You Will See Fire

The Life and Death of an American Priest in Kenya

Christopher Goffard

Dedication

To Jennifer, Julia, Sophia, Olivia,

and my parents

Epigraph

A man who does next to nothing but hear men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil.

—G. K. Chesterton

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The House at the Edge of the Dark

2 The Lawyer

3 The Collar and the Gun

4 Oaths

5 The Dictator

6 The Clashes

7 The Terrible Place

8 The Raid

9 Lolgorien

10 The Tribunal

11 The Girls

12 We Will All Be Sorted Out

13 The Bureau

14 Manic Depression

15 The Verdict

16 The End of the Time of Moi

17 The Inquest

18 The Labyrinth with No Center

Sources and Notes

Selected Reading

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

Other Books by Christopher Goffard

Copyright

About the Publisher

1
THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE DARK

WHEREVER HE WENT, the man of God carried his shotgun. Like its owner, the double-barrel twelve-gauge was old and broken in places, dusty from miles of hard African road. He kept the splintered stock bound together with a length of black rubber, and he believed it might be his only protection, save for the good Lord and his American name, in a country that had never felt more dangerous.

John Kaiser’s redbrick parish house, without a gate or guard or phone, sat on a twenty-nine-acre plot at the edge of an immense valley rolling away toward the Serengeti Plain. It was the finest house in the township, with five bedrooms and small outdoor water tanks. He would be awake before dawn, lifting his head with difficulty from his narrow metal-frame bed, blinking into the darkness of a room as spartan as a cell. Shapes congealed around him: the crucifix on the wall, the cluttered desk, the shotgun.

He’d be walking the grounds before sunrise, clutching his rosary beads and praying in the dark, his arthritic neck already encased in a thick orthopedic brace. At first light, the rutted murram road running past the parish house acquired a pinkish hue. As the countryside awoke, birdsong filled the surrounding trees, and from the long, wet grass, insects thrummed at his passing heels.

A few yards from his front door stood the church he had built soon after his arrival, five years back, in this tiny township in the heart of Masailand. It was a rough and functional structure, like dozens he’d thrown up across the countryside: corrugated-iron roof, concrete floor, unburnished wood pews, and exposed crossbeams in the vault overhead. He had developed a reputation as a ferocious and tireless builder during his years in Africa; this alone made him an unusual figure among white missionaries. He’d gone up ladders with pockets stuffed with bricks and pulled long roof beams after him by rope. But scattered around the compound now were crude brick structures—the shells of a girls’ dormitory and schoolhouse and dispensary—that he had not mustered the energy to finish in these last pain-racked years. He had begun to doubt he would.

The year was 2000. It was late summer. From his radio came the Voice of America, the cadences of home, where the news of late had been dominated by the presidential race to succeed Bill Clinton. He would sit down to breakfast in a dining room with lime green walls, adjoining a living room with a plain worn couch. His diet was as spartan as his room, and his breakfast, laid out by his housekeeper, Maria, would be quick and simple—some mandazi, a fried sweetbread, and ugali, the maize porridge that was the country’s staple.

By midmorning, he would be steering his Toyota pickup over the gravel driveway onto the red-dirt ribbon that formed Lolgorien’s one main road. As in many of Kenya’s disease-blighted towns, there were only a few intact families. Flanking the main road on either side, for a few blocks at the center of town, were tumbledown clusters of one-story shops topped by rusty roofs of corrugated iron, dukas, wood-plank stands, dirt-floor hotels. Milling there were police, game wardens from the Masai Mara, government functionaries, and the pack of prostitutes that served them. Shoulder-to-shoulder on the porches lounged gaunt, long-limbed Masai men, sinewy, sandaled, with shaven scalps, the ropy skin of their stretched and punctured earlobes bright with beads, their bodies wrapped in crimson and vermilion shukas. Their staffs were slanted across their laps or angled over their shoulders; a Masai male who didn’t carry one was considered a worthless guardian against the lions, and the tradition persisted even as the lions had begun to vanish. They were nomadic cattle herders who lived in manyattas—circular arrangements of loaf-shaped mud-and-dung huts, where they corralled their cattle at night, secure from predators behind lashed-together fences of thorned acacia branches. Cows supplied their diet: milk mixed with blood collected from a small arrow puncture in the animal’s neck. White missionaries sometimes talked of feeling like strangers among Africans, even after decades of taking their confessions and serving them Mass and burying their dead. No group elicited this sense of exclusion as powerfully as the Masai. During the priest’s years in Masailand, conversions had been slow, nothing like the success he’d had for decades among the Kisii. The priest knew he was a peculiarity to them, maybe the strangest mzungu they had known—an American, rich by definition, who insisted on a life of hard physical labor in the sun and had chosen to live without a woman or children. Inexplicable enough was a lifetime without physical love—only witch doctors live alone, people said—but a man who consciously forsook progeny meant an even deeper strangeness.

From his truck, as he rumbled through town with the shotgun and rosary beads resting beside him, he could see the Masai watching him from the porches, their gaze indifferent and unreadable in the baking sun. He had to assume that some of them were monitoring his movements, informing on him, reporting back to the man some called “the Butcher,” Julius Sunkuli. Many—it was impossible to know how many—were linked to Sunkuli by family or clan or ties of financial loyalty or fear.

This was Sunkuli country. He held the local parliamentary seat. He was not just the area’s political kingpin and its most prominent Masai but also one of the most powerful figures in the country. He had grown up on the grass plains, tending his family’s goat herds. He had been an altar boy and a Christian youth leader, and remained a conspicuous member and benefactor of the Catholic Church. He had been plucked from the margins of power by His Excellency the President of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, East Africa’s longest-reigning gangster-statesman, who had given him a place in his inner circle. As minister of state in charge of internal security, Sunkuli commanded a vast police network, and was widely rumored as a possible successor to the president. When he smiled, the gap in his lower jaw showed where his teeth had been chiseled out, evidence of his childhood initiation as a Masai warrior. Sunkuli was different from some of Moi’s other top men, with their charm and European degrees. Sunkuli emitted a raw street fighter’s intelligence, a backcountry roughness that had persisted through his years as a lawyer, magistrate, and political boss.

To Kaiser, Sunkuli seemed the crystallized embodiment of Moiism, the perfect product of a culture of Big Man impunity—widely feared, apparently untouchable by the law or the electorate. For years, the priest had received reports that Sunkuli had been preying on schoolgirls; some said the countryside was dotted with his unacknowledged children. Kaiser had helped push a legal case, now working its way through the courts, in which a young Masai girl from his parish had accused Sunkuli of rape; it had made headlines. The priest described him as his “biggest worry.” It will be one or the other of us, he told people. There was no way to know how many spies he might have. Some people said that one of them was living in the priest’s own house.

Kaiser would pass on, into the countryside. His truck had a whimsical name, “the Helicopter,” because it frequently left the roads, heaving and lurching over terrain that brought anguish to his neck. Throughout the day, he would venture deep into the grasslands, through drenching rains and sucking mud and hard sunlight, to reach the scattered outstations of his vast parish. He had traversed this mapless landscape so many times that the topography itself supplied his signposts: a fig tree, a ridge of rock, a gulley. Certain arcane knowledge accrued to a man over a lifetime in the bush. He had learned to start his truck with a coin when he lost the key, and he understood the utility of a bar of brown soap to patch cracks in a leaking gasket. He had learned to deflate the tires to surmount a bad hill, and to sit on a crate when the front seat fell apart.

A fiercely doctrinaire Catholic who espoused obedience to the letter of Vatican law, he was nevertheless adept at bush-missionary improvisation. He found that a Coke bottle was a serviceable receptacle for holy water. When he’d traveled hours, only to discover he had forgotten the Communion wafers, he looked for the nearest kiosk that sold chapati—a doughy flat bread resembling a pancake—to transform into the Savior’s body. A crack shot, he’d been vanishing for years into the elephant grass with his shotgun, stalking wildebeests and impalas, warthogs and zebras and buffalo. He would skin the carcasses—sometimes yanking the skin free with ropes attached to his truck—and carve up the meat and distribute it among the parish schools. He whittled the stocks of his guns and made his own bullets, shaving lead from an old battery and pounding the pieces into slugs. He shook in half rounds to conserve gunpowder and to mute the noise when he hunted, in case a game warden was within ear-shot. Poaching had been outlawed since the late 1970s, but that was one of man’s laws and therefore negotiable.

Some regarded him as an unbreakable man, the “John Wayne of priests.” They saw the six-foot-two former U.S. Army paratrooper who could creep close enough to a buffalo to kill it with a single half-powder round through the lungs or heart (to take a second shot gave wardens a bead on your location). They saw the hunter who refused to leave a wounded animal behind, despite the danger of pursuing an enraged, bleeding beast into the bush. He had promoted a fierce image, in part, as a form of protection. Even before he was an enemy of the state, he recognized the shotgun’s value in deterring ordinary trouble. He hauled it outside now and then to shoot at birds; everyone knew the American priest was armed. He had performed prodigious physical feats well into middle age, hunting, hauling, digging, building. When he arrived in Masailand in his early sixties, he was still strong and fast enough to kill a rabbit with a hurled stone or a dik-dik with an ax, and he’d be on top of the animal before it even fell, hacking with a big overhand arc. He was still popping wheelies on his motorbike for the amusement of the Masai girls.

He’d come through the crucibles of any bush missionary—hepatitis, typhoid, malaria, amoebic dysentery. He’d broken bones in motorcycle spills and survived a roof beam crashing on his neck during a construction project.

But the last few years had been brutal even by his standards; his body had become a catalog of anguish. Though he hated seeing the doctor, he’d gone dozens of times. He’d endured prostate cancer, and multiple bouts of malaria that grew increasingly resistant to quinine and left him helpless, sweating through fevers and convulsions and hiding from harsh sunlight and the gouging of birdsong in the ears, the terrible cold seizing him, his body without bones or muscles or volition for weeks. At times, as the decades accreted in the bones, a man could feel like the sum of all the stumbles off his motorcycle and falls in the mud, a creature of collapsing cartilage and inflamed joints and ulcers. He was a former soldier, and a soldier did not complain, but on his best day now he couldn’t move his neck without pain. He wore the cervical collar everywhere, except at Mass. There, facing his faithful, he refused any concession to his decaying sixty-seven-year-old body. His parishioners streamed down from the hills in their bright tribal wrappings to hear him speak in Swahili of the risen Savior, to stand in line at Mass as the enormous old white hands, aching now like the rest of him, leaking strength every day, cradled God Himself aloft.

Everybody in the area knew the American priest, and many depended on him for food and school fees; they would surround him as soon as he pulled up to a cluster of huts or to the little brick schools or churches. By the side of the road, in the shade of eucalyptus trees, he bowed his head and listened to their confessions. I have stolen a cow, Father. I have slept with girls, Father. I have struck my wife, Father. So much of his knowledge about the country had arrived in this fashion; the chronicle of sins formed an infinitely more accurate barometer of the country’s soul than did the Nairobi newspapers.

With luck, he would be home before nightfall. The road bristled with bandits, or shifta, and the sun didn’t linger on the horizon. It was nothing like the protracted twilights of his Minnesota childhood—that long dream hour of crying cicadas and droning mosquitoes. Here near the equator, night scythed down as swiftly as a panga knife; one writer compared the experience to having a sack pulled over your head.

The shotgun would stay with him as he walked the grounds at night, locking the church, shuttering the windows of his home, double-checking the locks; it stayed with him as he walked down the long, shadowed hallway to his room, the last on the left. Scattered before him at his desk, dimly illuminated by generator light, were dangerous documents. They told the story of the secret history of his adopted country, a subterranean narrative of land and blood. They chronicled the sins of Kenya’s rulers—decades of land-stealing, ethnic carnage, rape. There were affidavits from peasant farmers, land deeds, newspaper clips, correspondence, accounts from local girls. He had been collecting them for years. He spent hours in his room, reading, poring over documents, making notes in his journal. For some time, he’d been anticipating his violent death, warning friends and family in the States to expect it.

For most of his career as a bush missionary, save for the church and the tribes he had lived among, few in Kenya had known his name. He had done a fair job of impersonating the other good, hardworking, politically impassive men of Christ. He had raised little noise outside the Church, with the rationalization that he had plenty of God’s work to keep him busy. Then, no longer young or even middle-aged, he’d become chaplain at a hillside displacement camp called Maela, where he witnessed a scale of misery that nothing had prepared him for—ubiquitous choking dust, mud, disease, burned skin sloughing off children’s hands like gloves, and then the government’s nighttime raid on the camp. Good Lord, some of the refugees had even been singing as they were crammed onto trucks to be scattered across the countryside, singing because they’d actually believed the president’s promise that he would find them land. That six-month experience—culminating in his own beating and banishment from the camp—had forced him to reexamine his silence. Some of the lightness went out of him; photos showed a depth of sadness shadowing his eyes after that.

It would have been possible, even then, for him to melt back into his missionary work. His bishop, whose mantra was “Don’t provoke,” had sent him to the house in Masailand at the country’s southwest edge—about as far as he could go without spilling into Tanzania—with the hope that the remoteness would keep him out of trouble. The bishop had been mistaken. It had not deterred Kaiser from appearing at the Akiwumi Commission—a tribunal launched by President Moi, with the ostensible goal of probing the causes of the tribal clashes that had killed more than one thousand people in recent years. The real purpose, many suspected from the start, was to conceal the government’s central role in the carnage. Kaiser had been warned against speaking. His bishop believed the tribunal a waste of time, and Kaiser’s intention to name names a pointless provocation.

Some African churchmen considered it an embarrassment that a white man should presume to lecture them about their affairs. The missionary’s role in Kenyan history had been a fraught one. Determined to bring pagans of the Dark Continent into the Christian fold, the early missionaries preached not just salvation but also the superiority of white civilization. Many of Africa’s independence leaders, including Kenya’s, had been products of missionary educations. But it was easy for Africans to view the missionary legions with ambivalence, if not outright hostility. They had built schools but taught Africans to hate themselves. The Church had been a spearpoint of the colonial land grab, legitimizing the conquest, and had sided with the British against the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, defining the struggle as one of light versus darkness, God versus Satan. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, had put it this way: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.” Kaiser had inherited this uneasy legacy. For many of his colleagues, guilt fostered paralysis and passivity—a feeling that African politics was best left to Africans, lest the Church be accused of reproducing its past sins.

