The chilling legacy of one of Kenya’s deadliest cults has been laid bare by the eldest son of its convicted leader, who has revealed that forced starvation indoctrination continued to target his own younger siblings more than two years after the cult’s brutal practices were first exposed.
Twenty-seven-year-old Dan Mackenzie, son of doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie, came forward to Kenyan police with a disturbing tip-off just two weeks ago: his five young siblings were being held at their grandmother’s home and denied food as part of the cult’s deadly doctrine. Acting on his report, law enforcement officers raided the property, rescued eight children including the five siblings, and transferred them to a state-run protection center. “They were basically forcibly fasted because they were denying food to them for almost three days,” Dan told BBC’s Newsday in an exclusive interview.
On Monday, a Kenyan court delivered a historic guilty verdict: Paul Mackenzie was convicted of the murder of 191 people — 190 children and one adult — who starved to death in the remote Shakahola Forest near Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast. The 53-year-old pastor ordered followers of his Good News International Church doomsday cult to starve themselves and their children to death to “meet Jesus” ahead of an apocalypse he preached was imminent. Twenty-eight other senior cult leaders were also found guilty of murder alongside Mackenzie.
Dan, who once defended his father’s actions, told reporters he spent months grappling with the reality of the cult’s crimes as the court case unfolded, before his own childhood trauma led him to break with his family’s dangerous beliefs. “When I was 12, I was forced to fast for almost a week,” he recalled. He also detailed violent childhood abuse at the hands of church members, who beat him for hours to force him to attend cult services. Under the cult’s extreme ideology, formal education was banned entirely and modern medicine labeled “evil” — a rule that cost Dan his own schooling at just seven years old.
Today, Dan lives in the coastal town of Malindi, where he works as a motorcycle taxi driver to support himself and the newly rescued siblings he helped save. While some local residents have shunned him over his father’s atrocities, he says most have accepted him after he publicly cut all ties with the cult and its dangerous teachings. “I hope the verdict would bring some comfort to those who had lost friends and relatives,” he said.
In her eight-hour ruling delivered in the coastal port city of Mombasa, Justice Diana Mochache outlined the full scale of the cult’s manipulation and violence. She told the court that Mackenzie had convinced his followers he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece,” and that any member who resisted the order to fast would be beaten into compliance to “send them to heaven through kicks and blows.” Bodies of victims buried in shallow graves across Shakahola Forest were referred to by cult members as “weddings,” the judge added, with deaths celebrated as followers “wedding with Jesus.”
The murder conviction marks the first major ruling on the most severe charges against Mackenzie, who was first arrested in 2023 after investigators discovered more than 400 bodies in shallow graves across the forest. The cult leader and his co-convicted still face a string of additional pending charges, including terrorism, radicalization, and the unlawful denial of education to hundreds of children. Mackenzie’s sentencing is scheduled for 6 November, where he could face the death penalty for his crimes.