Leonora called me and told me that Mrs. K had disappeared. “Disappeared?” I asked stupidly. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
She meant exactly that. When she had arrived at the hospital to perform the latest interviews with her, she found her missing, her room empty. None of the nurses had seen anything, and neither had the guards at the gate, but it wasn’t above any of them to be lying, nor to have collaborated with her on her escape.
I hadn’t worked with Mrs. K in months, and in fact the reason Leonora was involved with her story was because I’d recused myself from it. I asked her why she had called me. She said, “I wondered if Mrs. K had said anything to you about her attempt to disappear.”
“No, why would she? We haven’t spoken in months,” I said. “Not since I stopped reporting.”
“Oh, alright,” Leonora said. “I have to go. Some of the guards are here. Let me see if they’ve found out anything and call you back.”
She never did call me back. And neither did Mrs. K, even though I called her old number several times over the next few months. The calls never went through. All I got was the disembodied voice advising me that the phone was unreachable and to try again later.
It took a few days for the news to leak into the newspapers. Angry editorials criticized the hospital’s lax security for putting the rest of the country in danger by releasing such a dangerous woman. On the evening news, one panelist wondered if Mrs. K had gone on the lam under a new identity to recruit more children into another cult.
Mrs. K had once told me about her desire to escape. This was far from unusual. What mental health patient doesn’t dream of breaking out of hospital? Who enters psychiatric care without freedom being their goal? What was unique to Mrs. K was the deliberateness of her planning, and her insistence that after her escape she’d go back to the recruitment she’d done for the church. “And what about the suicides?” I asked her. “Do you intend to go back to those too?”
She didn’t answer. She gave me a half-smile, and flicked back the hair that, short in the pictures circulated over the news, had grown long enough to hang over her shoulders. That was the last interview I ever had with her. The more I spoke to her, the more fearful I became that I would fall under her spell—I was alarmed by how quickly I’d begun to see the logic of ideas I would once have scoffed at—and so I requested to be removed from the story. And now she had escaped, throwing the entire country into hysteria. I went into my study and took out the notebooks I’d filled with notes from the sessions we’d had in the weeks after her arrest, and retrieved the audio recordings I’d made of my interviews with the survivors of her church. I opened my computer and started to write.
●
The stickiness of memory, thought Mrs. K as she stood in her kitchen that hot evening in 2023, a cup of tea in her hands. If this was the end of it all, she would have her memories begin with this tea she had made to ease her restlessness as she waited for her guests. It was a lime tea with cloves and ginger simmered in it. The scent of the spices, moving up into her face, was delectable. This was the day the people died.
When the news of the deaths first came out, I ignored them. I had other things to write about, books to think about, sheet music that I needed to learn how to play for my piano classes, and I saw no pleasure in being a hack, in writing stories that shocked. Besides, I was protesting the violence of the news—the news presenters took an ardent pleasure in announcing how many people had died in what fire, how many children were orphaned, how a murderer had committed his act. From the first mention, the church deaths took on this timbre. In matatus, I heard people count the number of bodies that had been found hidden in the forest. On the radio, new songs were bookended by gory interviews with those who had fled the church before any of the killings. And my mother, a religious follower of whatever happened in the country, called me to talk about the woman who had been arrested as a perpetrator. Mrs. K, she said, she looked like such a normal woman, didn’t she? And she had such kind eyes. And the way her voice trembled whenever she had the cameras on her. Who would have thought such a nice-looking kindly old woman could have committed such things?
Mrs. K had been a member of the church since its inception. She and her husband and daughter had just moved from Kisumu to Malindi after he got a job there, and there, they met Tiberius. They were broke and stressed about uprooting themselves to a town where they knew no one, and here was this preacher who told them he’d pray all their problems away. When he started the church, they would gather on a small plot of land, holding services in the same yard where chickens rummaged and clothes were hung out to dry. Some of the people I later spoke to, especially the women, told me they joined the church because of Mrs. K. They’d go to the yard every Sunday morning and Mrs. K would guide them through the scripture, reading it in both Kiswahili and English for them to understand. There was always a song service, and the songs were so active they wanted to dance to them. Tiberius spoke over their heads, making allusions to prophecies in the Bible they didn’t know, but Mrs. K actually understood them, and their needs. That she was a mother herself made them trust her more. She listened when they complained about their husbands, when they cried to her about their poverty, when they worried for their children. She opened her doors to them, hosting women when they needed to run away from the violence in their homes, finding small jobs for them to help pay their bills, giving them fruits and herbs to heal their children’s illnesses. When Tiberius told them to pull their children from school because they were being taught to sin there, it was she who taught them in secret, because she didn’t want them to fall behind. When the first cases of COVID appeared, it was she who told them not to worry, that God would take care of them, sheltering them like He did for the woman in the Book of Revelation. And when they moved into the forest, it was she who told them about the grand plan that God had for them. That they would go to heaven. That their children would go to heaven. That all they needed to do was give their lives to God. And when the children began to die, it was her daughter who died first.
And so, through Mrs. K, I found myself sucked into the story of the killings. A few editors of American magazines, drawn to the story like carnivores to blood, emailed me to ask if I wanted to write about the killings for them. I said no. What I wanted was to write about books, about the African writers who had been published by Heinemann but whose work was mostly out of print, their names forgotten. Were they interested? No, they weren’t, and so we remained at an impasse. In the American imagination, Africa was dark and macabre and full of starving children, and this church seemed to prove it: the children, all of them forced to starve to death by the church; the pastor whose doomsday sermons had attracted thousands of adherents; the forest that all the people had moved into at the start of the pandemic; the elephants and lions and leopards and hyenas that lurked nearby; bloody Africa. Still, I kept watching the news, wondering if there was a way to write about the killings that wouldn’t play to the tropes of Africa in nonfiction, the brazenly colonial ideas writers like Hemingway and Kapuściński had built their careers on.
What I wanted to write was a nonfiction novel, not a piece of traditional reporting. I’d read Svetlana Alexievich’s book on Chernobyl, and I was attracted by the idea of doing something like that. Alexievich gives direct voice to the people affected by the tragedy, in a form that seemed incompatible with what the editors wanted from me: too impressionistic and subjective, not enough verifiable facts. Only writers with a huge reputation were allowed the room to play with their craft in this way—to write experimental oral histories, or stories that mixed oral history with traditional journalism, or to make themselves present in the story. Writers like Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wright Thompson. Of course, most of these writers I so admired were American. But if I were to write about the killings, that’s what I would want to do. I’d write a book that transcended boundaries of genre, that was neither fiction nor nonfiction. Even Alexievich was limited by the confines of nonfiction.
The more I thought about my book—its cadence, its tone, its language, its pacing—the clearer it became that I needed a narrator I could control, and place deliberately in the text to guide the story of what had happened. This is how Mrs. K came to me.