Yet Kaiser had gone to the tribunal, braving the bad roads, waiting in the makeshift courtroom in his ironed clerical blacks, with his neck brace and his Roman collar and a folder of documents. Up he walked, a broad-shouldered, long-limbed man with a loose, slightly bandy-legged gait and thinning white hair. He was not a churchman of rank, not a bishop or a nuncio, not even the priest of a politically important parish like Nairobi. He was, up until then, a man of small importance to history—just a bullheaded old mazungu from one of the country’s poorer corners.

His voice was high and thin, almost feminine, incongruous with his cowboy gait, but it had not betrayed him that day. He had named names—a roster of the regime’s untouchable potentates. Sunkuli was prominent among them. This was dangerous enough, but then he went on to do the unpardonable: He named Moi himself. People would remember his voice as steady and even and insistent. Listening to it, it had been impossible to tell that he’d been sleeping with his shotgun for weeks, afraid that he would never be allowed to speak, afraid that once he began, he’d never be allowed to finish. He testified for two days, sparring with government lawyers, trying to distill the dark knowledge he had absorbed. Long portions of his testimony ran verbatim in Kenya’s daily newspapers, and in an instant the backwoods missionary had become a symbol of national conscience, a source of hope, a galvanizing force.

That was how it began: not just the fame but also the steady note of dread in his letters, the unbanishable sense that he would be called on to die violently in this green, malarial patch of East Africa. In the eighteen months since then, he had been upping the stakes, demanding not just that Moi be prosecuted at the Hague, where he vowed to serve as a witness, but pressing for criminal charges against Sunkuli, as well. The good, gentle men of his missionary order found it exasperating, his unwillingness to listen to reason, to moderate his tone, to demonstrate a normal man’s respect for death. You’re going to get us killed, John.

AGAINST HIS WINDOW pressed the cold deep-country dark, and from it rose the distant bedlam of hyena packs on the savanna. Cackles, whoops, rattles, gibbers—in the right state of mind, these sounds could be calming, melodic. Africa’s nightsounds used to be music to him, and there were nights as a young missionary in the open Mara that he would recount as if he were the world’s luckiest man. Picture him: the stars ablaze above, the breeze rippling quietly through the dry waist-high grass, the winged ants battering his lantern, the carcass of a wildebeest or zebra gutted in his truck and the aftertaste of its fried heart in his mouth, and all around the cacophony of animals in their night rituals. He had lived close to nature’s beauty and cruelty since childhood. It had suited him, this life. Now, the veldt noises lashing against his room’s little square of light seemed to remind him of the closeness of his own death. Again and again, the priest told people, That is what they will do to me if they catch me. Leave me as carrion. Human flesh was familiar to the scavengers, for the Masai still were known to leave their dead unburied, smeared with animal fat to hasten the bodies’ disappearance. Nothing lasted long out there, among the immense spear-beaked marabou storks—bald, Boschian grotesques whose wrinkled heads seemed born in some stygian pit of blood and ash—and the hyenas, spotted, hulk-shouldered, level-eyed. These he seemed to fear most. They fed deep on the entrails of living, thrashing gazelles. They ate the viscera and the muscles and the skin, crunched through bone and swallowed the hair, whole corporeal forms vanishing in the space of hours. They were, to assassins, an ideal evidence-disposal system. Everyone knew the story of the young English traveler Julie Ward, who had been murdered not far from here, her body devoured by animals, and the truth about her death—like so many crimes in Kenya—gone with equal thoroughness.

As a paratrooper, he’d been taught that darkness can be a friend and ally; a trained man can turn it to his advantage. Here, however, the mind peopled that void with innumerable evils; he knew the advantage was theirs, not his. Every odd sound, every rustle and crunch, seized his attention, his body tensing. He knew they could be out there even now, crouched, smoking, silent, patient, catching a glimpse now and then of his tall silhouette passing by a window, waiting for him to be separated from his gun, for his vigilance to slip. They’ll say I killed myself. Don’t believe it. He clutched his rosary beads. He prayed for strength.

THROUGH THE SUMMER, his missionary bosses and fellow priests made the trip from Nairobi to plead with him: Go back to Minnesota, John. Rest.

They knew there was small chance of reasoning with a man of such preternatural stubbornness. If he went home now, he explained, Kenya’s rulers would probably never allow him to return.

Any of his superiors could have ordered him out of Lolgorien, back to the States. He had taken a vow of obedience, and he very well might have complied; his last years would have been spent peacefully among his boyhood haunts in Otter Tail County, Minnesota, fishing quietly among the mayflies, visiting old friends and family, and browsing the cemetery slabs for childhood names. But his bosses gave no orders. Their preferred method was to offer suggestions, appeals to reason, pleas for prudence. These, he could ignore.

The summer was a dry one in Lolgorien, the green leaching from the hills until the grass was brown and short and brittle. His water tanks were depleted, and across the hills the skin tightened on the ribs of the cattle. The Masai watched the sky constantly, knowing that if it remained empty, their calves would begin to die first. Cows were not just their livelihood but God’s special bequest to their tribe. Every few seasons, droughts stole them in large numbers, and it was a terrible thing to hear the weeping of a proud Masai. They prayed and made sacrifices, and still nothing brought the rain.

All that summer, for the priest, the warnings kept coming. One day, returning home, he found someone had hurled a large rock through a window of his house. Another day, a friendly Kenyan contact—a game warden or policeman—came surreptitiously to say, A decision has been made to eliminate you. Another day, he opened a letter that had arrived in his mailbox and found an unsigned threat in Swahili: Utaona moto. You will see fire.

Much later, Francis Kantai, one of his catechists—a young Masai he had enlisted as a helper and a cultural bridge to the local people—would describe the priest’s sudden unease as he opened the letter. What is it, Father? What does it say?

As Kantai recalled, the priest gave a curt reply—I don’t give a damn—and took the letter down the hall to his room and closed the door. The threat was apt. Fire had been the medium of terror in village after village, defenseless thatched-roof huts and wooden hovels transformed into the tinder of infernos across the countryside. Flames took them quickly and completely. Even in his house of brick, there was little protection against a torch in the night.

It’s easy to imagine that the priest sat on his bed and prayed, clutching that note. It’s possible that he brooded, too, on his young Masai catechist, who slept down the hall from him. To many of the priest’s colleagues and acquaintances, why he permitted Kantai’s presence was a mystery. He was widely believed to be a spy for Sunkuli, and he had confessed to burning houses for the police. The priest had repeatedly defended Kantai, had once even smashed a table in rage when his name was impugned.

By this point, however, there were signs that he had begun to distrust Kantai himself. His housekeeper, Maria, told him that Kantai had let Sunkuli’s men into the parish house, into the priest’s room—the place where he allowed no one, the place where he kept his papers.

The priest had asked a Kenyan friend, Can Francis hurt me?

The friend had responded with a Swahili proverb: Kikulacho kimo nguoni mwako.

It meant: The bug that bites one’s back is carried in what one wears.

IN THE THIRD week of August, the rains came and the grass greened, and from his veranda he watched the cows dance.

One of his catechists, Lucas, handed him an envelope.

A letter for you, Father.

The priest opened it. It had been hand-delivered all the way from Nairobi, passed between church assistants. It was a summons from an authority he could not refuse—Giovanni Tonucci, the papal nuncio, the Pope’s representative in Kenya. The priest was to report to him immediately. The matter was apparently urgent, though unspecified.

Kaiser was certain what the meeting would entail. He would be thanked for his years of service in Kenya, and told to return to the United States to take an extended rest. It would mean, he was sure, his departure from the country for good. He would have to obey. Thirty-six years, and now it was over.

What he did in the days that followed would invite the most exacting scrutiny, his actions weighed and analyzed and puzzled over, his phrases parsed, word by word, and subjected to dramatically different readings. After the summons, his mood changed. He wept at Mass. He asked for prayers. He grabbed his duffel bag, then climbed into his truck with his ax and his rosary beads and his Bible and his neck brace and his shotgun, disappearing down the red-dirt road on the half-day trip to Nairobi.

2
THE LAWYER

THE LAWYER’S PHONE started ringing early that morning. They’ve killed Kaiser. He was at home in Ngong, on the outskirts of Nairobi. He felt a chill spread between his shoulder blades. The first details to reach him were vague, secondhand, filtered through a network of informants whose voices were tight with panic. It was August 24, 2000, four days after Kaiser’s departure from his parish house, and his body had been found in a weedy ditch that morning in Naivasha, about forty miles outside the capital. Nobody could determine what had brought him there. People were saying that his head had been blown apart, that his own shotgun lay nearby.

Charles Mbuthi Gathenji was fifty-one, a man of stocky build and medium height. He had a thin mustache, thinning gray-black hair, and sharp cheekbones. He possessed an air of wary circumspection informed by decades on the wrong side of a police state. His eyes were deep-set and heavy-lidded, and his thin, rimless glasses contributed an aura of scholarly gravity, an impression reinforced by his careful, formal English, his accent thickly Kenyan and punctuated with phrases like “It is quite in order.”

He did not deviate from his daily routine on this day. He put on his suit, picked up his leather briefcase, and steered his Mitsubishi Pajero into the cacophony of the capital’s morning gridlock. He had an appearance at the High Court and some appointments at his office. But the sense of prickly unease that had never entirely left him these past few years was very close now. They’ve killed Kaiser. In recent weeks, under the employ of the Catholic Church, the lawyer had been preoccupied by a case that felt eerily similar—the slaying of an Irish monk named Larry Timmons. The monk, not nearly as well known as Kaiser, had accused a Rift Valley policeman of demanding bribes, and one night the cop had shown up at the mission house—in response to a robbery—and shot him to death. A terrible accident, authorities said, but after all, it had been so dark. Now, three years after the shooting, Gathenji was arguing to bring murder charges against the cop; they were in the thick of a protracted inquest, and his witnesses were slowly dismantling the official narrative.

When Gathenji returned home that evening he turned on the television news and got a glimpse of the scene where Kaiser had been found. There was the priest’s body, with its fringe of white hair, supine in the weeds, clad in light gray slacks, black leather shoes, and a leather jacket. There was his Toyota pickup aslant in a drainage culvert, with a twisted right front wheel. There was the interior of the dirty cab, with the priest’s rosary beads hanging from the steering wheel and the sharp edge of his ax visible under some clutter. There were the dark-suited plainclothesmen and black-hatted officers milling around the truck in the sharp country sunshine. There was the shotgun—wrapped, ineptly and incompletely, in police plastic. There was the large crowd of onlookers massed on a nearby berm, mothers standing with arms crossed and children sitting at their feet in the brownish red dirt, all watching wordlessly and immobile as statuary. There was the sky as it had been that morning, pale blue and clear beyond the towering, slender-branched fever trees, and the road already alive with zooming buses as the body was wrapped and loaded into the back of an official Land Rover.

For the last five years, their lives had been closely linked, the lawyer’s and the priest’s. Kaiser would materialize at Gathenji’s office unannounced, always on a crusade, always in dusty shoes. To call ahead of time would have increased the possibility of being followed. He’d bring in people from his parish who needed legal help. He’d scribble notes on newspapers or whatever was on hand. He’d seek advice on how to build cases against government men, and how to get supplies to refugees displaced by violence.

If the Church remained one of the few institutions in Kenya that had raised its voice against the government, it did so mostly in a carefully hedged and muted way. As a corporate body, it preached reconciliation but rarely went further. The American priest had been an exception: He’d named names, and looked for every opportunity to do it again.

As Gathenji saw it, over their years of working together, their bond had evolved into something more profound than mere friendship. They shared the understanding of two colleagues who knew for a certainty that their work could get them killed. They were brothers in a foxhole.

Temperamentally, they were poles apart. Kaiser had a hard-charging, elbows-out approach, always racing toward the cannon’s mouth. Dogged but not personally flashy, Gathenji was quiet, methodical, and preferred to operate behind the scenes. He had a wife and two children. Despite his high-profile battles with the powerful, he tried to speak through his legal work. He saw no reason to draw more attention to himself than necessary.

Many of his peers had cultivated political connections and made themselves rich. He did not view the law as a stepping-stone for political power; to him, his country’s politics had a rank taste. He wasn’t an editorial writer or a maker of screeds and fiery speeches. He seemed to know everybody but made it a point to avoid social clubs. He would not be found mingling with the nation’s legal stars on a Nairobi golf course. He couldn’t be mistaken for a member of the wabenzi class—the Swahili term for those possessed of a Mercedes-Benz, the badge of arrival. He stayed away from bars and made it a habit to be home on his small farm, with his family, well before sunset.

Much of his work, championing the victims of political violence, carried small financial reward. And so despite being one of his country’s best attorneys, he labored in what he characterized as the lower-middle class. He described himself as a simple man, a working lawyer with a Mitsubishi and, when he could afford it, a clerk. He thought of himself as a foot soldier, and had the instincts of a survivor.

For years, he had worked from a respectable fourth-floor office in a tower across the street from the Central Law Courts in downtown Nairobi, but the place had stopped feeling safe a year back; one of Moi’s ministers had moved into the floor below, and Gathenji nervously found himself passing the man’s security detail in the stairway.

Now, in the summer of 2000, he was in semihiding in an old, peeling, out-of-the-way office bungalow on Chania Road in a compound of decrepit trees and flowers. The red-tiled roof leaked when it rained, and the cold days were bitterly uncomfortable. He had removed his name from the telephone book and changed his numbers. He was doing mostly low-level legal work to make a living—most clients had deserted him after his incarceration as an alleged enemy of the state a few years back—and quietly consulting human rights groups on strategies for prosecuting Moi.

