woman approached her and asked for her help in escaping the cult with her children and finding the money for transportation back to her hometown. Salema promised to help her. The woman returned to the forest to look for her children and It was never again heard from her.

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