Meet Nellie Shani, pastor whose mother was a witch doctor
Breaking Barriers International founder and CEO Nellie Shani during an interview at her home in Kilimani, Nairobi on March 29, 2024.
By Joseph Mboya
What you need to know:
- Pastor Nellie Shani describes her life as a story of victory.
Pastor Nellie Shani describes her life as a story of victory.
Her mother was a recognised medicinewoman or herbalist who would hear and hearken to the spirits that controlled her, most of her young and adult life.
Ironically, Agalo, for that was her name, believed that she had good or kindred spirits and that her sole aim in life was to help those who had bad spirits and sicknesses cast upon them by evil people.
However, in the beautiful tapestry of life that only the mighty hands of God can work, Nellie is now a globally recognised pastor specialising in teachings on spiritual warfare and deliverance, which she has taught and ministered in 20 countries all over the world, and in nearly all the continents. Pastor Nellie claims to follow the footsteps of Jesus who “Went about doing good and healing all those oppressed by the devil according…,” [Acts 10:38].
In all her youth and part adult years, Nellie knew her mother as one immersed in her spiritual trade. At one point, she disappeared and no single family member knew where she had gone, only for it later to emerge that she had been instructed by the spirits to visit a powerful medicine man in Tanzania who she was told would rid her of the evil spirits that oppressed her.
“I came home from school and met my mother at the front door with a suitcase in hand. When I enquired where she was going she bade me silence and walked out of the gate, never to be seen again for many years,” Pastor Nellie says, as we settle for an interview in her well-furnished home in Nairobi.
Agalo would be gone for eight years, leaving behind eight children (the last born only three years old) and a thoroughly flustered and lonely husband who never stopped looking for his missing wife.
Pastor Nellie says that even at this dark moment, God was working miracles in their family as she became born again at 11, joining three of her elder sisters who had already embraced the faith.
She adds that her father, veteran trade unionist, Raymond Odhuno, also saw the light and joined his children in Christianity.
“At salvation, God told my father three things - that he keeps the faith, take care of his children in their mother’s absence and that his wife (my mother) would come back again. In my mind, I thought my mum would return after a month. That month stretched to eight solid years before we would see her again!” she says.
More about Agalo and her business later. For Nellie, knowing Christ at a tender age provided a well-needed anchor as she navigated life. Born in Nairobi’s Doonholm Estate, Nellie attended Kongoni Primary School in South C before heading to Loreto High School Limuru where she wrote her Form Four exams and later joined Kenya High School for ‘A’ levels. She joined the University of Nairobi to study Graphic Design.
Upon graduation, she joined World Vision International where she met the man who would become her husband - Dan ole Shani. They celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary on Sunday, March 31, 2024. Their union was blessed with three children - Tetu, Silalei who was Kenya women’s national basketball team captain for a number of years, and Lantei who served for five years in the US military.
The couple would soon relocate to Lusaka, Zambia where Nellie started a women’s prayer fellowship. Her first case of seeing the manifestation of evil spirits was in a young girl who exhibited strange behaviour. Nellie prayed for her and she was healed.
It was also in Zambia that she saw first-hand a powerful demonstration of forgiveness.
“There was this lady I came to know. Her husband ran off with another woman and the lady was forced to singlehandedly raise her children. Years later, the brother of the husband contacted the lady and said her runaway husband was sick to the point of death and that the woman she ran away with had abandoned him. The jilted wife, against bitter protestations from her now adult children, made the difficult decision to forgive her husband and take him back. That was true Christianity at work,” Nellie says.
After Zambia, the Shani’s next port of call was the desert country of Mauritania where Nellie immediately got down with the work of God.
“Mauritania is an Islamic country but I also realised that the nationals of this country had a strange mixture of Islam and animism with a smattering of witchcraft,” she says.
Nellie also came to learn of a particular estate in the capital Nouakchott, where prostitution thrived, serviced mainly by women from Nigeria, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Nellie, together with a group of ladies began an outreach programme preaching to these women. They helped those who abandoned the trade to start small businesses from which they earned an alternative living.
After Mauritania, Nellie and her husband moved to Senegal and she got a job as a counsellor at the American embassy school and was also the youth director at the local interdenominational Baptist church that brought together all protestants living in Dakar.
It was at this time that Nellie began engaging in extensive spiritual warfare through teachings at conferences and workshops.
Moving from Dakar to California in the United States opened Nellie’s eyes to the fact that witchcraft existed in the developed world just as it did anywhere else.
“I was praying for many white people who showed manifestations of being oppressed by evil spirits,” she says.
It was in California that her deliverance ministry was established. Another positive thing about her stay here was that she wrote her first book.
She has since written 11 books mostly on spiritual warfare, prayer and deliverance.
The Shanis then moved to London, which proved to be propitious as far as ministry was concerned.
“London was much nearer Kenya and I soon re-started teachings on my favourite subject of spiritual warfare. I hired a place at the Home Care Fellowship. I would be in Kenya for three months teaching every Saturday afternoon and fly back to London quarterly,” Nellie explains.
In 2012, Breaking Barriers International (BBI) was finally registered with the Attorney General’s office as a society. It takes its name from Isaiah 61:1:
“Empowering people to live victoriously by identifying and breaking invisible barriers in their lives.”
Running a ministry must be a very expensive affair, I pose to Nellie, wondering aloud how she manages to stay afloat.
“God told me very early that my ministry would be supported by locals and I have seen it come to pass. I have covenant partners who commit certain amounts to the ministry every year and we account to them for every coin donated,” she says.
Some 10,000 people in the past 12 years have passed through the doors of BBI, getting healing from a myriad of afflictions.
“We teach about generational curses and how to break them. It is sad that many individuals who are good, churchgoing folks are suffering from addictions, sexual immorality, and financial problems and they sit in church pews hoping to get answers. These are the people we are here for,” Pastor Nellie affirms.
Sadly, some people have accused Pastor Nellie of using powers of divination, which she denies. “I am not a diviner and my teachings are straight out of the Bible. People are free to come and see our work and if they cannot attend physically then they can follow us online,” she says giving the address as www.bb-international.org.
Back to Agalo, Nellie says that her father received very many false leads from people who claimed to know where she was. He would travel to the said places only to find he had been led on a wild goose chase!
Finally, someone gave us solid information that she had been sighted at the home of a powerful witch doctor in the former South Nyanza district.
“We travelled there as a family and found her. It was with mixed emotions that we reunited. My mother used to be of very big in stature and in fact she was called ‘Tan saba’ (seven-tonner) but the person we met was thin and had not shaved her hair all the eight years she had been away,” Nellie says.
Agalo came back home accompanied by her host witchdoctor and on that day she came the family gathered to welcome her.
Strangely and following the doctor’s instructions, she re-entered her home walking backwards to the amazement of her children and the rest of the family.
By this time, her husband and all eight children were believing Christians and many of them serving in Christian ministry.
She then carried on her consultations and built a hut next to the main homestead from where she continued to attend to those seeking her services. Her husband and children continued as believers in Christianity.
With time she would also embrace salvation and the first thing she did was to burn down the consultation ‘clinic’.
Nellie says she travelled from Zambia to come to see her mother when she heard the news that she had gotten saved. What started with dabbling in the world of the dark arts ended with Agalo passing on as a bona fide believer in 2004.