To Gathenji, Kaiser’s death had the feel of a classic state-sanctioned hit, carried out by a cadre of professional assassins. It was the work of what he called “Murder, Inc.”—a vast apparatus of spies, security forces, and hit men with links to State House. Could Moi have been brazen enough to kill the American? If so, it meant anyone might be next; it suggested there might be a list the assassins were working from. His own name could plausibly be on it; many of the calls he would receive in coming days were from people concerned for his safety.

The country was two years away from the most important election in its postindependence history, a potential pivot point in East Africa’s rueful political trajectory. There was hope that Kenya’s fragmented ethnic groups might finally do what had seemed impossible before, coalescing long enough to defeat Moi’s machine. The ruler was apparently growing desperate, his grip threatened as never before.

SIX DAYS AFTER Kaiser’s death, as the priest lay in a glass-lidded brass-and-teak coffin under the vault of Nairobi’s Holy Family Basilica, Gathenji sat in the crowded cathedral among Catholic bishops, human rights activists, diplomats, and the priest’s friends and colleagues from across the country. The anger in the air was palpable. Gathenji listened as the papal nuncio—the man who’d issued Kaiser’s final summons to Nairobi—stood before the crowd, extolling the American priest’s crusade for justice and declaring him a martyr to the faith. In life, he’d been a troublemaker, an obstinate and single-minded man who’d railed against the Church’s passivity and clashed with his bishops, his missionary bosses, his fellow priests. Now it was possible to ignore the rough edges and complicated history.

The transformation had been instantaneous: The priest had been rubbed as smooth and flawless as a Masai bead, delivered from his aching body and messy humanity to abstraction, a clear and perfect symbol. After twenty-two years of Moi’s misrule, Kenyans were ready for such a symbol. The president’s face stared from every shilling in their pockets and the wall of every shop they entered—his name was on schools, streets, stadiums—and they had no trouble envisioning his hand steering the American priest to his grave. On everyone’s lips was a litany of political murders, unexplained car wrecks, implausible suicides. Outside the basilica, thousands crammed the streets in mourning and in rage. The American had already become a byword for Moi’s ruthless determination to stamp out dissent, and a rallying cry for the forces gathering against the dictator. Gathenji noticed that the regime had sent no representative to the funeral ceremony.

After the Mass, the priest’s body was loaded into a church van for transport to Kisiiland in the west, where Kaiser had spent decades, and then on to the gravesite in his last parish, in Lolgorien.

Gathenji did not follow the church caravan; there was no telling who might be waiting to ambush him on those long stretches of country road. His association with Kaiser was well known. He believed it best to lie low until facts could be gathered, the scope of the plot uncovered, the killers identified. On this score, there were grounds for hope far beyond what anyone could have expected. A team of FBI agents, summoned by the U.S. ambassador, Johnnie Carson, had crossed the Atlantic to begin investigating. Even now they were fanning out across the countryside, gathering evidence, digging up witnesses.

The ambassador had promised the Bureau’s investigation would be an independent one. To Gathenji and to others, this was a crucial reassurance, since no rational person expected the slightest help from the Kenyan police themselves; it was widely rumored that they’d played some role in the death.

Gathenji was heartened by the FBI’s reputation, by its awesome resources and name for professionalism; the agency had been instrumental in rounding up suspects in the terror bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi two years earlier.

But even now, a piece of not-so-distant history supplied grounds for anxiety. A decade earlier, Moi had invited New Scotland Yard in to investigate the murder of his foreign minister, Robert Ouko, but had curtailed the probe when it pointed to members of his inner circle. The investigation had supplied the illusion of the pursuit of justice while anger abated and memories faded and witness after witness died, some of them mysteriously.

No, Gathenji thought. This investigation was in good hands. The Kaiser case would not be like Ouko’s. The Americans wouldn’t permit themselves to be Moi’s dupes, and they would raise hell if they were trifled with. So seriously was the case being treated in the United States that senators there were taking to the floor of Congress to demand justice for Kaiser.

Gathenji’s day-to-day work representing victims of political violence was dangerous enough, and the Kaiser case promised even deeper hazards. He did not think it prudent to venture too soon to the crime scene in Naivasha, a closely surveilled area with a reputation as a regime stronghold, where the slightest political talk could easily be overheard.

In the weeks that followed Kaiser’s death, he would make discreet inquiries, trying to retrace the priest’s final steps. Mostly, though, he waited. It might not be necessary for him to get involved.

The case felt coldly familiar to Gathenji in a personal way. His father, a Presbyterian evangelist, had been the victim of a politically charged slaying in September 1969, dragged from his home by fellow Kikuyus for refusing to swear an oath of tribal loyalty.

Gathenji, a twenty-year-old student at the time, believed the attack was sanctioned by elements of the Kikuyu-dominated government of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta. No one had ever been punished for his death; there had been no trial, and nothing resembling a real investigation. The experience, more than any other factor, had pushed the young Gathenji into a career in the law, which he perceived as a process—at its best—of ferreting truth from darkness and lending strength to the helpless. He had developed an abiding wariness and a deep-seated distrust of institutions, including ecclesiastical ones.

Charles Mbuthi Gathenji. For the Kenyan attorney who lost his father as a young man, Kaiser’s death had personal echoes. Photograph by Carolyn Cole. Copyright 2009, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

Like Kaiser, Gathenji’s father had been an inveterate builder and a tough former soldier who had ignored reported warnings to adopt a more compromising stance. He had suspected that his betrayer would likely be a friend, a church mate, someone scared enough to sell him out.

Kaiser had been aware of the story of Gathenji’s father, of course. During one of their last meetings, the harried priest had invoked the lawyer’s father as a reminder of what they were both fighting for.

Both deaths had had a feeling of inevitability. Both of the dead had seen it coming, clear-eyed, from a great distance.

3
THE COLLAR AND THE GUN

HE ARRIVED IN December 1964, stepping off a freighter into the harsh equatorial sunlight at Kenya’s eastern port of Mombasa, into a country that had just reeled exuberantly through its first year of independence from the British. Across the continent, the apparatus of European domination was being shuffled off, with varying degrees of violence, and the sense of possibility was unbounded. Kaiser was thirty-two years old and just ordained, fair-skinned and squared-jawed, a big-framed man with an army duffel bag under a thick arm. He boarded a prop plane, which carried him over the vast bulge of land toward his first parish in western Kenya. It was his first sight of the country in which he would spend most of his life—the great forests and maize farms and tea plantations, the ice-capped towers of Mount Kenya, the staggering cleft of the Great Rift Valley.

Kaiser’s early years in Kenya seem to have reflected the country’s own mood of hope and possibility. He lived in a cool, high region of softly sloping green hills dotted with huts and little granaries and covered with groves of black wattle trees, eucalyptus, and cypress, grass pastures, and terraced fields. This was the land of the Kisii, or Abagusii, a place the British had declared off-limits to European settlers.

Crowds swarmed to meet the missionary as he settled into a parish with eighteen thousand baptized Catholics and eighteen Catholic schools. Winds from Lake Victoria rustled maize rows that soared above a tall man’s head, and from the high hills of Kisiiland he could glimpse the great gulf. Families tended small farms called shambas, growing tea and coffee, as well as sweet potatoes, finger millet, and corn. Along the narrow dirt roads the women toted heavy kerosene tins of corn kernels to the power mills. Sclerotic little buses called matatus raced by helter-skelter; frequent rains stalled them in thick, impassable mud.

English and Swahili were of limited use here. The Kisii, isolated in the hills for two hundred years, were Bantu speakers whose language was grasped by few outsiders. There were no dictionaries or written grammatical rules. Kaiser set to work mastering the language, and after four months he was conversant enough to hear confessions.

The Kisii were fond of late-afternoon drinking parties, and men clustered together on stools, thrusting three-foot-long bamboo drinking tubes into pots of boiling, gruel-thick beer made of fermented millet and maize flour. The sociable Minnesota priest, invited to partake, confided to friends that he found it awful-tasting but learned how to fake a sip.

John Kaiser during his first years in Kenya, in the 1960s. He lived among the Kisii in the fertile highlands of western Kenya. A stout six foot two, he built churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand, and went up ladders with pockets stuffed with bricks. Photograph courtesy of the Kaiser family.

The huts were windowless, with walls of mud and wattle. All night during the cold months, upward through fissures in the tight grass thatching of the high-coned roofs, filigrees of smoke curled from hearth fires where families huddled, asleep on cowhides scattered across floors of dried mud and dung.

On some levels, the area was as foreign to Kaiser’s native Midwest as it is possible to conceive. Despite the presence of Catholics and Seventh-Day Adventists, most Kisii remained animists steeped in traditional practices. Polygamy was ubiquitous. For a man, the highest ambitions were abundant offspring—the only insurance of personal immortality—and multiple wives, each with her own hut, between which he would rotate. Fecundity was celebrated, the ultimate badge of a woman’s worth, and she was expected to give birth every two years while it was biologically possible. Giving birth to fifteen children was common. The Kisii birthrate, one of the world’s highest, was to Kaiser “a great sign of Divine favour.” Population control he regarded as evil. In Kisiiland, a pregnant woman did not speak of her pregnancy for fear she would appear boastful and invite malevolent envy. Any perceived advantage, in fact, invited envy and witchcraft.

“No one dies without carrying someone on his back,” went one proverb. This reflected a dark vision of invisible forces harrying people to their graves. Everything required a cause, an explanation, especially major calamities. Rancor between co-wives was a given, and a woman who found herself infertile, or who lost a child during pregnancy, inevitably suspected some machination of the women who shared her husband. The wealthy lived in fear of the poor; the poor lived in fear of the very poor; the very poor lived in fear of the wretched. It was understood that for the powerless, the jealous, and the angry, there was no recourse except through magic, and so the community’s most miserable and reviled members—childless, neglected old women, for instance—were often the most feared and vulnerable to murder. The killing of accused witches was common.

Once, Kaiser would recall, he installed a drain under an old woman’s hut, but she remonstrated with him over the shallowness of the ten-foot hole he had excavated. No, she said—they might claw down into the earth and witch me with my used bathwater: the omorogi. These were malign grave-robbing entities in human form, witchdoctors capable of casting a hex on anyone whose clothing, hair, fingernails, or excrement they could lay hold of and boil into a lethal brew.

Against those forces stood friendly diviners who could diagnose frightful omens and determine whether they were a function of witchcraft or, perhaps, of ancestor spirits angry at some slight. Other divines prescribed the proper sacrifices to banish spells, indicating whether the occasion called for the slaughtering of a black hen or a white he-goat. Kaiser viewed these divines as “clever rogues and excellent students of human psychology.” Professional witch-smellers were paid to scour one’s hut and root out the charms hidden in the roof and the walls. Having surveyed the grounds ahead of time and planted the charms, they waited for a crowd to gather, removed the alleged artifacts with a flourish—animal tails, potions, little pots—and dramatically announced that they would identify the witches responsible unless the plots were ceased immediately. Even progressive-minded Christians, lectured at church not to believe in witchcraft, secretly kept potions as a hedge against it. Some converts to Christianity abandoned it to take multiple wives, and some abandoned it in the face of serious illness or death: Confronting such calamities, you took no chances with new and unproven gods like the Nazarene.

For the Kisii, the supernatural was everywhere, but they lacked what some anthropologists called “an organized cosmology.” Their religion was essentially an ancestor cult. In a volcanic peak, shapeless as the wind that swirled around its high ridges, dwelled immortal ancestor spirits called “grandfathers”—a fickle, prickly, demanding pack that meted out rough justice in human affairs, punishing homicide and adultery and incest. They sent death and disease, killing bolts and madness, barren wombs and ruined crops. They were not deities, the object of daily prayer and ritual, but their hand was detected when misfortune struck; in this sense, they more closely resembled demons or furies. When angry, they placed omens in your path—an aardvark or copulating snakes—to signal their need for appeasement by funerary and animal sacrifices.

Kaiser perceived the Kisii outlook as one of profound “fear and fatalism,” akin to the pagan Europe of his Irish and German forebears. This enlarged the exhilaration of his missionary work. He saw himself bringing the good news of Christ’s victory over death and evil, liberating a superstition-enslaved people from their terrors. People sought his protection against the curse left by a lightning strike on a homestead; a sprinkling of his magic water could remove it. Once, he came upon the corpse of a young girl killed by a lightning bolt, and was warned not to touch her: It was certain to bring death, unless goats were sacrificed. Kaiser disregarded the warning, hammered together a wooden coffin, and lifted her into it for burial. If he didn’t banish the belief in curses, he seemed at least to possess a special power to defeat them. His celibacy set him apart from the community’s normal rhythms and aspirations, and that sense of apartness—coupled with his connection to the spirit world, his ability to influence hidden forces—made him a relation of traditional Kisii diviners.

In a study of the Kisii conducted a few years before Kaiser’s arrival, ethnographers Robert and Barbara LeVine described them as a “distinctively paranoid” people who viewed families and neighbors as nests of potential enemies. They sued one another with astonishing frequency—over stolen cattle, boundary lines, beer-party brawls. Litigants were expected to fabricate elaborate stories to avoid admitting guilt, which is why, outside the courthouses, there stood small flowering omotembe trees—oath trees—on which they were made to swear; to lie was to invite supernatural disaster, and to refuse the oath was tantamount to confession. In matters of justice, families closed ranks, and many killers avoided trial for want of witnesses. Punishment by the human justice system was regarded as meaningless against the rage of the spirits.

Studying the Kisii, the ethnographers found a streak of sexual puritanism and sadomasochism. Women who initiated sex were seen as prostitutes; faced with a male overture, they were expected to demonstrate serious reluctance, a practice that obscured distinctions between consensual sex and rape. On her wedding night, the bride mounted a show of resistance while the groom’s clan mates tore off her clothes and forced her onto the marriage bed. In a kind of ritualized contest, she would have stashed a piece of knotted grass under the bed or a piece of charcoal in her mouth, magic amulets meant to render the groom impotent. Multiple sessions of intercourse were expected of him that night; it was cause for pride if he injured the bride so badly that she couldn’t walk. There was also a form of ritualized rape (still enduring in the late 1950s, though growing less frequent) called “taking by stealth”: On the occasion of annual initiation ceremonies, boys were permitted to sneak into girls’ huts, where “a few boys achieve a hurried and fearful act of coitus with girls who pretend to be sleeping.”