It is important that I say here that Mrs. K is not a made-up character. She is a real person, or as real as an amalgamation of actual people can be. She is a mixture of several people I met while writing about the killings, people who were neither strong enough nor compelling enough as characters to hold up the narrative. Some of them were boring, or too macabre to be believable, or too far from the central action. I needed either the pastor, or someone close to the pastor, but since they were all in prison and refused to speak to “people of the world” like journalists, I decided to come up with Mrs. K. Composite characters were no longer an acceptable element of journalism, so my book would inevitably be considered a novel, even though it wasn’t one really. Novel, fiction, nonfiction—these were nothing more than marketing terms and made no difference to the story I was determined to write, a story that composite characters or not, flamboyant details or not, intricately detailed dialogue or not, was the true story of how six hundred people starved to death in that church in Malindi.
So we had Mrs. K to guide us into the story. And in the first scene, Mrs. K was drinking tea, and thinking about her daughter. Why tea? Because I love tea—the possibility of using it as a metaphor, if not necessarily the drinking of it—and because it is my book to do with as I please. Why her daughter? Because the rules of storytelling were that you had to give your characters someone to latch onto, an emotional conduit of sorts. This conduit was even better for the reader, especially with my book, as it gave them something to distract them from the sordid details of the killings. While I could have managed this with traditional reporting, I was more intrigued by the children who had died in the forest, and curious about how the stakes could be raised by having one of the dead children appear in my book.
Mrs. K thought about her daughter. How to begin to understand this child’s mind. A single memory came up, a sunny day in May 2014. She was walking in town with Bayo, who was excited and talkative. She would have been nine, just starting to get into her tennis. Then a car came screeching down the road, a white Toyota station wagon, the kind they called an olwenda. Behind it billowed a green polythene bag. It was stuck to the back of the car. As the car rolled to a stop in front of them, the movements around her seemed to cease. The women hawking clothes went mute, the muezzin in the mosque opposite them was suddenly silent, the touts at the matatu stage in front of the mosque were no longer calling for fares, and the road was devoid of everything else but the car and the billowing piece of green plastic behind it, which as Mrs. K looked revealed herself. It was a girl. Her uniform was green, and her head was trapped beneath the back left wheel of the car. Then it was not. The girl, she lay on the hot tarmac. Mrs. K’s heart thumped. Mrs. K screamed. Later Bayo would tell her about this, but she couldn’t remember the screaming. Instead what she remembered was a trailer steaming down the road. The girl’s body lying on the tarmac, the green of her tunic bright in the noontime sunshine. The trailer coming closer, and no one thinking about the girl. Calling one of the hawkers to take her Bayo, and then diving into the road, and pulling the girl off the road. The trailer would probably have seen her. Or not. Mrs. K didn’t know. What she remembered was carrying the girl, and jumping onto a bodaboda, and riding with urgency into the hospital down the road. What she couldn’t remember was how she got home, or how Bayo got rescued from the hawker. But she did remember how, for years after that, Bayo would wake up screaming, having dreamt about an olwenda, and a green polythene bag, and a giant trailer, and she, Bayo, was the girl on the tarmac.
●
The first time I went to Shakahola in search of Mrs. K, I had one of the best chapatis I’ve ever eaten. In a tiny cafe by the town center, the waitress brought me a cup of black tea and two chapatis. The tea was spiced—ginger, and something delectable I couldn’t place—but the chapatis were the highlight. I don’t know what it was, whether it was the chapatis themselves, or the heat outside, or the way the sweat made my clothes cling to my body, or the Swahili gospel music on the stereo, or the fact that here in Shakahola, a preacher had made hundreds—possibly thousands—starve themselves to death, or all these combined, but as I ate, I felt that I had rarely enjoyed food so much.
I’d flown into Malindi from Nairobi on an early-morning flight, the air sultry and cold, my mood one of depressed suspended sleep. My driver from the airport, a boy of around twenty, looked scared to be at the wheel of that massive car. As we drove to Shakahola, I asked about the tragedy, trying to see what he thought of the story, of the people who had died, of religion, but, he, sensing my trap, smiled vaguely and concentrated on the road.
To get to Shakahola town from Malindi, you drive west for around an hour and half, away from the ocean. The highway out of Malindi has very few cars. All you can see is the green of the trees, thicker the farther away you drive, the red soil, and mud houses visible intermittently through the leaves. The Arabuko Sokoke forest rushes by on the left, while on the right, as you climb upwards away from the coast, the Galana River, Kenya’s second largest river, snakes its way to the Indian Ocean. It was hot outside, and I was grateful for the breeze through the window. As we neared Shakahola, the trees thinned out, and signs of human habitation appeared—schools, churches, a technical college. On one stretch of the road, a group of children played, and on another, a herd of camels marched by. And then a sign: “Welcome to Chakama. Land and Plots for Sale.”
The block of land Tiberius had purchased to house his followers was one of these blocks of land. Around the road stood newly built houses, fenced-off plots and houses under construction. There were sacks of charcoal being sold by the roadside, and small maize farms with people tilling the land. What was it like to travel all this way to worship with a pastor in the middle of a forest? Some of the people who starved to death had come to Shakahola from Nigeria, and I imagined them now, flying into Nairobi from Lagos, taking the train from Nairobi to Mombasa, then a bus to Malindi, then going past it, ignoring the small villages where people lived and venturing into a forest full of elephants so that they could put up a mud house, shed their former selves and build a new life, a life that would end in starving to death first their own children and then themselves because their pastor had told them that was how they would meet Jesus.
When I first decided to write about the church, I went to the National Archives in Nairobi and read through every single article that had been published about the killings. I was interested in what all these articles left out: the identities of those who had decided to give their lives to the cult. So I went to Malindi to search for people who could tell me about them. Relatives of people who had disappeared into the forest came to me with their stories. There was the short Nigerian man whose wife, a steward with one of the international airlines that operated out of Nairobi, had flown with their three daughters into Malindi and disappeared into the forest. There was the tall, dark Ugandan woman who, when Tiberius was arraigned in court for the first time, suggested to the police officers there to free the pastor for three minutes so that she could show him what she thought of the fact that her younger brother had starved to death. There was the elderly couple, both of them cradling walking sticks, who stood stoic and told me about their daughter Flo. Third-born in a family of six, Flo was a cheery girl whose days had been spent volunteering at a children’s home in Kisii and nights with her yarn and crochets. Never again would they receive the handmade sweaters and socks whose amateurishness they’d laughed at. Then there was Mrs. K, whose sister, Milly, sat shiva at the police station with me, and whose daughter, Bayo, was dead. Milly told me that her sister, second-in-command to Tiberius, had her own daughter killed when she refused to fast.
