The sleepy rural town of Shakahola in the Malindi area of Kenya, East Africa, hit global headlines recently with ‘breaking news’ that some members of a ‘church’ named Good News International Church had committed mass suicide. And they were hurriedly buried in unmarked graves.
A state-ordered investigation into the deaths led to the exhumation of the graves. At the time of writing this, 101 bodies have so far been exhumed, with more children making up the number. More victims are expected to be exhumed.
Meanwhile, the owner and leader of the ‘church’, identified as Paul Mackenzie Nthenge, is not among the dead. He is alive. He is with the Kenyan police authorities and is alleged to have ordered his followers to fast to death in order to meet with Jesus Christ.
The irony of what is now called “Shakahola Forest Massacre,” as Kenyan interior minister Kithure Kindiki said, is that “those who urged others to fast and die were eating and drinking.” According to details from the investigation, children were made to fast and die first, followed by women and then men. In all these, the ‘church’ victims were led by people who believed they were preparing them to meet their creator.
This is not the first time humankind would live to see such mass murder-suicide in the name of meeting with Jesus Christ. For instance, going through some dates in history, I recall that in the year 2002, there was the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda, which left about 778 members dead in mass suicide and murders. There was Heaven’s Gate in 1997 in Rancho Santa Fe, California, where 39 followers died in mass suicide. There was also the Solar Temple, otherwise properly known as the Order of the Solar Temple, and the International Chivalric Organization of the Solar Tradition. It was founded in Geneva and claimed about 74 lives in mass suicides that took place in France, Switzerland and Canada between 1994 and 1995.
Perhaps the most notorious of them all was the Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones in Jamestown, Guyana, which, in 1978, forced the mass suicide of 918 Americans, including 276 children, in what became more popular as Guyana Tragedy. There was also the Yogmaya Jal Samadhi of 1941 in Nepal, where the sect leader, Yogmaya Neupane, and her group of 67 disciples committed mass suicide by jumping into and drowning in the Arun River. In 1993, David Koresh led 73 members of his sect, Branch Davidians, in Waco, Texas, into mass death in a fire that engulfed their ‘church’ after 51 days of siege by the FBI to break in and free the cult members.
In “The Will to Kill,” James A. Fox and Jack Levin defined a cult as being “loosely structured and unconventional forms of small religious groups, the members of which are held together by a charismatic leader who mobilizes their loyalty around some new religious cause—typically a cause that is at odds with that of more conventional religious institutions.”
There is the view that “the core of the cult is the belief in something or someone that drives these persons to take action based on what the leader or leaders say or do, and this often has violent ends or a conclusion paved in death.”
So, the question is asked: what makes people accept to remain loyal to someone who would mobilise them towards a cause that is at odds with those of conventional religious institutions? Experts in cult psychology argue that the human need for comfort prompts people to seek out others or things to soothe their fears and anxieties. Eschatological studies, as enshrined in Christian theology and doctrinal teachings of the Christian church, do not encourage suicide for the sake of meeting with God. Scripturally, suicide is anathema. It is abhorred. Those who have found themselves deceptively nudging people to suicide for the sake of God only successfully manipulate the ignorant and the uninformed.
This is simply human instrumentation. It is about making a tool out of humans. Those who submit their lives to such a low level of instrumentation confirm themselves as foolish and lacking in the ability to think. The psychological situation that makes such suicide possible comes from the sort of poverty that traps the mind in a state of complete hopelessness. Those who successfully walk themselves into this state see themselves as good for nothing else other than to execute whatever any creature that leads them dictates.
Some people hold the view that when the system (often, governmental and leadership) fails families and groups of persons, they are more likely to turn towards something that sounds or looks like a better option. These failures often expose people to something that captures their minds in such a manner that they are eager to agree with new teachings and dictates. And it is more troubling when a leader has the charisma to capture the hearts and minds of those that agree to follow him/her. The problem that this creates is that such a leader will eventually become able to lead them into a very different path and even to a point where they would agree to hurt themselves, including suicide, because their leader dictated so. I guess this is the reason it is often quite easy for persons involved in religious cults to see their leaders as something other than ordinary humans (tin gods). When this happens, such members become self-destructive and may also harm others in the defence of their leader.
To address this issue, there would be a need for more strategic and purposeful management of the social environment and conditions where people develop. Abject poverty is an issue here. In local Nigerian circles, many people ask why it is only the poor, and mostly women, who fall down, roll on the floor and gyrate madly under ‘anointing’ by a pastor.
Many people wonder why the rich do not go for deliverance and also do not fall and roll on the floor ‘under anointing’. Some wonder why it is the poor and the deprived that always have ancestral curses and yokes to be liberated from. In the same manner, many people ask why it is only the poor, business and social failures as well as the deficient in learning that are mostly found at miracle crusades.
The fact, as it appears to me, is that human instrumentation is mostly possible among people who fail to appreciate the capacity of their minds. Such persons always submit themselves to the manipulative tendencies of their leaders for instrumentation.