As in the midwestern farmland of Kaiser’s youth, cows were ubiquitous in Kisii country. Along with the number of wives he managed to collect, cattle was the mark of a man’s wealth and status. They were a dowry for a daughter and an insurance policy, convertible to cash in emergencies that required payments to a witch-smeller or medicine man. And as in the Midwest, the rhythms of life in Kisiiland were dominated by the seasons, the rain and the crops, and survival depended on how well you read the signs. The year began with groups of women entering their little fields, their infants bound to their backs, their panga knives slashing the underbrush, their hoes pulverizing clumps of dirt in preparation for the broadcasting of millet and corn. Then came the long rains and the weeding and the waiting, and by August the granaries would be depleted, and the families, when they ate, survived on sweet potatoes and bananas. In the months that followed came the harvesting, and with it the initiation ceremonies, including mass clitoridectomies, the culture’s central ritual for girls. To an outsider, the rite involved bewildering dramas. Girls expressed great eagerness for the painful procedure in the face of older women who mockingly discouraged them. By this playacting, girls were signaling their mental readiness to enter the hut of the surgeon, who waited with a harvesting knife or razor; to flee the ceremony, once it had begun, was a disgrace to the family and an affront to the spirits.

Despite the vast cultural differences, Kaiser felt a kinship with his parishioners. They reminded him of the Scandinavian farmers he’d known as a boy in Minnesota. They were “tenacious and stubborn, yet warmhearted and generous, tightfisted and grasping, superstitious and religious—perceiving the influence of the spirit world in every occurrence,” he wrote in a memoir late in life. Kaiser came to respect native medicine men who used herbs and leaves to rescue people from the throes of mental breakdowns after modern medicine had failed. A sick Kisii saw no contradiction in treating his affliction with both a pill and a sacrifice to an offended ancestor.

This, then, was the land that Kaiser entered in his early thirties, the place he would spend much of his life. He came to regard himself not just as an African generally but as a Kisii in particular.

THE COUNTRY, WITH its fierce light and impenetrable dark, its jumbo maize rows and seasons of starvation, was immense, large enough to contain his clashing selves: the priest and the paratrooper, the healer and the hunter, the collar and the gun, the man of obedience who chafed at authority. The duality of his character had been obvious since his childhood, and partly a function of it. He was born in November 1932, the second of four children in a devoutly Catholic family in Otter Tail County, a backwoods patch of wild Minnesota where the children worked the farm and wandered deep woods of ash and poplar and basswood, and where learning to shoot was both survival and a poor boy’s central entertainment. The young John Kaiser, thin and sandy-haired, evinced a penchant for solitude, and he thought it would be a fine life to live as a trapper. He spent dark winter mornings roaming with his .22 rifle or single-barrel shotgun, hunting for muskrats and inspecting traps he had set. He became renowned for the speed with which he could detach a skin from the carcass. Animal fur earned the family a few dollars for a day’s work.

Religion, like firearms, saturated the Kaiser farm’s rhythms. Prayers began on awakening. Mom and Dad drilled their children in the proper responses to the Latin Mass. Their small, white, steepled church had frosted glass, plain wooden pews with uncushioned kneelers, and a wood furnace under the sanctuary. At the pulpit, a German-born priest named James Mohm upbraided parishioners by name for their sins and for their ignorance of the faith. He was opinionated, confrontational, deeply involved in the life of the congregation, and widely loved, a man Kaiser would later describe as a strong influence.

One Christmas at his one-room country school, Kaiser drew a nativity scene on the school chalkboard, carefully detailing the three kings, lovingly texturing the wool of the sheep, scrupulously shaping the halo around baby Jesus’ crib. Nights at home, he sat with the family around the kerosene lamp, creating images that might have sprung from the covers of a boys’ pulp magazine: horses, sheriffs, gunslingers, elaborate battle scenes. In one image of men at war, he lavished detail on the soldiers’ uniforms, on the sights of their M1 rifles, on their anguished faces as bullets riddled their bodies.

His capacity for concentration was married to an impetuous streak. One winter morning as a high school freshman, he and his elder brother, Francis, were exploring the deep woods with their rifles in search of mallards. Coming upon an ice-sheathed pond, the boys approached on elbows and knees, waiting silently for ducks to cluster in the pond’s melted center. They fired; the birds shuddered and lay floating. John Kaiser plunged into icy water above his waist to retrieve their prize. He emerged trembling uncontrollably and unable to speak. He ran home, a good mile’s distance, to be wrapped in a quilt and warmed by the potbellied cast-iron stove.

Rheumatic fever came on quickly, confining him to his bed for months, the vibrant sandy-haired boy shrunk to the bones. From his bed, he tracked animals with his rifle through the open window. The seasons changed around him, sending their messages: howling blizzards, snowmelt trickling from the eaves, the scratching of june bugs against the screens.

He would never forget his body’s capacity to betray him. During the slow recovery and afterward, he hardened it against another possible mutiny, steeling it with endless sit-ups and barbell curls, pushing it beyond endurance.

For years, people noticed his hand fluttering up to his heart involuntarily; in photographs of the period, people remarked that he stood like Napoléon. The habit lasted through his years at St. John’s Preparatory School, where he grew tall and fast and strong, catching footballs one-handed and setting a class record in pole vaulting, and through his two years at St. Louis University, where he competed formidably on the wrestling team. It survived well into his army career.

Kaiser had enlisted, following the example of his brother Francis, who had fought in Korea. What survives in official army archives is scant. He served from April 29, 1954 to April 26, 1957, and was discharged as a corporal at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was part of the Eighty-second, also known as the “All-Americans,” a celebrated elite airborne division that fought in some of World War II’s decisive battles, including the Battle of the Bulge, and participated in the invasion of Normandy.

Kaiser joined during one of the hotter periods of the Cold War—the armistice that brought a cease-fire to the Korean conflict was just nine months old, and an uneasy peace prevailed. The Eighty-second had been kept in strategic reserve from the conflict, poised to repel Soviet invasions elsewhere. Ready to fly, ready to jump: That was the unit’s raison d’être, its outsized pride, the justification for a training crucible that made the men swagger even in the company of marines. “We were much more disciplined than the Marine Corps because of our unique position,” recalled William Meek, the son of a Kentucky coal miner, who roomed with Kaiser at Fort Bragg and trained with him in Company D, a heavy-mortar platoon in the Eighty-second. “We were to be prepared within a few hours’ notice to go anywhere in the world where there was a trouble spot. We were to stay in top physical shape. Even the mess steward, if we were overweight, would determine how big a portion of potatoes we could have.” He would recall Kaiser as a loner who rarely left the base on off days, venturing instead to the library, the swimming pool, or the woods.

As a paratrooper and a noncommissioned officer, Kaiser earned $50 a month on top of his $120 wages, and he sent as much home to his family as he could. At the firing range, Kaiser proved an expert shot. He learned to take apart his M1 rifle and reassemble it blindfolded, to disable an enemy with a thrust of the butt plate to the jaw, and to kill with a lunge of the bayonet. To strengthen their legs for parachute jumps, the soldiers endured endless marching and running, the men in formation counting cadence in eight-mile jogs around the base, sounding off, and in the blazing summer heat stripping to the waist, so they ran only in boots and khakis, the sweat from one man’s swinging arm splattering the bare back of the man ahead, and that man’s sweat hitting the man ahead of him, all the way through the ranks in the unremitting North Carolina sun. Over and over, they practiced the paratroop roll, learning to let their weight hit the ground in degrees, bodies folding up accordionlike to lessen the shock of impact. Suited up, latched into the restraining rig, they left the tarmac in C-119 Flying Boxcars and sat in two facing rows, twenty men on each side, climbing above cotton and peanut country dotted down below with the tiny shapes of farmers and mules. Look straight out, not down. A layer of planes leveled out at eighteen hundred feet, another at three thousand. Then came the interminable moment: standing at the open bay door, waiting for the green light to trigger the plunge. Then the air filled with falling soldiers, two thousand at once, “like Cheerios in a bowl of milk,” Meek recalled, jostling one another as parachutes opened.

By now Kaiser could lift more than his two-hundred-pound weight over his head. His hand still crept to his heart, a decade after his fever, as if to suggest why he seemed to spend every free minute conditioning his body with push-ups and sit-ups and barbell curls, an exercise regimen so intense that Meek thought it bordered on the neurotic. Once they were swimming in Chesapeake Bay, Kaiser and Meek and another soldier, diving, having a hell of a time, and found themselves about a mile offshore in the shipping lanes. They had brought an army air mattress in case someone cramped up, and an exhausted Meek wanted to ride it back to shore. Kaiser would not surrender it, announcing, “You’re just now building muscle.” When Meek insisted, Kaiser answered by letting the air out of the mattress. Meek cursed and started swimming, and succeeded in making it back under his own steam. How had Kaiser calibrated the risk? Perhaps he believed he’d be able to rescue his friend with little trouble should he flounder; nobody doubted that he would have risked his own life to do so. Still, Meek thought that the Minnesota soldier’s behavior was foolish, stubborn.

By all accounts, Kaiser relished the physical life of a soldier and considered it, for a time, a vocation. It’s possible that military existence, with its elaborate codes and structures, rituals and hierarchies, supplied a kind of peace to a man whose energies sometimes threatened to over-top their banks; an impetuous temperament can find psychic freedom in order, routine, and clear lines of authority. Still, he seemed to like skirting rules. He kept a .22-caliber pistol buried in a plastic bag at the base, Meek recalled, though he couldn’t say what Kaiser intended it for. And Kaiser once staged the clandestine nighttime excavation of a buried crate of surplus ammo—he could not abide the waste of good bullets—and then smuggled it out of the base in his car trunk, with his mother smiling obliviously from the passenger seat.

Kaiser faithfully attended the Latin Mass on the base and wrestled with the possibility he might have to take a human life in war. The fearsome presence of the water-cooled, tripod-mounted .50-caliber machine gun that, as a squad leader, he carried—the weapon spewed six hundred rounds a minute, punctuated by phosphorescent tracers, and grew so hot that it boiled the water in the tanks—made it impossible to ignore the question. The army was shaping him with ruthless efficiency into a Red-killing machine. “We discussed that very thing,” Meek said. “I had a lot of problems myself with it, if I could fire into human beings with that weapon or not.” Still, he recalled Kaiser as “very much a patriot,” a full-blooded soldier ready to follow orders. Ecclesiastes told him there was a time to kill, as did the Church doctrine of a just war. Deeply embedded in his ideological firmament was a sense of the malignancy of global communism and the “materialistic atheism” it represented; the struggle against the Soviet Union was nothing less than a fight against the principalities of darkness. It was one thing to pray for the conversion of Russia, as every good Catholic did, but only a fool forgot his gun.

NEAR THE END of Kaiser’s three-year army stint, he was demoted from sergeant to corporal in an incident whose details remain obscure. Having lost certain archives in a warehouse fire, the army has no record of what cost Kaiser his rank. “Some of the black soldiers under his supervision refused to work and he confronted them,” according to an FBI summary of his sister Carolita’s account. “As a result of his intolerance of reverse discrimination and his actions at the time, he was demoted.” Later, she said her brother’s solidarity with the black soldiers got him in trouble—racist townsmen surrounding the Fort Bragg base were aghast at the presence of the black soldiers Kaiser had stationed to guard a barracks of white nurses. Refusing to remove the black soldiers, or to apologize to the townsmen, he accepted demotion rather than relent.

That account was echoed by Kaiser’s brother Francis, who portrayed him as a victim of the army’s racial backwardness and cowardice: “The townfolks didn’t want ‘niggers’ guarding people. He said, ‘I don’t have niggers. I have soldiers.’”

It takes only a little imagination to reconcile the variations of the story. It’s easy to picture Kaiser as a hard-driving, brook-no-nonsense commander who demanded the strictest discipline; he obeyed orders unstintingly and likely expected the same from his troops, who might have bristled at his harshness. It’s possible that his black soldiers, sensing the danger, did not particularly relish the duty of guarding a barracks of white nurses in the Jim Crow South of 1957. It would have been consistent with Kaiser’s character to insist: Right is right; wrong is wrong.

By the time he was demoted, his sister recalled, he had already made the decision to leave the army. He had grown tired, he would later tell people, of teaching recruits how to kill.

His time in uniform coincided with a tense but quiet period for America’s fighting forces, and he left the service, unlike his brother, without having seen a battle zone. There is no record of a sudden mystical experience, an epiphany, a catalyzing moment that led to his enrollment, at age twenty-five, at the Mill Hill Missionaries’ Jesuit school at St. Louis University, in Missouri. His decision to pursue the priesthood surprised no one, since he had spoken of its appeal for years. He told people that he considered it the world’s most important job.

“He was sidestepping God until he couldn’t do it anymore,” as his sister put it, though he did not relish the prospect of urban priesthood and “having to go to ladies’ circles, all the stuff you have to do.” Missionary work seemed the logical fit for a midwestern farm boy still seeking adventure and a measure of freedom.

Mill Hill, a London-based missionary society, had a reputation as a strict and exacting order. Kaiser got a single bed in a little wood-frame house, and he became fast friends with his roommate, a former air force pilot named Tony Barnicle. Their long nighttime chats flouted the rule of magnum silencium, or “the great silence,” which students were expected to observe through the night and morning rituals. The course load encompassed metaphysics, Latin, Plato, Aristotle, and massive doses of Thomas Aquinas.