Now, why attribute this to an invented second-in-command? Why not fictionalize the pastor himself? Perhaps it’s that the fascination lies in true believers like Mrs. K, not the power-hungry pastor. Through her we get to my idea of a true story—the true story of the psychology of church leadership in Kenya, and how the spread of evangelical religion in Africa has been made possible by poverty and social instability, and people’s desperation to escape them. Through her I can deliver not just one account of sensationalized cult behavior, but a larger critique of the place of evangelical Christianity in East Africa, and how it emerges as part of the afterlife of colonialism. By using Mrs. K I can capture the many faces of this Christianity and its paradoxes: its kindness as well as its larger violence. And perhaps it is that I see an opportunity for literary glory. Is that not what drives a lot of our writing? I can see it now, the exaltations that will follow a book that attacks the constraints of journalism, even while using its tools to uplift itself. And it doesn’t hurt that I am packaging it as a sort of anti-colonial attack on how Africa is written about.
●
I, like most people in Kenya, was Christian, and my parents’ church was the same as everyone else’s: it seemed ordinary until one stepped away from it. We worshipped on Saturdays, forsook eating meat and believed that God’s return was imminent (“Soon and Very Soon” was a song we’d sing after every service). I had, in recent years, become skeptical about what we had been taught, but I knew that the lessons we held dear were hardly particular to our church. And yet my mother was horrified by what had unfolded in Shakahola. She’d call me and tell me about a neighbor or distant relative or former colleague who’d joined a cult. “These funny-funny churches,” she said, “even people you think are very smart get washed into them.”
Mrs. K was certainly a smart woman. In our conversations, she made deductions that surprised me in their accuracy, and had enough conviction in her logic to spar with me whenever we disagreed. At our second meeting, when I questioned the cult’s claim that the rapture had been calculated to happen in August of 2023, four months after her arrest, she opened up the Bible she carried everywhere with her. She read from Revelation. “The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.”
She paused and looked up. “It’s all simple maths,” she said. “We were instructed to go into the forest in 2019, and 1,260 days after our entry is August. Wait and see. We’ll all be taken home.”
Mrs. K escaped from prison in July, and after she did, I thought back to this conversation. Had she been taken home? I didn’t think so—Tiberius and the other church leaders were still behind bars, their surviving followers still trapped by those they considered people of the world—but there were so many biblical comparisons to draw from her escape. Paul and Silas, for instance, had been imprisoned for their beliefs, and escaped from prison mysteriously. We’d been taught to think of this as an act of provenance that they’d earned from their faith. We’d also been taught about the 1,260 days. In our church, I told Mrs. K, the interpretation was different. Biblical time did not work the same way as earthly time. In the Bible, a day meant a year: 1,260 days was actually 1,260 years. The woman had hidden in the wilderness for 1,260 years. What was unclear to us was when the count started. It definitely hadn’t started from the time of Christ’s passing. What, then was the trigger? Was it the fall of the Roman Empire? Was it the rise of America? Was it the fall of the kingdoms of Gog and Magog?
I had stopped believing in these figures, though, and how people determined their veracity was beyond me. Data could always be extrapolated in a way that supported your convictions, I told Mrs. K. She gave me her usual half-smile, and looked at me with pity. “Your church sounds confused. They gave you no plan, no path.” Tiberius and his followers, meanwhile, had believed that 2019 was the precipitator. “There will be signs,” he said in a sermon I watched on YouTube when I got home that night. “Like the Israelites in Egypt, there will be plagues sent to rescue us.” They’d disappeared into the forest, just as a mysterious virus appeared in a market in China and swept the world. This was the first plague, Mrs. K had told me. How had they known this if their calculations were wrong?
●
In Shakahola town, after my chapati and tea, I walked to a cybercafe a few meters away. Mekatilili wa Menza, one of Kenya’s most important pre-independence heroes, had been born somewhere near here in the nineteenth century, but she was no longer the reason news crews traveled to the area. Now the focus was on Tiberius.
I talked to a few people about what had happened in the forest—a boisterous man who had sold maize flour to the cult members and missed the business they brought him, a man at the cyber copying music onto a memory card who quaked with fear at the mention of Tiberius’s name. It is important to note that all these people are real people. Mrs. K is the only person I had to invent, and I have already explained why the narrative needs her. Everyone else is real, and I made few, if any alterations to the conversations we had. Of course, that they were speaking to me in Swahili means that I have to translate here, and one always loses something when translating, but everything else is as told to me that day in Shakahola. I admired how Alexievich had let her subjects speak for as long as was needed without any intrusion, and for this book to work, I must do that as well.
After my conversations in the cyber, I walked back outside. There were groups of herders, young men on motorbikes waiting for fares under a shade, and some women cooking chapatis near the cafe where I’d had my breakfast. Shakahola is a small town, and the center couldn’t have been bigger than a radius of five hundred meters from where I stood.
A lone woman walked up to me. The dust swirled around her feet, and her eyes glowed grave importance. She looked me up and down, saying nothing. I, too, didn’t speak. When she finally spoke, her voice was raspier and louder than I’d expected. “Are you the journalist from Nairobi?” she asked.
I was a journalist, and I was from Nairobi, but I didn’t know if I was the one from Nairobi, the one she seemed to be expecting. “I am,” I said.
She turned, and began to walk away. “Follow me,” she said.
We walked through the doorway, past doorways from which children peered at us, and past men who sat sad-faced in the dirt. After a minute, she turned right, and I followed her. She was wearing a leso, and I could make out the methali at the bottom: Tell my enemies I’m eating well. I loved that. I resolved to get one made in Nairobi, with that very proverb inscribed at the bottom.
We walked down a small hill, and at the bottom of the hill gushed the River Galana. It was mighty and loud and brown, and it was all I could hear. Then she spoke. She said, “All the journalists have been coming. From all the stations. Newspapers and TV and radio. The other day a white woman came here, and said she was writing a thesis on religion, and wanted to focus on us. What did we know about religion, she wanted to know. Me I asked her, what do you know about Mekatilili?”
I was surprised by her turn of phrase. From her words, one could guess a certain level of education, a spell spent out of Shakahola, living in Nairobi perhaps, a world away from the rural poverty of this town.
She said, “My mother was born here. And my mother’s mother before her. And my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother before then. Only I was born elsewhere, breaking the chain of femininity that links us to this soil. Before us all there was Mekatilili, who fought for us here, but you know about her, I suppose?”
I nodded, anxious not to break the spell of her speech.
Her tone turned harsh. “And now all the journalists are here, writing new stories about Shakahola, stories that center that horrible man and the horrible thing she did in the forest. All of you, writing about this place that we love. Love. It never ends, no matter how far away you go. The half-life of love is forever. What do you know about love?”
