adminNAIROBI. — When the leader of the Good News International Church, Pastor Mackenzie, said the world would end in June 2023, Stephen Mwiti’s wife believed him.
Now, he is certain that she starved to death along with their six children.
The 45-year-old, who makes his living selling mandazi, or fried bread, holds up a crumpled photograph of his wife and four of his children asking if anyone has seen them.
He has been doing this over and over again in the town of Malindi, south-east Kenya, since she disappeared from there last August.
Mr Mwiti has also been to look for them in the Shakahola forest, where members of Pastor Mackenzie’s church had isolated themselves.
His wife, Bahati Joan, was pregnant when she left last year with their children: Hellen Karimi, nine years old, Samuel Kirimil, seven, Jacob Kimathi, three, Lillian Gatumbi, 18 months, and Angelina Gatumbi, seven months.
Mr Mwiti later found out that his wife had given birth to a son, who also died.
She had been an ardent follower of Pastor Mackenzie since 2015 and had first gone to Shakahola in 2021, and then kept coming and going.
After alerting the police numerous times and failed personal attempts to rescue them, he learned recently from other children who had escaped and were being held by Kenyan police, that his own children had died.
“They could identify them from the pictures. They knew their names and where Jacob and Lillian had been buried,” he recounts, fighting back tears.
“I was told not to try to look for my children again. They were all dead. I was too late.”
He believes they were buried in the forest but their bodies have not yet been identified.
Some of Pastor Mackenzie’s followers lived a life of deprivation in Judea. Others holed themselves up in Bethlehem. There was also Nazareth.
“I learned that my wife and children lived and died in Jerusalem,” Mr Mwiti says. But he has not been there since officials began to exhume bodies from marked gravesites.
In the forest, detectives had initially mapped out 65 sites where people were buried. Each had several shallow graves with bodies huddled close to each other. — BBC
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter