Inside the Kenyan cult that starved itself to death

(Abstract by The Economist) A preacher lured thousands of people into a forest. Then he told them to stop eating. It started with one family. Then another one arrived, then another. Soon there were enough of them to begin clearing a section of the forest, cutting down the moringa and acacia trees, and uprooting thick shrubs. The forest, known as Shakahola, bordered a village of the same name in south-eastern Kenya, not far from the coast. The villagers were puzzled. Not only had these strangers occupied their ancestral land without permission; they were also venturing into parts of the forest that were deemed uninhabitable. Shakahola forest, on the edge of the vast Tsavo National Park, teems with dangerous animals: lions and leopards, hyenas and elephants. Locals sometimes dipped into it to gather wood, to make charcoal or to graze their livestock. But no one from Shakahola dared live there.Yet these mysterious visitors continued to arrive throughout late 2019. By spring 2020, as the pandemic ravaged Kenya, shutting down schools and leading to severe restrictions on travel and socialising, their numbers grew to around 2,000. Every week, Changawa Mangi, one of Shakahola’s elders, saw groups of women and children come to town to buy maize for milling into flour. But he found it difficult to learn much about the newcomers. “We didn’t know who they were. We asked them, but they refused to say more than that they were farmers,” Mangi told me. There were signs, though, that they had begun to regard the forest as their permanent home: locals saw them raising chickens and building mud houses.In January 2023 – three and a half years after the forest-dwellers first appeared – the shopkeepers in Shakahola noticed something strange: the children from the forest who usually accompanied their mothers into town were no longer tagging along. Within weeks, the women themselves stopped appearing.