I looked away, and at the river. Around us developed an unease—a quiet and malign thickening, inseparable from the hotness of the season, well-concealed within its spreading beneficence. It rose with the turbulence of the mighty river, and swept past us into Shakahola.
●
Now, this scene never happened. There was no woman who spoke to me about love. Everything about this scene is too perfectly constructed to have occurred. Why this scene exists is that I read this—the half-life of love is forever—in a book once, and I’ve always wanted an excuse to use it. But this does nothing to alter what this book is: a truthful investigation into religion, how evangelism spread in East Africa and the violence it has caused, violence that, despite my reservations about writing a dark and macabre Africa book, is at the heart of this story.
And in the woman, we glimpse more of what drew me to Mrs. K. She too had a vision of love I struggled to understand, one that imbued her days with a mysterious meaning. The dryness of her days, she told me, was a reflection of the moral dryness of the last days. She asked me what I knew about the moral center of the world, and wondered why I couldn’t see the way it shriveled up more with each passing year. What was I, blind or stupid, either not seeing the pattern, or too stupid to recognize it? During our first conversation, she told me about her life in Malindi in the days before they’d moved into the forest. She told me about the December wind, sweeping through. The sun, high and searing, in the sky. The dust, endless. Column after column of sandstorms. Grass stalks, long deadened and yellowed, marching from one compound to the other. Empty water bottles, rolling down roads and side streets and curbs, depositing themselves into the culverts of the town. And, above them all, the drone of air-conditioning units, portable fans in gardens and rickety ceiling fans straining against the heavy heat. Inside boiling cars, forgotten pineapples ripened, and inside houses, the humming of little children too listless and lazy to move about.
The day before they left, she found herself thinking about the girl she and Bayo had seen killed years ago, dead on the tarmac, wrapped up in her tattered green tunic, brought to the hospital for nothing. What if she’d been able to save her? Would it have prevented Bayo’s nightmares? Would they have been friends if she’d survived? She would have been around twenty now, imagine—nearly as old as her Bayo, becoming her own person. But this person had never been, and Bayo had stopped having nightmares about the dead girl years ago. Mrs. K wondered if Bayo remembered them, the sweaty sleepless nights.
“Hello-o-o,” Bayo called, and Mrs. K found herself interrupted by her call and the clatter of things falling in the hallway and the bang of the door. Then her husband arrived with the chicken for tomorrow, then a neighbor rang the bell to ask was her child here by any chance, then the clock chimed and it was seven already, and she’d have to cook. Cook the last meal they’d eat in that house before moving into the forest. Life went on, in other words.
The rituals of the evening. Dinner was made. Spinach, fried in coconut oil and turmeric. Omena from the woman by the entrance of Donna. Ugali, and Mrs. K had gone to a posho mill to make sure her husband got the arega he liked. And afterwards, a pile of oranges, neatly quartered, laid out at the lower table. Everything was normal.
That night she dreamed of her, of both of them. Her dream had been the kind that lingered, dying the whole day gray. Bits of it had risen like dust from the pillows on the couch when she plumped them—a sense of the past, a sense of longing.
She thought of her daughter, of the girl in green, throughout the day. As they packed up, and threw out the leftover food, and loaded their belongings into the car that would take them into the forest at Shakahola. She walked the house, moving from room to room to make sure that nothing vital had been left behind. Nothing. She entered the car. Above them, the clouds had gathered, dark and heavy.
She left. They left. The house was left; the house was deserted. it was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. With all the lights turned off, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drummed on the roof. An outpouring of immense darkness came, and the rain increased. It rained all night, and the water seeped into the house. With the water came a wall of darkness which nothing, it seemed, could survive. It crept into the crevices of the house, drowning out the joys which shimmered in the memories of the house, strangling into nothing the years of making the house a home, tossing away the roots Mrs. K had lain with patience. It rained. And the girl in green remained dead.
At this point Mrs. K stopped herself. She asked if I would use this in my story. I nodded. “It’s too personal,” she said. She asked me to remove it and exclude it from whatever I wrote, and I promised, already anxious about how the world would think of this woman whose faith was misunderstood and who would be oversimplified as a murderer. In our conversations I had glimpsed the purity of her beliefs—beliefs that had led to her daughter’s death—and been reminded of some of the people I’d known in my parents’ church. Now, months later, I think of this promise, and I think of Alexievich. Alexievich interviewed someone for Secondhand Time, her book about the end of the Soviet Union, and he, an old man who had been imprisoned in Siberia and whose wife had died in the camps, refused to let her publish it, saying that it would “show the Party in a negative light.” Two decades after his death, she decided to include his story in her book. She wrote, “Now I have decided to publish his story in full. It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual.” And now that Mrs. K has escaped from prison, now that I remember that more than five hundred people are dead because of her, I, too, find myself breaking my promise. Her story belongs to history more than it does to her, or anybody else.
And yet I’ve had a hard time following Alexievich’s example. Instead of writing about Mrs. K I keep thinking about her, dwelling on how she was both a victim and a villain. She had been unable to save a young girl on the streets of Kisumu, and then her daughter had died in the forest. Had she killed her daughter? But Bayo was going to heaven, and as she told me, that’s what every parent desires for their children. Milly, Mrs. K’s sister, told me about her own dual sorrows: she loved her sister, but also hated her for what had happened to Bayo. But how to write about this contradiction? How could the moral constraints of traditional journalism allow me enough room to switch between these sides with enough distance to answer these questions truthfully? Mrs. K only existed because of the literary possibilities she offered me, but now she had taken control of herself and her story, and left me unable to direct the book where I wanted it to go.
One evening, a few months after Leonora told me about Mrs. K’s escape, Milly called me. Her sister, she said, had appeared. She’d come home to her. The two of them had talked, Milly trying to delay her long enough to call the police. But Mrs. K had been in a hurry. She was, she said, a new person, now that she realized how wrong her deductions had been. The flaw in Tiberius’s calculations had been in failing to account for biblical time. But she had met the young journalist from Nairobi who had reminded her that where the Bible said days, it meant years, and so, it had been 1,260 years. This time had passed already, when Napoleon had invaded Rome and captured the Pope, 1,260 years after the founding of the Roman Empire. “He was right about it all,” she told Milly. “I was looking in the wrong places.”
I didn’t say anything. Her sister, Milly continued, had urged her to join her. They would have to study the Bible again. Reconsider everything. She was moving somewhere else. To a place where she’d be safe from all the people of the world. She and the true believers were going to commune in nature, and work out what the new date of rapture was, and what they had to do to get ready. “If you don’t see me again,” she said, “just know that I’ve gone to heaven. And thank the young man for me. He made me see the truth.”
Art credit: Arlene Wandera, Kidnapped cheese block, 2017. Hardback book, air-drying clay, wooden block, 14 x 14 x 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Leonora called me and told me that Mrs. K had disappeared. “Disappeared?” I asked stupidly. “What do you mean, disappeared?”