In snatches of downtime, the seminarians watched films on a sixteen-millimeter projector and played fiercely competitive games of bridge and Monopoly in smoke-choked rooms. Everyone save Kaiser seemed to smoke. Even as they immersed themselves in doctrine, they wrestled with the prospect of giving up any semblance of a normal life. There was a sense of terror, of the massive weight they had agreed to shoulder, when strangers on campus noticed their cassocks and greeted them as “Father.”

“Both of us had a lot of doubts,” Barnicle said. “Every time I was ready to leave, John talked me out of it. Every time John was ready to leave, I talked him out of it. We had both had lives as adults in the military. We had no illusions about going into a life of celibacy.” The ache was sharpened by the site of pretty coeds wandering the campus. Barnicle had had girlfriends; Kaiser acknowledged to his roommate that he was a virgin. “I’m sure he’d fallen in love a couple of times. Daily, you’re faced with the sacrifice of a family,” Barnicle recalled. “We talked about our vocations, and we talked about girls, but we mostly talked about Thomistic philosophy.”

After two years in St. Louis, Kaiser accompanied Barnicle to the four-year course at St. Joseph’s College in London, where they were among the few Americans. They received a red sash to drape over their cassocks, a sign they were willing to shed blood for the faith. Missionary work had its hazards, though it was less risky than it had been in the years before quinine, when an assignment to a place like Kenya, where Mill Hill had been sending men since 1904, often meant quick malarial death. The seminary was dominated by archaic rules, in the fashion of a Benedictine order. After night prayers, students were expected to observe the magnum silencium the instant they placed a foot on the first step leading to the dormitory area, and it reigned till morning Mass. The rooms were tiny, primitive, with a small bed, a cupboard, a desk, a lamp, a chair, a cross on the wall. To discourage “unhealthy friendships,” a euphemism for homosexual trysts, there was a strict prohibition against visiting one another’s rooms.

Harrie van Onna, a Dutch seminarian, would remember Kaiser as a quiet man of great warmth who possessed a naive idealism about the faith but sometimes clashed with the men who ran its institutions. The missionary order left little room for individual dissent on matters of doctrine—Kaiser expressed skepticism about the logic of celibacy but agreed to adhere to the vow—and the seminary structure was an infantilizing one. Like Kaiser, van Onna had commanded men in the military; now they were required to ask permission to take a trip into downtown London.

Having studied Spanish, Kaiser had anticipated a posting to South America after his ordination. But Mill Hill needed priests in Africa. He had no special knowledge of the continent and spoke none of its indigenous languages; he was not able to conceal a sense of disappointment at the assignment. Still, he was a man of obedience, and adaptable to any terrain. That had been the pride of the Eighty-second Airborne, after all: the ability to go anywhere in the world with little notice, mountain or desert, city or bush.

He would, at least, be spared the mundane duties and circumscribed routines of a big-city priest, for which he understood himself to be temperamentally unsuited. Plus, he relayed with delight to his brother Francis, he would be able to take his hunting rifle to Africa.

A YEAR AFTER his arrival in Kenya, he steered his motorcycle southward out of tightly packed Kisii country into what some people called “the other side”—the immense open plains of Masailand in the Transmara region. He stood on a hill overlooking the Migori River and beheld a vista alive with elephants, buffalo, topi, waterbuck, and impalas. He felt, he wrote, as if he had been admitted to the Garden of Eden, a hunter’s paradise. Kaiser applied for a hunting license and, on free days, when other missionaries headed to the cities, he disappeared into the tall grass, at times in the company of traditional spear-bearing Kisii hunters. Traveling the region with his gun, he learned every square mile of it. He did not pursue trophies—seeking only the game meat he used to feed himself and his parishioners—but he was thrilled by the hunt. He elbow-crawled with his shotgun to within twenty yards of a warthog, which he considered the best meat in Kenya.

This was Kenyatta’s country, still in the childhood of its independence, and Kaiser would write of its “easy peaceful aspect.”

During his fourth year in Kenya, he boarded a night bus out of Kisii with a few belongings, heading to the Nairobi airport in October 1968. For reasons that are unclear, Mill Hill had reassigned him to the States. He would be the rector of the missionary order’s house in Albany, New York, the headquarters of its American operation. It’s not certain whether Kaiser sought this assignment, but his writing suggests that he believed it only a temporary departure from East Africa.

The bus was traveling along a high, cold road, he recalled in a memoir years later, when it approached an intersection crammed with trucks. All along the roadside, under a chilly rain, crowded hundreds of Kisii peasant farmers with the sum of their possessions—chickens, goats, bedding, pots, pans. Some were huddled near piles of blazing firewood they had foraged. He climbed off the bus and began asking questions. The farmers, he learned, had pooled their savings and purchased a large estate—they displayed documents to prove it—only to discover, after making the journey to their new home, that someone else had bought the land and was occupying it. A fraudulent company had swindled them out of everything.

By Kaiser’s account, the spectacle profoundly affected him. He decided that when he returned, he would have to immerse himself in the villagers’ lives and familiarize himself with the nation’s laws. He was so troubled by the farmers’ plight that he stopped by the American embassy in Nairobi to find out whether he could become a Kenyan citizen. He thought it might somehow put him in a better position to help. But renouncing his United States citizenship would leave him at the mercy of the Kenyan authorities, who might deny him a visa if he wanted to visit the States, where his two brothers and sister and aging parents remained; he might find himself trapped in Africa if he needed to leave in a hurry. However much he thought himself a Kisii, American citizenship—and the measure of protection that implied—amounted to what he called a “great asset.”

His stay in the States would last a year. He returned to Kenya in November 1969, bearing what he called “my luggage & idealism & my lousy novels.” Entering the Mill Hill house in Nairobi to find other priests and a local bishop drinking tea, he braced himself for their reaction. Word had circulated among Africa’s Mill Hill priests that something dreadful had happened during his time in New York. That he’d made accusations against the eccentric head of the society there. That he’d shown a streak of volatility some had already glimpsed in him. That he’d resisted police and been briefly institutionalized. “I had predetermined to be calm and serene & so I was extremely nervous, but everyone rushed to my aid and paid me much complimentary attention or else fled the room in cowardice,” he wrote in a letter to Barnicle. “They don’t so much think I am nuts as simply had a severe nervous breakdown—and no doubt they might be right.” Kaiser acknowledged that “there is the possibility that I am subjectively dishonest—nuts,” and he mocked his own imprudence during the New York episode: “Prudence, Tony, that’s the governing virtue.” Enthusiastic about returning to Kisiiland, he ended the letter on a note of optimism, but he hinted at the psychic toll the last year had taken: “The future looks good for me Tony—I have no place to go but up.”

4
OATHS

IN SEPTEMBER OF that year, in a town called Kikuyu in the countryside about fifteen miles northwest of the capital, a twenty-year-old student named Charles Mbuthi Gathenji stood beside the hacked and beaten body of his dying father. Hours before, the young Gathenji had been pulled out of his Nairobi classroom by a summons to the head-master’s office. There was a phone call waiting for him—a nurse from Kikuyu Hospital saying, “Your father has been admitted.” If he received further explanation in that conversation, he wouldn’t remember it later. He didn’t need much explanation anyway: The attack on his father was no surprise. He rushed from the school and found a bus. He climbed aboard, squeezing between a crush of bodies. He would remember standing for the interminable hour-long drive over the tarmac, jostled by bodies, thinking, I hope I will meet him alive. He would remember the kindness of the bus driver, a devout Quaker, who seemed to know exactly what had happened when he explained where he was going, and why. It was a terrible time for Christians.

THE ATTACK HAD its origins deep in Kenya’s bloody preindependence history, in the green and war-racked countryside in which Gathenji had grown up. He was the second-oldest boy in a family of seven children. His immediate family, poor and landless Kikuyus, lived north of the capital in a mud-walled house roofed with corrugated iron in what the British euphemistically called a “protected village,” a place he later regarded as a modified concentration camp. Ostensibly, they were being protected from the Mau Mau, Kikuyu rebels whose mass peasant insurgency was then at its height. White settlers had confiscated tens of thousands of acres in the Kikuyu heartland, and the rebellion’s rallying cry was ithaka na wiyathi, or “land and freedom.” Its tactics—machete attacks, arson raids, assassinations, decapitations—inspired terror even among sympathizers.

Gathenji had been three years old, in October 1952, when the colonial government declared a state of emergency. The British had responded to the rebellion by forcing most of the Kikuyu population into barbwire-enclosed camps and villages like this one, with its encircling spike-filled moat, one entrance and one exit. A cadre of Home Guards—Africans loyal to the Crown who had been given rifles and uniforms—policed the premises, collected taxes, and inspected the despised dog tag–like identity cards, called kipandes, that all adults were made to wear around their necks. The guards, with their berets, long black trench coats, khaki shorts, and heavy black boots, were remote and fearsome figures with a reputation for casual cruelty, more loathed than the British soldiers themselves. Their whistles would pierce the air before dawn; Gathenji’s parents and other adults would be herded off to perform compulsory “communal work,” digging ditches and clearing brush on the surrounding European farms.

Gathenji watched them beat anyone suspected of Mau Mau sympathies, and he watched them whip old people who were not quick enough in answering the whistle. Once, he was whipped himself after attempting to walk to school during a siege. Around their homes, villagers were forbidden from erecting fences or growing thickets that might impede the guards’ view as they patrolled the pathways between the long, straight rows of huts.

The village was structurally divided between the “Royals”—those seen as sympathetic to the government, like Gathenji’s immediate family—and Kikuyus deemed sympathetic to the insurrection, a group that included Gathenji’s paternal grandmother, a hard-eyed, slender woman clad in beaded necklaces and traditionalist wrappings and ornaments. Between the groups, there was always tension; their huts faced one another across a clear path. Now and then, boys from the other side pelted Gathenji’s hut with stones and chanted songs depicting his family as traitors.

Sometimes, during insurgent raids on nearby villages, Gathenji could hear the screams and smell the smoke, and the gates of his village would close, the guards stationed in a protective ring. Sometimes the British troops, known as “Johnnies,” poured into the village with their rifles, hunting for rebels. It was a childhood pervaded by fear.

If you were a Kikuyu boy growing up in a protected village in the 1950s, you knew certain things in the marrow.

You knew not to talk to the guards; if your people saw, you would be made to give explanations. You knew not to talk to the few white people you brushed past at the markets outside the village, or the ones you saw rumbling down the roads in their Land Rovers and Bedfords; they were armed, and any of them could do anything to you. You knew not to look in their eyes and draw attention to yourself. If possible, you disappeared.

If white people asked you a direct question, you knew to answer as briefly as possible and then shut up, to turn your face into a mask and your words into riddles, and never—never—to volunteer information. In many cases, your lingering distrust of white people would remain ineradicable even half a century later, and you would find yourself weighing your words carefully around them. You knew not to take shortcuts across the European farms, because you’d heard stories of other kids being shot as trespassers. You knew not to confide in the blacks who worked as field hands and domestic servants at those farms, because their allegiances were in doubt from every side: They might pass information about your family on to the whites, or they might be secret Mau Maus.

Above all, you were made to understand that talk was dangerous. You knew this at a cellular level, as law so universal and mundane that you couldn’t even recall when you had first learned it, in the same way you had always known that the gigantic armor-plated ants known as siafu would draw blood if your bare feet landed in their nest for more than a few seconds.

AT THE CENTER of the insurgency was its loyalty oath, which drew on—and bastardized—a long Kikuyu tradition. In earlier times, oath takers held a Bible in one hand and a pile of earth in the other; now, as the fighting intensified, Scripture was scuttled in favor of goat meat. At secret ceremonies, initiates would pass under an arch of banana leaves and strip naked in a symbolic shuffling off of their old selves. The goat would be slaughtered, a piece of its flesh ingested, its hot blood smeared on the bodies of oath takers. A series of vows was affirmed: Kill the enemies of Mau Mau. Never betray Mau Mau. Never reveal the oath to whites.

To the British, the oathing represented the atavistic savagery of their enemy, “the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed.” To the Kikuyu, most of whom reportedly took it in some form, it was regarded as transformative, a rebirth, a thing of transcendent power: God, or Ngai, would visit death on those who broke it. In detention camps, the oathing flourished, sometimes accompanied by the promise that initiates would get a plot of land once the whites were banished. The oath was often coerced, and as the war dragged on, it came to involve the drinking of blood and the binding of initiates with goat intestines.

To reject the ritual meant one was too dangerous to live, a potential stooge. Kikuyu Christians, a minority, were especially vulnerable. Many refused the oath, not out of colonial sympathies necessarily, but because the Church portrayed the goat blood as a blasphemy, the satanic counterpart of Christ’s blood. Militants strangled obstinate Christians with blankets, slashed their throats with jerry-rigged blades, and—if they were suspected informers—cut out their tongues.

On his mother’s side, much of Gathenji’s family sided with the rebellion, but his father, Samuel, an itinerant carpenter, occupied the gray and dangerous zone of staunch Christians.

After serving with the King’s African Rifles in the battle against Mussolini in Ethiopia, where he had lost many of his front teeth, he had become a pacifist and an evangelist with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. He preached at the pulpit and on the streets, anywhere he could find a crowd, and his themes were peace and reconciliation. He recited the story of the Good Samaritan and hummed “Nearer My God to Thee” when he walked.

He was a puzzle to his traditionalist, fervently Mau Mau in-laws. He had adopted the unswerving missionary stance against the genital mutilation of girls, which his in-laws clung to as an indispensable rite. He abjured old rituals, like spitting on your own chest as a blessing and offering goat sacrifices at the sacred mugumo, or fig tree. He rejected the notion that his wife, who had died as a young woman in childbirth in the late 1950s, had perished as a result of mistreating ancestor spirits, or, as her grieving mother insisted, by a curse placed upon her by a jealous neighbor.

He had a reputation as a consummately gentle man who avoided quarrels. When neighbors argued, they inevitably found themselves in Samuel Gathenji’s hut, seeking a peacemaker’s counsel. Still, he retained basic Kikuyu notions of child discipline and the importance of instilling obedience toward elders; he didn’t hesitate to raise the cane when young Charles came home muddy from fishing for tadpoles at the lake or had strayed beyond the compound into areas where so many hazards waited—colonial soldiers, settlers, feral animals, and Mau Maus, who were rumored to anoint children into their cadres by smearing castor oil on their faces.

