Court Prices the Gap Between Fasting and Starving at 191

MALINDI, KILIFI COUNTY, KENYA. The High Court here has convicted Paul Mackenzie, leader of the Good News International Church, on 191 counts of murder, in the first trial arising from the deaths of his followers in the Shakahola forest. Local bulletins named the organisation a starvation cult. Its own press materials named the practice fasting. The coroner's findings named it starvation. The verdict covers 191 of the more than 400 dead recovered from the forest. The remaining cases have entered a waiting list, a local instrument best described as the queue of the queue, pending further trials.

A fast, in the church's publications, is a discipline with an endpoint: the participant stops eating and, under this doctrine, proceeds to a scheduled meeting with Jesus. Starvation, in the coroner's vocabulary, is what the body files while the endpoint is pending. The mechanism on trial is one of tenses. The church briefed in the future tense. The forest kept records in the past tense. Local bulletins reprinted the future tense for months, then received the past tense one body at a time. Measured as filed: declaration, fasting, a word with no body count attached; finding, starvation, a term that is a cause of death; distance between the two, 191 counts, converting at a fixed rate of one murder charge per unit. The statement preceded its correction by the length of a fast with no listed end.

"We never printed the word starve," said Ephraim Charo, the church's former publications director, outside the courthouse, with the composure of a man reading minutes he wrote himself. "We printed fast. What a member did between the first day and the meeting with Jesus was a private arrangement between the member and Jesus."

Grace Mwende, advocate for several of the convicted, defended the operation on structural grounds. "A press release is written in the future tense. A post-mortem is written in the past tense. My client never once left the future tense," she said. "If remaining in one tense is a crime, every communications office on this continent should be arraigned by Friday."

Mackenzie denied the charges. Sentencing on the 191 counts follows. The intercept closes as a single row: declared, fasting; observed, starvation; variance to date, 191 counts; further counts, pending conversion.