She meant exactly that. When she had arrived at the hospital to perform the latest interviews with her, she found her missing, her room empty. None of the nurses had seen anything, and neither had the guards at the gate, but it wasn’t above any of them to be lying, nor to have collaborated with her on her escape.
I hadn’t worked with Mrs. K in months, and in fact the reason Leonora was involved with her story was because I’d recused myself from it. I asked her why she had called me. She said, “I wondered if Mrs. K had said anything to you about her attempt to disappear.”
“No, why would she? We haven’t spoken in months,” I said. “Not since I stopped reporting.”
“Oh, alright,” Leonora said. “I have to go. Some of the guards are here. Let me see if they’ve found out anything and call you back.”
She never did call me back. And neither did Mrs. K, even though I called her old number several times over the next few months. The calls never went through. All I got was the disembodied voice advising me that the phone was unreachable and to try again later.
It took a few days for the news to leak into the newspapers. Angry editorials criticized the hospital’s lax security for putting the rest of the country in danger by releasing such a dangerous woman. On the evening news, one panelist wondered if Mrs. K had gone on the lam under a new identity to recruit more children into another cult.
Mrs. K had once told me about her desire to escape. This was far from unusual. What mental health patient doesn’t dream of breaking out of hospital? Who enters psychiatric care without freedom being their goal? What was unique to Mrs. K was the deliberateness of her planning, and her insistence that after her escape she’d go back to the recruitment she’d done for the church. “And what about the suicides?” I asked her. “Do you intend to go back to those too?”
She didn’t answer. She gave me a half-smile, and flicked back the hair that, short in the pictures circulated over the news, had grown long enough to hang over her shoulders. That was the last interview I ever had with her. The more I spoke to her, the more fearful I became that I would fall under her spell—I was alarmed by how quickly I’d begun to see the logic of ideas I would once have scoffed at—and so I requested to be removed from the story. And now she had escaped, throwing the entire country into hysteria. I went into my study and took out the notebooks I’d filled with notes from the sessions we’d had in the weeks after her arrest, and retrieved the audio recordings I’d made of my interviews with the survivors of her church. I opened my computer and started to write.
●
The stickiness of memory, thought Mrs. K as she stood in her kitchen that hot evening in 2023, a cup of tea in her hands. If this was the end of it all, she would have her memories begin with this tea she had made to ease her restlessness as she waited for her guests. It was a lime tea with cloves and ginger simmered in it. The scent of the spices, moving up into her face, was delectable. This was the day the people died.
When the news of the deaths first came out, I ignored them. I had other things to write about, books to think about, sheet music that I needed to learn how to play for my piano classes, and I saw no pleasure in being a hack, in writing stories that shocked. Besides, I was protesting the violence of the news—the news presenters took an ardent pleasure in announcing how many people had died in what fire, how many children were orphaned, how a murderer had committed his act. From the first mention, the church deaths took on this timbre. In matatus, I heard people count the number of bodies that had been found hidden in the forest. On the radio, new songs were bookended by gory interviews with those who had fled the church before any of the killings. And my mother, a religious follower of whatever happened in the country, called me to talk about the woman who had been arrested as a perpetrator. Mrs. K, she said, she looked like such a normal woman, didn’t she? And she had such kind eyes. And the way her voice trembled whenever she had the cameras on her. Who would have thought such a nice-looking kindly old woman could have committed such things?
Mrs. K had been a member of the church since its inception. She and her husband and daughter had just moved from Kisumu to Malindi after he got a job there, and there, they met Tiberius. They were broke and stressed about uprooting themselves to a town where they knew no one, and here was this preacher who told them he’d pray all their problems away. When he started the church, they would gather on a small plot of land, holding services in the same yard where chickens rummaged and clothes were hung out to dry. Some of the people I later spoke to, especially the women, told me they joined the church because of Mrs. K. They’d go to the yard every Sunday morning and Mrs. K would guide them through the scripture, reading it in both Kiswahili and English for them to understand. There was always a song service, and the songs were so active they wanted to dance to them. Tiberius spoke over their heads, making allusions to prophecies in the Bible they didn’t know, but Mrs. K actually understood them, and their needs. That she was a mother herself made them trust her more. She listened when they complained about their husbands, when they cried to her about their poverty, when they worried for their children. She opened her doors to them, hosting women when they needed to run away from the violence in their homes, finding small jobs for them to help pay their bills, giving them fruits and herbs to heal their children’s illnesses. When Tiberius told them to pull their children from school because they were being taught to sin there, it was she who taught them in secret, because she didn’t want them to fall behind. When the first cases of COVID appeared, it was she who told them not to worry, that God would take care of them, sheltering them like He did for the woman in the Book of Revelation. And when they moved into the forest, it was she who told them about the grand plan that God had for them. That they would go to heaven. That their children would go to heaven. That all they needed to do was give their lives to God. And when the children began to die, it was her daughter who died first.
And so, through Mrs. K, I found myself sucked into the story of the killings. A few editors of American magazines, drawn to the story like carnivores to blood, emailed me to ask if I wanted to write about the killings for them. I said no. What I wanted was to write about books, about the African writers who had been published by Heinemann but whose work was mostly out of print, their names forgotten. Were they interested? No, they weren’t, and so we remained at an impasse. In the American imagination, Africa was dark and macabre and full of starving children, and this church seemed to prove it: the children, all of them forced to starve to death by the church; the pastor whose doomsday sermons had attracted thousands of adherents; the forest that all the people had moved into at the start of the pandemic; the elephants and lions and leopards and hyenas that lurked nearby; bloody Africa. Still, I kept watching the news, wondering if there was a way to write about the killings that wouldn’t play to the tropes of Africa in nonfiction, the brazenly colonial ideas writers like Hemingway and Kapuściński had built their careers on.
What I wanted to write was a nonfiction novel, not a piece of traditional reporting. I’d read Svetlana Alexievich’s book on Chernobyl, and I was attracted by the idea of doing something like that. Alexievich gives direct voice to the people affected by the tragedy, in a form that seemed incompatible with what the editors wanted from me: too impressionistic and subjective, not enough verifiable facts. Only writers with a huge reputation were allowed the room to play with their craft in this way—to write experimental oral histories, or stories that mixed oral history with traditional journalism, or to make themselves present in the story. Writers like Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Wright Thompson. Of course, most of these writers I so admired were American. But if I were to write about the killings, that’s what I would want to do. I’d write a book that transcended boundaries of genre, that was neither fiction nor nonfiction. Even Alexievich was limited by the confines of nonfiction.
The more I thought about my book—its cadence, its tone, its language, its pacing—the clearer it became that I needed a narrator I could control, and place deliberately in the text to guide the story of what had happened. This is how Mrs. K came to me.