Though he had no interest in politics, some fellow Kikuyus perceived Samuel Gathenji as an ally of the Crown, so deeply was Christianity associated with the establishment. The churches had helped to provide the Manichaean language of the struggle, after all. Through the detention camp’s loudspeakers, some missionaries railed against the evils of the rebellion, urging detainees to repent of their oaths and accept Christ’s salvation.

In young Charles Gathenji’s government-run elementary school, he and other children were tutored in the splendors of British civilization, made to memorize “God Save the Queen” and to recite the names of the royal family. They were taught the backwardness of Kikuyu traditions, from genital mutilation to the way one’s grandparents dressed. To Gathenji, the intended message was unambiguous: African ways are evil.

In the ongoing Mau Mau war, he was taught, virtue resided solely on the colonial side. In civics class, teachers posed the question “Who are the enemies of your country?” The boy dutifully recited the required answers: rebel leader Dedan Kimathi and Jomo Kenyatta, the alleged mastermind of the revolution. Kenyatta was feared by settlers across the continent, and described by one governor of Kenya as “an African leader to darkness and death.” In reality, he was a moderate with little sympathy for the Mau Maus. His imprisonment—on evidence now accepted as fabricated—did not have the intended effect of decapitating the movement. Instead, it transformed him into a living martyr and created a power vacuum into which militants swarmed.

The rebellion was crushed, but the nerve for continued occupation had raveled. In the summer of 1961, his cult having grown during his incarceration, Kenyatta was released. The man portrayed as the country’s greatest enemy would soon be its first president. Gathenji stood with the masses when he came to Kikuyuland to speak. Thickset, with his gray beard and resonant voice, Kenyatta was the most eloquent man the boy had ever heard. Speaking in English and Gikuyu, defying calls for vengeance against those who had taken the colonial side, Kenyatta talked rousingly of harambee—transcending ethnic divisions and coming together as members of a single, self-governing nation. He urged the Mau Maus to come out of the forests. It was time to prepare for independence.

The protected villages were dismantled. Samuel Gathenji bought a small plot of land and built a three-room timber-walled home. In their new village there were no guards, no colonial chiefs and subchiefs to answer to, no forced labor, no curfew, no one telling them how to build. The sense of perpetual menace was gone.

Gathenji was fourteen years old on the night in December 1963 when he stood outside Kikuyu Station, the local government headquarters, to watch the Union Jack lowered for the last time; in its place rose the red-and-green-and-black flag of independent Kenya. It was the thirty-fourth African country to achieve independence. The cheering was ecstatic. The tribal songs and dances lasted through the night, and the free food seemed limitless, no small thrill for a scrawny boy who got a single full meal of ugali, a cornmeal porridge, on good days. It was an unalloyed joy to be young in a country that now belonged to its people, with a hero at the helm. It was the last nationalist celebration in which he would be able to lose himself.

Despite his talk of harambee, Kenyatta’s policies would baldly favor his own ethnic base. On well-connected Kikuyus he would lavish prime land, jobs, generous funding, and contracts, with this explanation to those who remonstrated: “My people have the milk in the morning, your tribes the milk in the afternoon.” As for the years of civil bloodshed, they were to be consigned to the past, banished to the sinkhole of national memory: “Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” Yet memory abided, and unhealed traumas lived close to the surface. Former guerillas and former royalists were now living side by side.

Young Gathenji understood there was a price to pay for the perception that his father had been on the wrong side during the independence struggle; he sensed it was the reason behind his eviction from one of the best local schools. Other factors militated against the likelihood that he’d complete his education. For years, he’d been shuttling between schools, forced to leave when money ran out. At night, he studied by the dim light of a paraffin-filled tin can.

He had been nine when his mother died during labor, and he still felt her loss sharply. He remembered her beautiful hair, her impressive height, her Somali profile, and how lovingly she had prepared him and his siblings for school every morning. During canings, she had told him she was beating the sin out of him. As her body was lowered into the grave pit, he felt a strangling in his throat and a numbness in his body. He could neither move nor cry. Staring hard at the sky, he heard one of his sisters wailing. It was his first real experience of loss and helplessness—a feeling that returned a few years later, when his older brother, Henry, was killed crashing his motorcycle. This left Gathenji to shoulder the burdens of the eldest boy. There was always water to be fetched or other chores around the house.

His father remarried and picked up steady work for the government and kept his home immaculate. On weekends, Charles accompanied him on long walks to construction sites, carrying the woven basket that contained the screwdriver and hammer and saw, the red dust rising at their feet as his father sang hymns.

Gathenji began attending an integrated government-run high school in Nairobi. Nobody thought he would go very far. His father disliked the idea of his being alone in the city: There were too many temptations and bad influences for a boy. You’re wasting my money on that school, he told his son, urging him to drop out and train as a flight attendant. The son insisted on staying in school. In the capital, he’d found access to a good library, with shelves of American books. He absorbed tales of Abraham Lincoln and the war for the American West. He read Tom Sawyer and Gone with the Wind. He relished Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp novels about Perry Mason, the defense attorney who always managed to untangle the web of lies entrapping his clients, and to demonstrate—often by eliciting a courtroom confession—that the government’s version of reality was illusory.

IN JULY 1969, assassins gunned down a young cabinet minister named Tom Mboya on a Nairobi street. He was a prominent member of the Luo, a populous ethnic group whose rivalry with the Kikuyu dominated the country’s politics. Each group spoke a language incomprehensible to the other and looked askance at the other’s rituals (the Kikuyu practiced circumcision, for instance, and the Luo did not). Stereotypes fueled mutual contempt: The Kikuyu were thrusting, greedy, and eager to emulate the West; the Luo were backward and in thrall to atavistic tribal beliefs. The Luo masses, who nursed a sense of bitter exclusion as their rivals came to dominate politics, business, and the civil service, perceived the hand of the Kikuyu elite in the assassination. Street riots and mob skirmishes erupted, crowds hurled stones at Kenyatta’s motorcade, and there were reports that Kikuyus were being murdered.

Gathenji avoided the streets. As the sense of siege became widespread, and as Luo anger threatened to tilt upcoming elections, the Kikuyu resurrected a tactic from the years of insurrection: mass oathing ceremonies. Officially, nothing of the sort was taking place. When church leaders visited Kenyatta to express concern, he feigned ignorance.

But from cities and villages, on foot and by bus and hired truck, thousands made their way to secret ceremonies, some of them at Kenyatta’s own compound, where they affirmed their loyalty to the House of Mumbi—the Kikuyu people—and to Kenyatta himself. It was the year of the American moon landing, and the pilgrimage was called “going to the moon.”

Mercenary motives exacerbated the mania: Fees were demanded of the oath takers. To any number of teachers, government ministers, civil servants, professors, and other intellectuals, the ingestion of goat blood was a meaningless humiliation, the oath a coerced recitation of empty, superstitious words. As in the Mau Mau era, however, those who refused the oath—often on religious grounds—were considered dangerously unreliable, potential turncoats.

One day that September, Charles met his father during a lunch break in the capital’s Uhuru Park, where the elder Gathenji was building the framework for a series of ponds. “People are looking for me,” he told his son. The village headman and the regional parliamentarian had been organizing mass oathing trips; in some cases, gangs had been snatching people from their homes.

Samuel Gathenji, not content with quiet resistance, had been publicly denouncing the oath as divisive and un-Christian. When they found him—and sooner or later they would—they would give him a choice between the goat’s blood and death. “This is the time for shujaa,” he told his son. The word meant heroes in Swahili.

The younger Gathenji knew what could happen, but he respected his father’s position. There would have been no point in challenging him, even if such a thing had been conceivable, which it was not: He was an obedient Kikuyu son.

Now, both of them understood, it was only a question of when it would happen and who would do it. The elder Gathenji guessed Christian friends with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa would betray him to the oath men. Some had initially joined him in defiance, only to acquiesce to the oath after beatings and threats. Some were hiring out their trucks to carry people to the ceremonies.

Gathenji watched his father’s face. It had a faraway look. His father asked how he was doing in school. It was the kind of thing he never asked. Then he did something else that was out of character. He handed his son a few shillings to buy food, though he knew he would have been fed. Money had always been tight, and ordinarily he frowned on adults giving money to children, who were expected to spend it frivolously. But now he seemed to be reaching out. The abyss between them was imminent. The son sensed what was happening. He took the money, dread twisting in his stomach. For years, he’d comforted himself with the notion that God, having taken his mother and brother, would spare the rest of his family. His father, in particular, had seemed invulnerable. But now he told his roommate, “They will probably kill him.”

WHEN THE BUS from Nairobi dropped him off at Kikuyu Station, he rushed to the hospital on foot. The first thing to strike him, when he found the room where his father was being kept, was the smell of blood. Samuel Gathenji lay on his back, breathing with difficulty. He asked his son to turn him over and said, “You see what they’ve done to me.” His back had been skinned from the neck to the buttocks with a simi, a Kikuyu sword. During the accompanying beating, his internal organs had been crushed. He was barely alive, spasming when he tried to speak.

Gathenji read to him from Revelation, and they prayed. His father told him to take care of the family, to have courage, and to be careful whom he trusted. He said that he held no bitterness and that he forgave his attackers, and that he wished his son to do the same. Finally, he said, “I am cold.” The son covered him with a blanket and walked out of the hospital room. Within minutes, his father was dead.

Later, a photograph of his father’s hacked body—taken by a journalist who had found his way into the hospital room—was slipped to Gathenji. He would keep it in a file, along with newspaper clippings about the killing and accounts he’d taken from a handful of local women who had been snatched with his father that night. He’d tracked the women down and given assurance that he would not expose them: He just needed to know what had happened. From them, and from the account of his stepmother and younger brother Edwin, who had been at the house during the abduction, he pieced together the details.

He learned that about ten young men had converged on the house, and that some had worn the red shirts of the youth wing of the ruling party. Some were members of the campaign team of the local parliamentarian, Joseph Gatuguta, a longtime Kenyatta confidant who owed his power to the president. Some were unemployed young men to whom Samuel Gathenji had thrown construction jobs. Some were true believers, whipped into a frenzy by calls for tribal solidarity. Some just viewed the snatching as another job; incredibly, they would return to the Gathenji house afterward, having helped to kill their benefactor, looking for more construction work.

Gathenji was given further details: that his father had been packed into the back of a covered Peugeot pickup for a drive into the countryside to the oathing center. That he’d preached to the women who accompanied him in the truck. That they’d been singing. And that the attackers had had to force open his mouth to pour the goat blood down his throat.

THE STORY WAS carried in Target, a newspaper published by the National Council of Churches of Kenya. The accompanying photographs included one of the pastor’s coffin as it was being carried to its grave, and a portrait of his bespectacled twenty-year-old son, Charles, his features rigid with fear and the weight of his new knowledge. Christian leaders mounted protests and visited Kenyatta, urging him to stop the oathing campaign. It ceased shortly afterward. The president had reportedly been unhappy with the evangelist’s slaying. It hadn’t been meant to happen, Gathenji thought. It had probably been intended as a beating—they’d inflict pain until he relented. They had misjudged their victim’s nature.

Gathenji expected the Presbyterian Church of East Africa would honor his father with a memorial. Instead, local church leaders balked at the perceived danger; Kenyatta’s security men were shadowing the family. Gathenji borrowed money for a tombstone. At the funeral, he found himself studying the faces of the mourners, wondering who had betrayed his father to the oath men. With his mother dead, his brother Henry dead, his father dead, and whatever trust he had in friends now an impossibility, he felt a deep and ineradicable sense of isolation.

He was not surprised that no inquest was conducted and no one was prosecuted. Everyone wanted the case forgotten. To dig too deeply into it would have implicated the nation’s legendary founder and the men he kept closest.

Though he prayed for the strength to forgive, he wasn’t sure he was capable of it. He was not his father, and the killers weren’t coming forward to ask his forgiveness, in any case.

Replaying their last exchange, he came to think that his father had been trying to warn him away from the quicksand of bitterness. Telling him to find a way to move on, because there was no way to right this particular evil. Telling him not to let it become a devouring obsession. Telling him not to waste his life.

No, he thought, he couldn’t forgive, but he couldn’t realistically expect justice, either. He would have to accept that the situation was hopeless and make peace with it.

With help from his extended family he transferred to a government-run boarding school near Mount Kenya. He felt safer there; he wouldn’t leave the compound for the whole term.

People still doubted he’d go far, as his education had been so erratic. No one in his immediate family had attended college. But the need to finish school had never felt more urgent. Quietly, he’d taken an oath of his own. Later, asked to explain his decision to pursue the law, he would never hesitate to point to his father’s murder and the subsequent inability to bring anyone to book. Along with a deep wariness, he had developed a preoccupation with justice. He thought that the law, properly wielded, might be a searchlight, an antidote to historical amnesia, a counterweight to arbitrary state power and the madness of the mob. For all the ways it could be corrupted, the law lived on the ideals of order and reason and discipline; these would be his plank against the undertow of despair. “I want to be rational,” he would say with characteristic terseness, trying to explain himself years later. “I think law assisted me.”

Government scholarships paid his way through three years at the University of Dar es Salaam, across the border in Tanzania, then in the throes of socialist fervor. It was a scorching, mosquito-infested place, where, between law classes, he endured malaria and ideological instruction in the wisdom of Lenin and Mao. At times, he had an exhilarating sense of a broader philosophical world than his British-based schooling had exposed him to, though he regarded revolutionary ideology, like alcohol, as being best consumed in measured doses. His classmates nicknamed him the “Chief Justice,” or “CJ,” a nod to the air of gravity and conservatism with which he carried himself. After another year at the Kenya School of Law, where he was apprenticed to a criminal defense lawyer, he joined the attorney general’s office as a prosecutor in 1975. It was a small office, and experience came fast.

