Kenyan cult leader Paul Mackenzie convicted of murdering 191 people, nearly all of them children
Paul Mackenzie, the leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult, has been found guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children. He ordered members of his cult to starve their children to death so that they could “meet Jesus”. His doctrine held that education was forbidden and that modern medicine was “evil”.
Twenty-eight other leaders of the movement were convicted of murder alongside him, and they had all pleaded not guilty, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to die. Convictions for murder now sit on the record next to that insistence, which makes the meaning of consent the sharpest thing about the case.
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The detail that sticks is the co-defendants' insistence that nobody was forced to die. Mackenzie told parents to starve their children so they could meet Jesus, so “no one was forced” becomes an argument about the definition of force rather than a denial of what happened.
One follower who started attending Mackenzie's church at the age of eight still describes him as his “spiritual father” and says he would never say a bad word about him. That same follower's condition deteriorated in the forest because medication was banned. Devotion that durable is what makes a consent defence sound arguable at all — and what should make anyone suspicious of it.