It is important that I say here that Mrs. K is not a made-up character. She is a real person, or as real as an amalgamation of actual people can be. She is a mixture of several people I met while writing about the killings, people who were neither strong enough nor compelling enough as characters to hold up the narrative. Some of them were boring, or too macabre to be believable, or too far from the central action. I needed either the pastor, or someone close to the pastor, but since they were all in prison and refused to speak to “people of the world” like journalists, I decided to come up with Mrs. K. Composite characters were no longer an acceptable element of journalism, so my book would inevitably be considered a novel, even though it wasn’t one really. Novel, fiction, nonfiction—these were nothing more than marketing terms and made no difference to the story I was determined to write, a story that composite characters or not, flamboyant details or not, intricately detailed dialogue or not, was the true story of how six hundred people starved to death in that church in Malindi.
So we had Mrs. K to guide us into the story. And in the first scene, Mrs. K was drinking tea, and thinking about her daughter. Why tea? Because I love tea—the possibility of using it as a metaphor, if not necessarily the drinking of it—and because it is my book to do with as I please. Why her daughter? Because the rules of storytelling were that you had to give your characters someone to latch onto, an emotional conduit of sorts. This conduit was even better for the reader, especially with my book, as it gave them something to distract them from the sordid details of the killings. While I could have managed this with traditional reporting, I was more intrigued by the children who had died in the forest, and curious about how the stakes could be raised by having one of the dead children appear in my book.
Mrs. K thought about her daughter. How to begin to understand this child’s mind. A single memory came up, a sunny day in May 2014. She was walking in town with Bayo, who was excited and talkative. She would have been nine, just starting to get into her tennis. Then a car came screeching down the road, a white Toyota station wagon, the kind they called an olwenda. Behind it billowed a green polythene bag. It was stuck to the back of the car. As the car rolled to a stop in front of them, the movements around her seemed to cease. The women hawking clothes went mute, the muezzin in the mosque opposite them was suddenly silent, the touts at the matatu stage in front of the mosque were no longer calling for fares, and the road was devoid of everything else but the car and the billowing piece of green plastic behind it, which as Mrs. K looked revealed herself. It was a girl. Her uniform was green, and her head was trapped beneath the back left wheel of the car. Then it was not. The girl, she lay on the hot tarmac. Mrs. K’s heart thumped. Mrs. K screamed. Later Bayo would tell her about this, but she couldn’t remember the screaming. Instead what she remembered was a trailer steaming down the road. The girl’s body lying on the tarmac, the green of her tunic bright in the noontime sunshine. The trailer coming closer, and no one thinking about the girl. Calling one of the hawkers to take her Bayo, and then diving into the road, and pulling the girl off the road. The trailer would probably have seen her. Or not. Mrs. K didn’t know. What she remembered was carrying the girl, and jumping onto a bodaboda, and riding with urgency into the hospital down the road. What she couldn’t remember was how she got home, or how Bayo got rescued from the hawker. But she did remember how, for years after that, Bayo would wake up screaming, having dreamt about an olwenda, and a green polythene bag, and a giant trailer, and she, Bayo, was the girl on the tarmac.
●
The first time I went to Shakahola in search of Mrs. K, I had one of the best chapatis I’ve ever eaten. In a tiny cafe by the town center, the waitress brought me a cup of black tea and two chapatis. The tea was spiced—ginger, and something delectable I couldn’t place—but the chapatis were the highlight. I don’t know what it was, whether it was the chapatis themselves, or the heat outside, or the way the sweat made my clothes cling to my body, or the Swahili gospel music on the stereo, or the fact that here in Shakahola, a preacher had made hundreds—possibly thousands—starve themselves to death, or all these combined, but as I ate, I felt that I had rarely enjoyed food so much.
I’d flown into Malindi from Nairobi on an early-morning flight, the air sultry and cold, my mood one of depressed suspended sleep. My driver from the airport, a boy of around twenty, looked scared to be at the wheel of that massive car. As we drove to Shakahola, I asked about the tragedy, trying to see what he thought of the story, of the people who had died, of religion, but, he, sensing my trap, smiled vaguely and concentrated on the road.
To get to Shakahola town from Malindi, you drive west for around an hour and half, away from the ocean. The highway out of Malindi has very few cars. All you can see is the green of the trees, thicker the farther away you drive, the red soil, and mud houses visible intermittently through the leaves. The Arabuko Sokoke forest rushes by on the left, while on the right, as you climb upwards away from the coast, the Galana River, Kenya’s second largest river, snakes its way to the Indian Ocean. It was hot outside, and I was grateful for the breeze through the window. As we neared Shakahola, the trees thinned out, and signs of human habitation appeared—schools, churches, a technical college. On one stretch of the road, a group of children played, and on another, a herd of camels marched by. And then a sign: “Welcome to Chakama. Land and Plots for Sale.”
The block of land Tiberius had purchased to house his followers was one of these blocks of land. Around the road stood newly built houses, fenced-off plots and houses under construction. There were sacks of charcoal being sold by the roadside, and small maize farms with people tilling the land. What was it like to travel all this way to worship with a pastor in the middle of a forest? Some of the people who starved to death had come to Shakahola from Nigeria, and I imagined them now, flying into Nairobi from Lagos, taking the train from Nairobi to Mombasa, then a bus to Malindi, then going past it, ignoring the small villages where people lived and venturing into a forest full of elephants so that they could put up a mud house, shed their former selves and build a new life, a life that would end in starving to death first their own children and then themselves because their pastor had told them that was how they would meet Jesus.
When I first decided to write about the church, I went to the National Archives in Nairobi and read through every single article that had been published about the killings. I was interested in what all these articles left out: the identities of those who had decided to give their lives to the cult. So I went to Malindi to search for people who could tell me about them. Relatives of people who had disappeared into the forest came to me with their stories. There was the short Nigerian man whose wife, a steward with one of the international airlines that operated out of Nairobi, had flown with their three daughters into Malindi and disappeared into the forest. There was the tall, dark Ugandan woman who, when Tiberius was arraigned in court for the first time, suggested to the police officers there to free the pastor for three minutes so that she could show him what she thought of the fact that her younger brother had starved to death. There was the elderly couple, both of them cradling walking sticks, who stood stoic and told me about their daughter Flo. Third-born in a family of six, Flo was a cheery girl whose days had been spent volunteering at a children’s home in Kisii and nights with her yarn and crochets. Never again would they receive the handmade sweaters and socks whose amateurishness they’d laughed at. Then there was Mrs. K, whose sister, Milly, sat shiva at the police station with me, and whose daughter, Bayo, was dead. Milly told me that her sister, second-in-command to Tiberius, had her own daughter killed when she refused to fast.
