Why Parents Starved Their Own Children: The Machine Inside Shakahola

In a forest near Kenya's coast, investigators have pulled more than 400 bodies from shallow graves and latrines. Many were children. They did not die in a massacre in the usual sense — no gunfire, no raid. They starved, slowly, often while their own parents enforced it. Paul Mackenzie, a former taxi driver who led the Good News International church, has been sentenced to 200 years for 191 of these deaths, with inquiries into more than 200 others still open.

The obvious question is the one everyone asks: how could parents do this to their children? The answer is not that these were monsters. It is a documented social mechanism — two of them, working together.

The models: obedience to authority, and the sunk-cost trap

The first is obedience under authority, associated with the psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. His famous experiments found that ordinary people would administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to a stranger because an authority figure told them to continue. A caution: the original study has been heavily criticised — on its ethics, on how much participants truly believed the shocks were real, and on later reanalyses suggesting people obeyed partly because they identified with the experiment's stated purpose, not blind deference. So the robust, surviving claim is narrow: when a trusted authority appears to take moral responsibility for an act, ordinary people will do things they would not originate alone. That is enough here.

The second is the sunk-cost trap, or escalation of commitment. A sunk cost is money, time or sacrifice already spent and unrecoverable. Logically it should not affect the next decision. In practice — a finding replicated across decades of behavioural economics — the more a person has already given up for something, the harder it becomes to admit the sacrifice was wrong, so they give up more to justify what they have already lost.

Combine the two inside a sealed community and you get the Shakahola machine.

The mechanism, step by step

Mackenzie did not begin by asking people to die. No one would have joined.

Isolation. He forbade school and hospitals as satanic, moved the group deep into forest, and split the camp into zones with biblical names. Isolation removes the outside voices — doctors, teachers, relatives — that would otherwise say this is insane. Inside a closed group, the leader becomes the only source of truth.

Small commitments first. Give up school. Give up medicine. Give up your home and move to the forest. Each step is a down payment that makes the next feel consistent rather than extreme.

Raising the stakes. Having given up everything, a follower faces an unbearable thought: what if I was wrong? The sunk-cost trap resolves it by pushing forward. The children's deaths were not a break from the logic — they were its endpoint. To refuse was to admit everything already sacrificed was for nothing.

Distributed enforcement. Mackenzie did not starve each child himself. Followers enforced the rules on each other; accomplices beat those who wavered; parents withheld food while others watched. That is the obedience finding at scale — once the group and its leader have absorbed moral responsibility, individuals carry out acts they could never initiate alone.

The other view, and the limits of psychology

Facts and interpretation must be separated. The facts: Mackenzie ordered the starvation, accomplices used violence to enforce it, and the court rejected his claim that followers acted freely. What is genuinely contested is how much each follower was a coerced captive and how much a willing believer. Some were beaten into compliance — closer to captivity than persuasion. Others appear to have embraced the doctrine. The line between coercion and belief is blurry, and it maps onto a live legal problem: who among survivors and accomplices bears what responsibility.

A competing explanation plays down psychology and stresses institutional failure. Mackenzie was known to authorities from 2017. His church was shut in 2019. He was arrested in 2023, then released on bail — after which relatives say he brought the predicted end date forward, accelerating the deaths. Kenya is deeply religious and oversight of churches is light. On this reading the tragedy is less a mystery of the mind than a dangerous man repeatedly let go. The two explanations are not rivals: the psychology explains why followers obeyed, the institutional gap explains why no one stopped him.

Where else this pattern lives

Isolation plus escalating commitment runs far beyond doomsday cults, usually in milder, non-lethal forms.

Investment and "pig-butchering" frauds work exactly this way: a victim puts in a little, sees a fake return, puts in more, and the larger the stake the harder it is to accept it was a scam — until the final, ruinous transfer. Abusive relationships follow the same curve: small concessions, growing distance from friends and family, and a partner who becomes the sole authority on what counts as normal. Even ordinary organisations show a weak version when a failing project gets more funding because so much has already been spent.

The transferable lesson is practical. The warning sign is never the final demand. It is the earlier pattern: steadily losing contact with outside voices, and each new sacrifice justified by the last.

What to watch

Two signals will sharpen the record. First, the inquiry into the 200-plus additional deaths and the separate case over 52 deaths at Kwa Binzaro that prosecutors say Mackenzie directed from detention — if proven, it shows his authority outlived his freedom, which is itself a measure of how total the hold was. Second, whether Kenya actually legislates tighter oversight of religious bodies; calls for it are loud now.

A falsifiable expectation: roughly 65% that Kenya passes some form of new religious-oversight law within three years, given the political pressure. But passing a law and enforcing it are different things, so a repeat of the underlying failure is far from ruled out.

Distilled from The Guardian World