Kenya 2023. A Christian domes day cult situated deep within the jungle away from prying eyes and civilization has shown us how a few terrible people can take advantage of the needy, desperate, and lost among us. Hundreds of followers located in this forest had given up their possessions, livelihoods, and wealth to prepare for the end of times. Their families and friends too followed this path towards destruction. Following the call of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, these people searching for a faith-driven solution to their lives, with a promise of forgiveness and paradise to come gave up everything in preparation for their salvation. What they received was horrible, evil, and not Christian.
So far 179 bodies have been exhumed and moved to a hospital in the coastal town of Malindi for body identification and investigation. Many of the bodies had been strangled or bludgeoned, with internal organs missing. Hundreds more people are missing, possibly buried in unmarked mass graves. Of course, the Kenyan Government is trying to explain how such a thing could happen within one of Africa’s most modernized nations.
Why would so many people disregard the most basic of human instincts to survive and chose to die through fasting and poisoning one’s self and family? How can an organization that sells itself as a Christian Church and movement become an example of human evil? Well, the answer to the question of why someone would do such a thing is obvious…GREED. These despicable murderers lacked any form of humanity except so one…survival of the fittest. Like a thought out of Darwin’s Evolutionary Thesis, the strong predators devoured the weak and vulnerable.
Africa has become an outlet for Right Wing Extremist Christian Movements, a place where anything can truly happen if the bribe is big enough. For the police and government officials in Kenya to claim innocence and ignorance of what was going on is like comparing these events to what happens in China’s Prison System where prisoner’s organs are harvested freely. Ignorance cannot be an excuse, nor that many Kenyans were innocently ignorant of these events. Like the Nazi’s actions, Germans claimed to not know what was going on. Seriously???
Evangelical Christianity has blossomed throughout Africa. In most cases, these organizations carry out good works attracting a loyal flock to religion. Those who see Africa as a wide open “Wild West” environment have been harvesting Africa’s Precious Commodities and Wealth. European and American Evangelists have become wealthy picking the pockets of Africans searching for a faith and religious promise. While the EU and Britain are becoming secularized, African Religious intensity is growing. Evangelical Preachers seeking wealth and power search for it throughout the continent.
For Victor Kaudo, a rights activist in Malindi, the freedom granted to preachers like Mackenzie has gone way too far. Indoctrination and brainwashing technics had been used to sell their ideology. As some members of the cult died, they refused to be helped because they wanted to die and be with Jesus.
Those who opposed Mackenzie were called witches and demons, threatened, imprisoned, and killed.
How can this happen? Well, there is a continental poverty widespread throughout Africa. The people are poor, the public servants and police are poor. So the poverty-stricken people search for solace within a religion or a political ideology. Politicians and police try to become wealthy through the acceptance of bribes and corruption. A very common practice indeed. Lots of organizations are around to spread this corruption, like multi-national corporations, and Chinese, European, and North American National Governments also. Africa has multiple mining, rubber, oil, and natural resource possibilities that foreign interests will acquire, and national governments and individuals are willing to sell their nation’s soul to the highest bidder. Then religious and political opportunists arrive to rob those who still have wealth and financial substance.
“Africa for Africans” was once the call of people like Mandela. Now, if this is heard, the police show up to arrest the political terrorists calling for national action for the people’s benefit. Capitalism at its worst, evolutions answer to the African Question: Africa belongs to who? Some will say it belongs to the organization of foreign nations with the deepest pockets. What do you think?
Steven Kaszab
Bradford, Ontario
[email protected]
sources: New York Times, U.N. African Paper, Vatican News(Africa).