Now, why attribute this to an invented second-in-command? Why not fictionalize the pastor himself? Perhaps it’s that the fascination lies in true believers like Mrs. K, not the power-hungry pastor. Through her we get to my idea of a true story—the true story of the psychology of church leadership in Kenya, and how the spread of evangelical religion in Africa has been made possible by poverty and social instability, and people’s desperation to escape them. Through her I can deliver not just one account of sensationalized cult behavior, but a larger critique of the place of evangelical Christianity in East Africa, and how it emerges as part of the afterlife of colonialism. By using Mrs. K I can capture the many faces of this Christianity and its paradoxes: its kindness as well as its larger violence. And perhaps it is that I see an opportunity for literary glory. Is that not what drives a lot of our writing? I can see it now, the exaltations that will follow a book that attacks the constraints of journalism, even while using its tools to uplift itself. And it doesn’t hurt that I am packaging it as a sort of anti-colonial attack on how Africa is written about.
●
I, like most people in Kenya, was Christian, and my parents’ church was the same as everyone else’s: it seemed ordinary until one stepped away from it. We worshipped on Saturdays, forsook eating meat and believed that God’s return was imminent (“Soon and Very Soon” was a song we’d sing after every service). I had, in recent years, become skeptical about what we had been taught, but I knew that the lessons we held dear were hardly particular to our church. And yet my mother was horrified by what had unfolded in Shakahola. She’d call me and tell me about a neighbor or distant relative or former colleague who’d joined a cult. “These funny-funny churches,” she said, “even people you think are very smart get washed into them.”
Mrs. K was certainly a smart woman. In our conversations, she made deductions that surprised me in their accuracy, and had enough conviction in her logic to spar with me whenever we disagreed. At our second meeting, when I questioned the cult’s claim that the rapture had been calculated to happen in August of 2023, four months after her arrest, she opened up the Bible she carried everywhere with her. She read from Revelation. “The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.”
She paused and looked up. “It’s all simple maths,” she said. “We were instructed to go into the forest in 2019, and 1,260 days after our entry is August. Wait and see. We’ll all be taken home.”
Mrs. K escaped from prison in July, and after she did, I thought back to this conversation. Had she been taken home? I didn’t think so—Tiberius and the other church leaders were still behind bars, their surviving followers still trapped by those they considered people of the world—but there were so many biblical comparisons to draw from her escape. Paul and Silas, for instance, had been imprisoned for their beliefs, and escaped from prison mysteriously. We’d been taught to think of this as an act of provenance that they’d earned from their faith. We’d also been taught about the 1,260 days. In our church, I told Mrs. K, the interpretation was different. Biblical time did not work the same way as earthly time. In the Bible, a day meant a year: 1,260 days was actually 1,260 years. The woman had hidden in the wilderness for 1,260 years. What was unclear to us was when the count started. It definitely hadn’t started from the time of Christ’s passing. What, then was the trigger? Was it the fall of the Roman Empire? Was it the rise of America? Was it the fall of the kingdoms of Gog and Magog?
I had stopped believing in these figures, though, and how people determined their veracity was beyond me. Data could always be extrapolated in a way that supported your convictions, I told Mrs. K. She gave me her usual half-smile, and looked at me with pity. “Your church sounds confused. They gave you no plan, no path.” Tiberius and his followers, meanwhile, had believed that 2019 was the precipitator. “There will be signs,” he said in a sermon I watched on YouTube when I got home that night. “Like the Israelites in Egypt, there will be plagues sent to rescue us.” They’d disappeared into the forest, just as a mysterious virus appeared in a market in China and swept the world. This was the first plague, Mrs. K had told me. How had they known this if their calculations were wrong?
●
In Shakahola town, after my chapati and tea, I walked to a cybercafe a few meters away. Mekatilili wa Menza, one of Kenya’s most important pre-independence heroes, had been born somewhere near here in the nineteenth century, but she was no longer the reason news crews traveled to the area. Now the focus was on Tiberius.
I talked to a few people about what had happened in the forest—a boisterous man who had sold maize flour to the cult members and missed the business they brought him, a man at the cyber copying music onto a memory card who quaked with fear at the mention of Tiberius’s name. It is important to note that all these people are real people. Mrs. K is the only person I had to invent, and I have already explained why the narrative needs her. Everyone else is real, and I made few, if any alterations to the conversations we had. Of course, that they were speaking to me in Swahili means that I have to translate here, and one always loses something when translating, but everything else is as told to me that day in Shakahola. I admired how Alexievich had let her subjects speak for as long as was needed without any intrusion, and for this book to work, I must do that as well.
After my conversations in the cyber, I walked back outside. There were groups of herders, young men on motorbikes waiting for fares under a shade, and some women cooking chapatis near the cafe where I’d had my breakfast. Shakahola is a small town, and the center couldn’t have been bigger than a radius of five hundred meters from where I stood.
A lone woman walked up to me. The dust swirled around her feet, and her eyes glowed grave importance. She looked me up and down, saying nothing. I, too, didn’t speak. When she finally spoke, her voice was raspier and louder than I’d expected. “Are you the journalist from Nairobi?” she asked.
I was a journalist, and I was from Nairobi, but I didn’t know if I was the one from Nairobi, the one she seemed to be expecting. “I am,” I said.
She turned, and began to walk away. “Follow me,” she said.
We walked through the doorway, past doorways from which children peered at us, and past men who sat sad-faced in the dirt. After a minute, she turned right, and I followed her. She was wearing a leso, and I could make out the methali at the bottom: Tell my enemies I’m eating well. I loved that. I resolved to get one made in Nairobi, with that very proverb inscribed at the bottom.
We walked down a small hill, and at the bottom of the hill gushed the River Galana. It was mighty and loud and brown, and it was all I could hear. Then she spoke. She said, “All the journalists have been coming. From all the stations. Newspapers and TV and radio. The other day a white woman came here, and said she was writing a thesis on religion, and wanted to focus on us. What did we know about religion, she wanted to know. Me I asked her, what do you know about Mekatilili?”
I was surprised by her turn of phrase. From her words, one could guess a certain level of education, a spell spent out of Shakahola, living in Nairobi perhaps, a world away from the rural poverty of this town.
She said, “My mother was born here. And my mother’s mother before her. And my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother before then. Only I was born elsewhere, breaking the chain of femininity that links us to this soil. Before us all there was Mekatilili, who fought for us here, but you know about her, I suppose?”
I nodded, anxious not to break the spell of her speech.
Her tone turned harsh. “And now all the journalists are here, writing new stories about Shakahola, stories that center that horrible man and the horrible thing she did in the forest. All of you, writing about this place that we love. Love. It never ends, no matter how far away you go. The half-life of love is forever. What do you know about love?”