The Kenyan courts were independent from the Crown but retained the trappings of Mother England. Lawyers appeared in black robes, and judges, called “Lords,” most of them still English, wore powdered wigs. In one of his first High Court cases, he prosecuted a farmhand who had strangled a baby. He went at it with vigor, arguing that the man should be hanged. His anger and disgust were so obvious that the judge cautioned him to moderate his tone. A finding of insanity won the defendant a reprieve. Such outcomes rankled the zealous young prosecutor. So much seemed to ride on each case; he internalized the defeats. It was not long before he understood the importance of a more clinical approach. He would be seeing death every day, after all. Domestic homicides, bar-brawl homicides, slum homicides; greed-motivated murder, lust murder, stupid, logic-defying murder; bludgeonings, stabbings, shootings.

During those years, Gathenji haunted the Nairobi Law Courts. One of the fixtures there was Joseph Gatuguta, who had been a member of parliament at the time of Samuel Gathenji’s death and was widely believed to have organized the oathing in the Kikuyu region. He had been voted out of office and was now a lawyer in private practice. Gathenji encountered him constantly in courtrooms and in corridors. It was unavoidable. Sometimes they’d be on opposite sides of the same case. Their exchanges were formal and tight. Gathenji had determined to bite back his bitterness and anger, knowing they might consume him. There was nothing to be gained by a confrontation. He was young and relatively powerless, recently married, with two young sons, plus five siblings who depended on him. He was just beginning to build a career and establish a foothold in the country’s growing middle class. Gatuguta’s manner seemed to suggest that he was punishing himself. In Gathenji’s presence, he looked like a man in torment. Gatuguta knew who the young lawyer was, of course. As if to confirm their connection, he would address him as “Kijana wa Gathenji.” Son of Gathenji.

THIS WAS STILL Kenyatta’s country, a prosperous and relatively stable land whose capital, with its bright bougainvillea-lined corridors, was known as the “City in the Sun.” The president had embraced capitalism-friendly policies and had enlisted the skills of Europeans and urged them to stay. For all that, his one-party state adumbrated horrors to come, from corruption to ethnic chauvinism to the assassination of political rivals. The so-called Kenyatta royal family grew wealthy smuggling coffee, jewels, and poached ivory (even as hunters eviscerated the nation’s elephant population). The ruling family was untouchable, a fact Father John Kaiser witnessed firsthand one day when he came across a group of elephant poachers on the savanna and asked a game ranger if he planned to take action. The ranger explained that they were connected to mzee Kenyatta: certain people he could not arrest.

THE MAN KENYATTA appointed vice president in 1967, Daniel arap Moi, belonged to the small, pastoralist Kalenjin from the far hills of the Rift Valley, and was thus deemed peripheral to the Kikuyu-Luo rivalry. He was lanky and gravelly-voiced, a former herder and schoolteacher, a stolid, awkward teetotaler with a reputation for servility. He seemed little threat to the interests of the Kikuyu elite, who derided him as “the passing cloud,” a marionette who could be counted on to serve their interests and then discarded. This was a miscalculation in the extreme. He assumed power on Kenyatta’s death, in August 1978, outmaneuvering Kikuyu plots to thwart his ascent.

Moi made it a point to advertise his Sunday attendance at religious services. For a time, the country’s churches embraced this pious mask at face value. “Indeed, we regarded him as a great Christian prince, ‘Our Beloved President,’” John Kaiser would write in a memoir years later.

Moi liked to call himself the “Professor of Politics” and identified his philosophy as “Nyayo,” or footsteps—suggesting he was following the path blazed by Kenyatta. Yet he lacked much of what had made Kenyatta effective: personal charisma and oratorical flourish, the mythic gravitas of an independence hero who’d endured exile and a nine-year prison term. Nor did he have the luck, as Kenyatta had had, of a good economy to help obscure his greed.

Crucially, Moi also lacked the backing of a powerful ethnic group. He would embody, and skillfully exploit, free-floating anxieties about the dominance of the populous, advanced, urbanized Kikuyu, anxieties that had been amplified by their rush into the Rift Valley under Kenyatta. Moi rewarded fellow Kalenjins with top posts in his cabinet, the military, the banks, and the civil service, while publicly condemning tribalism as the “cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation.” Despite his rhetoric of a unified Kenya, division was the spine of Moi’s rule. The Kikuyu and the Luo together comprised more than a third of the nation’s population; their numbers would overwhelm him should they ever unite in opposition. A fractious and tribally minded country was one he could rule indefinitely.

GATHENJI ENTERED PRIVATE practice in 1980. On his wall hung a photograph of Moi standing with Kenyatta. He represented clients who had been swept up in government raids in the northeast province bordering Somalia, which was under emergency rule amid threats of succession and widespread violence from militias and bandits, called shifta. Suspects were hauled in on gun-running charges on flimsy evidence. Residents were required to be in their homes between the curfew hours of 6:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M.; someone caught outdoors fifteen minutes later would be charged. Gathenji argued for a broad interpretation of the definition of home: If you lived in a hut or a tent and stepped into the bush to relieve yourself, you were still on home ground. Few lawyers took these cases. He risked the perception that he was collaborating with the government’s enemies.

The unhappiness with Moi already ran deep, and talk of coups was everywhere. Gathenji was not entirely surprised when, one morning in August 1982, he turned on the radio and heard that the government had been overthrown. He was living with his wife and two young sons in a Nairobi suburb. Disgruntled junior officers of the Kenya Air Force—mostly Luos—had seized the airports, the post office, and the Voice of Kenya radio station. The country’s new masters announced that existing codes of law had been suspended, effective immediately. Gathenji said to his wife, “Did you hear what happened? I no longer have a job.” It was impossible to gauge the seriousness of the danger. The continent had become an ever-changing map of violent and quickly deposed strongmen.

In the pandemonium, rioters looted Nairobi, inflicting a disproportionate toll on businesses and homes owned by Asians, who occupied the merchant class and were widely resented as outsiders. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Asian girls were raped. Moi’s loyalists swarmed the city, fanned across the rooftops, and gunned down suspected insurgents and looters. The coup was crushed, and Moi was restored to power almost immediately.

Gathenji drove into town days later to inspect his office. He’d heard a rumor that the capital was safe, but it took only a cursory glance to sense it had been a false one. Bodies were still slumped inside bullet-riddled cars along the road. Televisions were lined up on the sidewalks, and broken glass glinted on the pavement. Every rooftop seemed to bristle with rifles. Soldiers were jittery. They ordered Gathenji to step out of his car and place his hands above his head and his ID card in his mouth. One soldier insisted that Gathenji had stolen his car, and he demanded that he prove otherwise by furnishing registration papers. Gathenji didn’t have the papers on him. For a moment, he thought, This is where I am shot. On Uhuru Highway, heading back home, he drove frighteningly close to a camouflaged tank, planted in the road, before he realized what it was. He turned the wheel hard and found another way home.

Soon after the abortive takeover, when the courthouses reopened, Gathenji arrived in court and found the dock crowded with defendants, some of them wildlife rangers and civil service workers, who had been charged with celebrating the coup. He watched a few plead guilty and receive jail sentences; in an atmosphere still so highly charged, no judge would leave them unpunished. Gathenji gave the others some advice: Enter not-guilty pleas and wait until the temperature abates. It proved a solid hunch: The cases were soon dismissed. The president wanted to discourage the impression, it appeared, that any of his subjects had reason to celebrate his ouster.

Meanwhile, in Kisiiland, an obscure middle-aged missionary named John Kaiser was trying to assess the country’s trajectory. “The coup attempt was a terrible shock to our Asian community & many of them are leaving the country,” Kaiser wrote in a letter to Minnesota. “The result will be great harm to the economy of Kenya but you sure couldn’t tell the average African that. On the day of the coup attempt I knew all policemen, G. wardens, etc would be in their barracks and huddled around radios so I took the opportunity to picky picky into Masailand a few miles and harvest a nice fat young w. hog.” His humor veered into a rare, dark register. “We had to do without such delicacies for many months due to the pressure of the special anti-poaching unit in the Kilgoris area, so we were grateful to the coup leaders & look forward to many more.” By the end of the month, Kaiser was sensing the atmosphere had changed permanently. “Things are quiet,” he wrote, but added, “I’m afraid the country won’t have the same easy peaceful aspect from now on.”

5
THE DICTATOR

IT WAS A prescient assessment. The violence, and the fears it unleashed, proved useful to Moi, who justified his tightening grip as a safeguard against further anarchy. Paranoia became entrenched as national policy. Because it was dependent on Western aid and tourism, Kenya required the barest simulacrum of democracy and the rule of law. This did not prevent him from outlawing opposition parties and expanding the secret police. He eviscerated judicial independence at a stroke, pushing through the parliament a law giving him the power to sack any judge at his whim. The entire justice system fell into his grip; no one would be prosecuted, or spared prosecution, if he decreed otherwise. The courts, stacked thick with his stooges, were spiraling into a morass of corruption so universal that there was little effort to hide it. Three out of four judges, by Gathenji’s estimate, expected bribes; clients expected to buy their way out of trouble. More than once, he found himself preparing a case meticulously, building it airtight, only to lose on the flimsiest pretext. Everyone knew: Somewhere, money had changed hands.

To Gathenji, a portal into Moi’s nature—a suggestion of his tactics and how he would employ them—came in 1983 when he destroyed his ambitious attorney general, Charles Njonjo. Moi accused him of being a traitor in thrall to a treacherous foreign power attempting to overthrow the government of Kenya, stripped him of his power, and consigned him to political limbo. He was allowed to live, technically a free man, but as a nonentity. It was a lesson to potential rivals not to climb too high.

Gathenji could sense the president losing his mind. He watched as Moi systematically purged Kikuyus from positions of power. Journalists who asked questions found themselves in lockup. In one case that particularly infuriated Gathenji, he represented a woman who had been charged with possessing Beyond, an Anglican church magazine banned for its critical remarks about the regime. It had been found in her coffee table, and she was taken into custody with her newborn baby in her arms. He argued she hadn’t known the magazine was there; people were known to work out grudges by planting a banned publication on an enemy’s premises. The case was dismissed. Police had lost their interest in it anyway; it had been enough to scare the woman. That was the dynamic of dictatorship. To create an all-encompassing chill, you needed to lock up only a few.

“Foreign devils” and Marxists, said to be plotting constantly against the nation, became the convenient pretext Moi trundled out to crush enemies. “Bearded people”—intellectuals—were deemed suspect in their loyalties. Members of Amnesty International became “agents of imperialists” after they criticized his human rights record. He employed a colonial law called the Public Order Act, which forbade nine or more Kenyans from assembling without a government permit. As his search for enemies intensified, Moi dispatched people to “water rooms” under a Nairobi high rise called Nyayo House, where they were forced to stand in excrement-filled water for days. Moi expanded police detention powers so that those accused of capital crimes, such as sedition, could be held for two weeks without a hearing, ample time for torture squads to extract confessions. Scores of such prisoners were hauled before judges who accepted their guilty pleas and handed out four- or five-year sentences.

Moi carried a silver-inlaid ivory mace and wore a rosebud in the lapel of his Saville Row suits. With his claim on legitimate authority so flimsy, he mastered the tactics of large-scale bribery and intimidation. He made a practice of wholesale land stealing, using vast tracts of seized public land as payment to ministers and military officers; this was meant as a hedge against another attempted coup. He handed out stacks of cash to State House visitors and to the masses he met across the country during rounds in his blue open-topped Mercedes.

“I would like ministers, assistant ministers, and others to sing like a parrot after me,” Moi said. “That is how we can progress.” His subordinates vied to outdo one another in cringing sycophancy, their speeches hailing his mastery of foreign and domestic affairs, his deep compassion—yes, one declared, even the fish of the sea bowed before the Father of the Country. Parliament passed a law declaring that only Moi could possess the title of president, in any realm. Ordinary souls who ran charities and businesses would have to content themselves with the title of chairman. To his worshipers, he was “the Giraffe,” an admiring nod both to his height and farsightedness, or “the Glorious.”

“Kenya is a one-man state, and that man is the president,” Smith Hempstone, the former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, wrote in his memoir, Rogue Ambassador.

Paranoid Moi was, but also skilled at shuffling and reshuffling his underlings to keep them forever off balance. “You know, a balloon is a very small thing. But I can pump it up to such an extent that it will be big and look very important,” he said. “All you need to make it small again is to prick it with a needle.” Under his command were more than one hundred state-owned companies, or parastatals, that did business only with “patriotic” firms; the slightest dissent meant one’s contracts evaporated. The British system of pith-helmeted chiefs was gone, supplanted by a vast network of chiefs and subchiefs that provided Moi with intelligence and control all the way to the village level.

The Soviet foothold in Angola and Ethiopia seemed, to American eyes, a harbinger of continental Communist designs, and Moi reaped massive U.S. aid by positioning his country as “a pro-Western, free-market island of stability in the midst of a roiling sea of Marxist chaos,” Hempstone would write. “Moi’s one-party kleptocracy might not be a particularly pretty boat, but it was not to be rocked.”

Here and there, Kenyan clergymen raised their voices, with harsh results. After a Presbyterian minister named Timothy Njoya called for “dissidents, malcontents, critics, fugitives and anyone with a grievance” to speak out, Moi swiftly summoned Protestant and Catholic leaders to State House to warn against such “subversive” sermons. Njoya was defrocked but won back his position. During marches for constitutional reform, he endured bayonet-wielding soldiers, beatings, tear gas, and jail. Once, attackers doused his parish house with gasoline and set it ablaze. He seemed to feel that it would have been worse if the president had not been a churchgoing man. “Moi’s Christianity is our protection,” he said. “That’s our secret as pastors in Kenya.”

Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi became one of Africa’s longest-reigning dictators. Photograph by Francine Orr. Copyright 2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

Under Moi, brutality walked hand in hand with farce. When Ngugi wa Thiong’o published the novel Matigari in 1986, Moi ordered the arrest of its fictional hero after receiving reports that “peasants in Central Kenya were talking about a man called Matigari who was going round the country demanding truth and justice,” Ngugi would write. The dictator was forced to settle for confiscating the books.

