2023-04-28 09:45:51
FOCUS – This sect is responsible for the “Shakahola forest massacre”, a place located in south-eastern Kenya where the bodies of 109 starving members have been found since April 13, according to a provisional report.
Since mid-April, Kenyan police have been searching the Shakahola Forest in southeastern Kenya after the bodies of members of the Good News Church International were discovered. In this tragic case, the individuals allegedly practiced extreme fasting to “meet jesus“, under the leadership of a “pasteur» nommé Makenzie Nthenge.
The macabre count increases as the excavations progress, reaching 109 dead this Friday. The balance sheet remains provisional and the excavations had been suspended Tuesday evening to unclog the morgues. “We will not dig in the next two days to have time to carry out the autopsies“said an officer of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI).
Movement launched in 2003
The story begins on April 13, when police receive reports of “ignorant citizens starved to death on the pretext of meeting Jesus after being brainwashed by a suspect, Makenzie Nthenge, pastor of the International Church of Good News“, whose report was presented to AFP. Another information evokes possible mass graves. The following day, the pastor surrendered to the police, he is due to appear in court on May 2. Since the start of police operations, the death toll has only increased with children as the main victims.
The victims are members of the Good News International Church, founded in 2003 by Paul Mackenzie Nthenge. A former taxi driver in the 1990s, he self-proclaimed “pasteurby founding this religious movement. The sect claims more than 3,000 members and branches in several regions of Kenya. “The mission of this ministry is to nurture the faithful holistically in all areas of Christian spirituality as we prepare for the second coming of Jesus Christ through teaching and evangelism.“, could we read on their site. According to Titus Katana, who knows this “pasteur», «ct was in January that Paul Mackenzie set the schedule: children and unmarried people were to die first, followed by mothers, then fathers», «Paul Mackenzie and his family were to fast the last“. This guru had announced to the faithful an end of the world next June.
For Sébastien Fath, CNRS researcher and specialist in evangelism in Africa, “this “Church” is in fact a sectarian group, which is not part of any network. It is neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Evangelical, and revolves around a charismatic leader who has achieved his own “mix” theological and ascetic», explains the researcher, “its doctrines are still little known, but according to the declarations of the number two of the sect, Zablon Mwana wa Yesu, affirming “not to believe in God, only in Jesus”, we are clearly in complete heterodoxy in relation to the networks existing Kenyan Christians. There’s actually a lot to figure out…».
Read alsoSectarian separatism: when the new gurus break with the laws of the Republic
The guru had also launched a YouTube channel in 2017 where he warned his followers against the practices “demonicsuch as wearing wigs and cashless digital transactions. He had been arrested twice in the same year for “radicalisationafter advocating not putting children in school, and for leading to the death of two children from starvation. He was released on bail of 100,000 Kenyan shillings (about 670 euros).
In 2019, the “pasteurself-proclaimed decided to shut down his Church claiming:Jesus told me that the work he entrusted to me is finished“. But the charismatic leader allegedly then took his followers to a nearby forest and convinced them to fast to meet God.
”
data-script=”https://static.lefigaro.fr/widget-video/short-ttl/video/index.js”
>
African Independent Churches
This tragedy is part of a larger phenomenon of development of marginal religious movements in this area of Africa. Kenyan Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said on Tuesday: “Che event at Shakahola is a turning point in how Kenya deals with security threats posed by religious extremists“. President William Ruto denounced the work of “terrorists».
Already in 1992, in his book Africa of Healings, the Jesuit priest Éric de Rosny explains this phenomenon of prosperity of the independent Christian Churches in Africa. Originally described as “a mystical resistance to colonial power and the expression of an original faithhe dates the first religious movement to 1862 in Ghana.
Read alsoExtraterrestrial embassy, drain on wages, “sexual revolution”: Raël, the fruitful sectarian multinational
Since then, their number has increased considerably. No assessment has recently been published, but Éric de Rosny presents various figures drawn from surveys carried out in the 1980s. In Ghana, there were 500 independent religious movements at that time. In Liberia, for 235,000 people, there are 500 places of worship, belonging to a hundred religious groups independent of each other.
For Sébastien Fath, “sects almost always start from a pre-existing religious ground. In Uganda, on Catholic soil, the Kanungu sect, which killed 700 people in the year 2000, claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and was led by defrocked priests“. But according to Éric de Rosny, these movements abound particularly in regions with a high Protestant proportion, such as Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, former British colonies. Here, the theological principle of free will derived from Protestantism favors separatist initiatives. Such is the case for this International Church of Good News, where the words preached “refer to borrowings from the Protestant world“says Sébastien Fath.
As far as practices are concerned, Sébastien Fath explains that this sect has “exploited to the horror and death of rural African ascetic traditions deeply rooted in the Malindi region, in particular the notion of purifying fasting“. This region is also a very fertile ground for this kind of movement. Just today, a local pastor was arrested this morning for “mass murder of his followers». «The Malindi region is neglected by the Kenyan central government“says this CNRS researcher. “It is also confronted, from time to time, with the jihadist terror of the Shebabs. This context of misery and anxiety could feed millennial expectations».
The death toll could rise further. The Kenya Red Cross said more than 200 people were missing. Kithure Kindiki said “We pray for God to help them overcome the trauma, recover and tell how one day a Kenyan, a human being, decided to hurt so many people, heartless, hiding under the holy scriptures» .
”
data-script=”https://static.lefigaro.fr/widget-video/short-ttl/video/index.js”
>
#International #Church #Good #News #sect #advocating #fasting #death