I looked away, and at the river. Around us developed an unease—a quiet and malign thickening, inseparable from the hotness of the season, well-concealed within its spreading beneficence. It rose with the turbulence of the mighty river, and swept past us into Shakahola.
●
Now, this scene never happened. There was no woman who spoke to me about love. Everything about this scene is too perfectly constructed to have occurred. Why this scene exists is that I read this—the half-life of love is forever—in a book once, and I’ve always wanted an excuse to use it. But this does nothing to alter what this book is: a truthful investigation into religion, how evangelism spread in East Africa and the violence it has caused, violence that, despite my reservations about writing a dark and macabre Africa book, is at the heart of this story.
And in the woman, we glimpse more of what drew me to Mrs. K. She too had a vision of love I struggled to understand, one that imbued her days with a mysterious meaning. The dryness of her days, she told me, was a reflection of the moral dryness of the last days. She asked me what I knew about the moral center of the world, and wondered why I couldn’t see the way it shriveled up more with each passing year. What was I, blind or stupid, either not seeing the pattern, or too stupid to recognize it? During our first conversation, she told me about her life in Malindi in the days before they’d moved into the forest. She told me about the December wind, sweeping through. The sun, high and searing, in the sky. The dust, endless. Column after column of sandstorms. Grass stalks, long deadened and yellowed, marching from one compound to the other. Empty water bottles, rolling down roads and side streets and curbs, depositing themselves into the culverts of the town. And, above them all, the drone of air-conditioning units, portable fans in gardens and rickety ceiling fans straining against the heavy heat. Inside boiling cars, forgotten pineapples ripened, and inside houses, the humming of little children too listless and lazy to move about.
The day before they left, she found herself thinking about the girl she and Bayo had seen killed years ago, dead on the tarmac, wrapped up in her tattered green tunic, brought to the hospital for nothing. What if she’d been able to save her? Would it have prevented Bayo’s nightmares? Would they have been friends if she’d survived? She would have been around twenty now, imagine—nearly as old as her Bayo, becoming her own person. But this person had never been, and Bayo had stopped having nightmares about the dead girl years ago. Mrs. K wondered if Bayo remembered them, the sweaty sleepless nights.
“Hello-o-o,” Bayo called, and Mrs. K found herself interrupted by her call and the clatter of things falling in the hallway and the bang of the door. Then her husband arrived with the chicken for tomorrow, then a neighbor rang the bell to ask was her child here by any chance, then the clock chimed and it was seven already, and she’d have to cook. Cook the last meal they’d eat in that house before moving into the forest. Life went on, in other words.
The rituals of the evening. Dinner was made. Spinach, fried in coconut oil and turmeric. Omena from the woman by the entrance of Donna. Ugali, and Mrs. K had gone to a posho mill to make sure her husband got the arega he liked. And afterwards, a pile of oranges, neatly quartered, laid out at the lower table. Everything was normal.
That night she dreamed of her, of both of them. Her dream had been the kind that lingered, dying the whole day gray. Bits of it had risen like dust from the pillows on the couch when she plumped them—a sense of the past, a sense of longing.
She thought of her daughter, of the girl in green, throughout the day. As they packed up, and threw out the leftover food, and loaded their belongings into the car that would take them into the forest at Shakahola. She walked the house, moving from room to room to make sure that nothing vital had been left behind. Nothing. She entered the car. Above them, the clouds had gathered, dark and heavy.
She left. They left. The house was left; the house was deserted. it was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. With all the lights turned off, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drummed on the roof. An outpouring of immense darkness came, and the rain increased. It rained all night, and the water seeped into the house. With the water came a wall of darkness which nothing, it seemed, could survive. It crept into the crevices of the house, drowning out the joys which shimmered in the memories of the house, strangling into nothing the years of making the house a home, tossing away the roots Mrs. K had lain with patience. It rained. And the girl in green remained dead.
At this point Mrs. K stopped herself. She asked if I would use this in my story. I nodded. “It’s too personal,” she said. She asked me to remove it and exclude it from whatever I wrote, and I promised, already anxious about how the world would think of this woman whose faith was misunderstood and who would be oversimplified as a murderer. In our conversations I had glimpsed the purity of her beliefs—beliefs that had led to her daughter’s death—and been reminded of some of the people I’d known in my parents’ church. Now, months later, I think of this promise, and I think of Alexievich. Alexievich interviewed someone for Secondhand Time, her book about the end of the Soviet Union, and he, an old man who had been imprisoned in Siberia and whose wife had died in the camps, refused to let her publish it, saying that it would “show the Party in a negative light.” Two decades after his death, she decided to include his story in her book. She wrote, “Now I have decided to publish his story in full. It belongs to history more than it does to any one individual.” And now that Mrs. K has escaped from prison, now that I remember that more than five hundred people are dead because of her, I, too, find myself breaking my promise. Her story belongs to history more than it does to her, or anybody else.
And yet I’ve had a hard time following Alexievich’s example. Instead of writing about Mrs. K I keep thinking about her, dwelling on how she was both a victim and a villain. She had been unable to save a young girl on the streets of Kisumu, and then her daughter had died in the forest. Had she killed her daughter? But Bayo was going to heaven, and as she told me, that’s what every parent desires for their children. Milly, Mrs. K’s sister, told me about her own dual sorrows: she loved her sister, but also hated her for what had happened to Bayo. But how to write about this contradiction? How could the moral constraints of traditional journalism allow me enough room to switch between these sides with enough distance to answer these questions truthfully? Mrs. K only existed because of the literary possibilities she offered me, but now she had taken control of herself and her story, and left me unable to direct the book where I wanted it to go.
One evening, a few months after Leonora told me about Mrs. K’s escape, Milly called me. Her sister, she said, had appeared. She’d come home to her. The two of them had talked, Milly trying to delay her long enough to call the police. But Mrs. K had been in a hurry. She was, she said, a new person, now that she realized how wrong her deductions had been. The flaw in Tiberius’s calculations had been in failing to account for biblical time. But she had met the young journalist from Nairobi who had reminded her that where the Bible said days, it meant years, and so, it had been 1,260 years. This time had passed already, when Napoleon had invaded Rome and captured the Pope, 1,260 years after the founding of the Roman Empire. “He was right about it all,” she told Milly. “I was looking in the wrong places.”
I didn’t say anything. Her sister, Milly continued, had urged her to join her. They would have to study the Bible again. Reconsider everything. She was moving somewhere else. To a place where she’d be safe from all the people of the world. She and the true believers were going to commune in nature, and work out what the new date of rapture was, and what they had to do to get ready. “If you don’t see me again,” she said, “just know that I’ve gone to heaven. And thank the young man for me. He made me see the truth.”
Art credit: Arlene Wandera, Kidnapped cheese block, 2017. Hardback book, air-drying clay, wooden block, 14 x 14 x 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.