After the National Council of Churches, a mainstream Protestant body, objected to the abolition of secret balloting, Moi accused an Oregon-based missionary group, which had been digging water wells in northwestern Kenya, of plotting against the government. Police confiscated pellet guns the missionaries used to fend off snakes, a cache of uniforms sewn for local students, and shortwave radios used to communicate in a remote region without telephone service. These, by the state’s account, were armaments, military uniforms, and sophisticated communications equipment, all intended to “cause chaos,” Moi said, adding this complaint: “Why don’t they use their resources to build churches and bring in related things—like Bibles?” He later deported seven American missionaries accused of “sabotage and destabilization.” The evidence: a sloppily fabricated letter revealing their scheme to overthrow his government in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan.

Once, during a spat with Hempstone, Moi sent police to seize a package of school textbooks—they included Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—that the U.S. ambassador had donated to a poor rural school. Moi’s men denounced the books as “sinister” and said they were designed to “pollute the minds of peace-loving wanachi [masses].”

The president’s dour countenance glared from the walls of every shop on every block; his name was plastered on uncountable roads and bridges, stadiums, and schools. He put his profile on coins and a full-frontal close-up on bills. His prosaic daily pronouncements inaugurated the evening news on state-run television: “His Excellency the President Daniel arap Moi proclaimed …” He invented Moi Day, a holiday on which his people could express gratitude for his leadership. To celebrate his first decade in power, he commissioned an Italian marble statue in downtown Nairobi’s Uhuru Park that depicted his enormous hand, clenched around his ivory mace, rising triumphantly out of Mount Kenya toward the sky. (Considering the mountain was both the nation’s namesake and the Kikuyus’ most sacred site, no less than the dwelling place of God, the monument carried a certain nasty symbolism.)

By the late 1980s, criticism was growing louder, even from within the superpower that was sponsoring him. Edward Kennedy publicly urged Moi to “pull back from the darkness of torture and repression and return to the bright sunlight of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law.”

Faced with such talk, Moi had a typical response: Look at my neighbors. His record, he pointed out again and again, was much better than that of Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda. Why should Kenyans expect democracy? he asked, invoking the West’s tormented history of race relations. The country had only gained independence in 1963. After breaking from the Crown, he argued, it had taken the United States two hundred years to achieve democracy.

Moi avoided interviews and wrapped himself in enigmatic silence. His authorized biography portrays him as a man who loved his Bible and simple country living, a ruler whose one-party state represented a bulwark against civil war in a cobbled-together nation of forty-two tribes and thirteen languages.

A more plausible glimpse of his psyche can be found in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Wizard of the Crow, which proceeds from the moral premise that only fantasy can capture the absurd nightmare that is existence under a Moi-like dictatorship. It describes a megalomaniacal ruler who has been “on the throne so long that even he could not remember when his reign began,” and who yearns to erect a tower that stretches to heaven, the better to call on God. At the core of this personality is a corrosive, all-consuming anger, an “insatiable desire for humiliating the already fallen.” Having cringed beneath endless abuse during his rise to power, he now demands endless groveling from others. He foments pandemonium and then postures as “a Solomonic prince of peace.”

JOHN KAISER WAS beginning to glimpe the scope of Moi’s cruelty as early as 1986 and 1987. He was living in Nyangusu, on the border between the dense farming area of the Kisii and the sparsely populated vastness of Masailand. For years, he’d watched the groups skirmish over cattle and boundary lines, staging elaborate—and mostly harmless—face-offs that Kaiser viewed “more as recreation than a serious war.” He’d watched as combatants assembled on either side of the mission football field, hurled menacing insults at one another through the night, and unleashed high arrow volleys that rarely proved fatal. If killing had truly been the aim, Kaiser reasoned, they would have charged with their spears.

But what he witnessed now, in the mid-1980s, had a different feel entirely. Thousands of Kisii peasant farmers were streaming through the countryside with their belongings. Political bosses had ferried in gangs of Masai warriors to burn their homes and destroy their schools. Informants told Kaiser the attackers belonged to the private mercenary army of William ole Ntimama, then the regime’s most powerful Masai. Investigating the refugees’ claims, Kaiser witnessed government paramilitaries and police evicting farmers from their land en masse as the police stood by passively, intervening only when the Kisii fought back.

In early 1988, Kaiser took the news to his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, an aging Kenyan whom he regarded as a spiritual father. Mugendi had assumed the violence reflected “the usual fights over cattle rustling” and dismissed the possibility of government involvement: “Impossible!” That would mean the sanction of Moi, and Moi was the country’s benevolent father.

Little would be written about the mid-1980s clashes, and Kaiser would later castigate himself for his passivity. Concerning the violence, he believed himself “the best informed Christian” and “the best placed to take effective action.” He shared his findings with superiors, as well as with the Church’s Justice and Peace branch, but regretted that he didn’t go further. He could have contacted Western embassies, human-rights groups, or Bishop Raphael Ndingi of Nakuru, Kenya’s most outspoken Catholic human rights champion. “But I did none of these things. Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands on the grounds that I had plenty of other work in a busy parish,” Kaiser would write. “In so doing I stored up more fuel for a long hot purgatory.”

Through the 1980s, his life remained a largely anonymous one of baptisms and herculean building projects, of confessions and sick calls, of rugged trips on his Honda motorcycle down crenellated laterite roads, across mapless valleys and hills. Fever and malaria, dysentery and pneumonia and rabies sent him again and again bearing bodies to ancestral burial plots deep in the bush, praying people into the earth as the clustered women sent up their stylized wailing and the men stood around the grave with spears and pangas, their faces blank and hard. He built tractors and oxcarts, planted crops, demonstrated Western methods of fertilizing. He bought second- and thirdhand trucks, not just to save money but because buying new ones would have enriched government men. He made a wooden wheelchair for a crippled boy and bought the family a donkey to pull it. He took confession in the shade of eucalyptus trees and threw up churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand. He earned a nickname, “Kifaru wa Maskini”: Rhino for the Poor.

As often as possible, he vanished into the bush and returned with meat to distribute. The landscape of his missives teemed with animal carcasses, and he took a raconteur’s pleasure in recounting close calls. One day near dark, walking along the edge of the woods, he heard “the grumbling of what I was sure were giant forest hogs in the bush,” he wrote in one letter. “I loaded up with 00 Buckshot, put some dirt on my face (something it’s not used to) & slipped into the bush as quietly as Hiawatha. I could hear the ‘pigs’ clearly & thought I would easily get one. But as I got deeper in the bush & closer to the grunting I detected a peculiar tone to their symphony & started getting apprehensive. When the grunting became growling the dirt on my face was being washed away by the sweat. I had come right into a pride of lions, at least 9 of them. One huge male stepped out from behind a bush about 15 yards away; he was very angry & nervous & his tail was whipping back & forth; by this time I was backing up full speed in reverse & they were all gentlemen enough to let me pass unmolested.”

At one point Minnesota friends supplied him with jacketed bullets, a tin of rifle powder, and an H & R single-shot .30-30 rifle with a mounted Redfield scope. This allowed him to strike an animal from eighty yards. Now, entering the bush, he carried this “lovely little gun” slung on his back, along with his twelve-gauge double-bore shotgun with double-ought buckshot in his hands “in case of something unexpected like a lion or bad buffalo.” Once, he tallied up a year’s worth of rifle kills:

“12 impala—about 150 pounds….

9 topi—350 lbs & over

8 oribi—40–50 lbs

6 grey duikers—30–40 lbs

2 Reedbucks—100 lbs

2 warthogs—120 lbs

1 waterbuck—300 lbs

That is 40 animals in a bit over a year which is not bad—about 3,560 pounds of meat after butchering.”

Another letter from the mid-1980s described the abiding exhilaration of missionary work. “I have just come back from a sick-call which I was lucky to sneak in just before dark & not get rained on,” he wrote. “The sick-call was for a young girl who is dying apparently having returned from hospital where the doctors have given her up. She is a very beautiful girl of 18 who received the Sacraments most beautifully and serenely. At such times I would not trade being a priest for any position.”

THEN THE SOVIET empire collapsed, and with it the West’s justification for reflexive support for Moi. In May 1990, soon after his arrival, Hempstone, the improbable U.S. ambassador—a blunt-spoken former editor of the conservative Washington Times who’d parlayed connections in the Bush administration into a diplomatic post—galvanized a weak and demoralized Kenyan opposition with a speech at the Rotary Club of Nairobi. From now on, he said, the United States would steer money to nations that “nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights, and practice multiparty politics.” The regime’s mouthpiece, the Kenya Times, answered his challenge with headlines like this: SHUT UP, MR. AMBASSADOR.

Dissidents took courage, even as the regime characterized the call for democratic pluralism as the latest thrust of white domination. The year was full of grim and portentous spectacles, including the murder of Robert Ouko, the country’s urbane foreign minister, who had been compiling documents on high-level corruption. He was discovered on a hill, shot twice through the head, his body charred, a .38 revolver lying nearby. Suicide, announced police. The president promised that “no stone would be left unturned” in finding answers. To demonstrate his commitment to the truth, he called in New Scotland Yard, which took four hundred depositions over four months and discovered that Ouko had been at odds with Nicholas Biwott, Moi’s widely feared right-hand man. The investigation also pointed to Hezekiah Oyugi, the secretary of internal security.

The head New Scotland Yard detective, John Troon, complained that he was not allowed to interview either of these two key suspects, who were briefly arrested and released for “lack of evidence.” Moi closed the investigation and refused to accept New Scotland Yard’s report unless Troon delivered it personally (a condition tough to meet, since Troon had already left the country). Moi appointed a commission of inquiry to take testimony, then dissolved it before it reached conclusions, sending the case back into the hands of the Kenyan police. By such methods, Moi could drag out an investigation forever. This would prove one of his signature moves. Memories would fade, and witnesses would vanish (within a few years after the killing, eleven people connected to the case, including Oyugi, would perish, some under strange circumstances).

The Ouko case would be etched in the national psyche as an illustration both of Moi’s ruthlessness and his wiliness. The U.S. ambassador, for his part, had no clear evidence of who had killed Ouko, or why, but “what did appear obvious was that the murderer was too highly placed and powerful to be apprehended,” Hempstone wrote.

It was a season of smoke and truncheons and proliferating dissent. Activists and lawyers launched a group called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD). Moi rounded up dozens of opposition figures; police fired on protesters and raided an Anglican cathedral where they sought sanctuary. The country’s seventeen Roman Catholic bishops—representing Kenya’s largest Christian group—issued a pastoral letter denouncing the ruling party’s “unlimited authority,” and complained that “the least sign of dissent” was deemed subversion. Mild as this seemed, it represented relatively bold language for the cautious bishops. In late summer, a milk truck plowed into a car carrying an Anglican bishop named Alexander Muge, who had denounced corruption and land grabbing by unnamed regime potentates; a parliamentary commission ruled it “death by misadventure,” a verdict tough for many Kenyans to embrace. Moi’s labor minister had recently warned that Muge would “see fire and may not leave alive” if he strayed into his district.

Though Kenya remained the largest recipient of U.S. assistance in sub-Saharan Africa—it had received $35 million the year before in economic aid and another $11 million in military aid—American congressional leaders now urged a freeze. With the Marxist menace dead, Moi’s carte blanche had been yanked.

One day, the phone rang on Charles Mbuthi Gathenji’s desk. The man on the other end was a reporter for the state-run television station. He wanted to know the lawyer’s views on a recent controversy: The new chairman of the Kenyan Law Society, Paul Muite, was using his platform to denounce the president and call for reforms. Pro-government lawyers, for their part, had decried such “meddling” in politics.

Where did Mr. Gathenji stand?

He saw nothing wrong with Muite’s remarks, he said; they reflected the sentiments of a good portion of Kenya’s legal community, and nobody called it political meddling when lawyers praised Moi.

Gathenji hung up. Soon, he learned that his statement had made the nightly news. He realized that he’d been incautious. He knew this even before the letter came in the mail demanding payment for back taxes he supposedly owed, equivalent to more than six thousand U.S. dollars. He had ten days to pay, or his home would be seized. He knew other lawyers were getting similar letters. He called his accountant. Numbers were examined. He did owe money—about a fourth of the figure claimed. He paid up. He didn’t want to give the government any excuse to harass him.

Now he understood the reason for the reporter’s call. As dissent grew bolder, Moi wanted to know who was on his side.

MEANWHILE, IN KISIILAND, Kaiser, already in his late fifties, was feeling the effects of age. He described himself as “the chap who never got malaria for 20 years”—he’d been able to banish the early symptoms with a course of chloroquine—but in early 1990 the disease sent him to the hospital for a five-day course of quinine, incapacitated him completely for three days afterward, and stripped twenty pounds from his frame. “Malaria is no longer a minor nuisance & from now on wherever I go the net goes along,” he wrote. Soon he was racing around on his Honda motorbike—a piki-piki in Swahili—joking, “I use a motorcycle every day but at a sedate & dignified pace such as befits my age & position.” There had been some bad spills in recent years. Once, as he rode after dark, the blinding light from an oncoming bus sent him off the tarmac, and a sharp edge of asphalt opened a big gash in his shin. Another time, doing forty as he headed down a narrow gravel road to a sick call, he swerved to avoid a cow, breaking his collarbone and two ribs. Alone on the empty country road, he’d been forced to pull himself to his feet and find his way to the hospital without fainting from the pain.

The culture of corruption was making itself felt at every level. To repair his motorcycle meant paying a 200 percent bribe for the spare parts. The corrosion of the rule of law was increasingly painful and personal. That March, he learned that a friend named James Ongera had been working on his farm when three agents of the General Services Unit attacked him, for reasons that were unclear. His spine was broken, and his body was dragged to the Masai border and mutilated, apparently to convince the Kisii that the Masai had been responsible. The family brought suit against the three agents; the courts threw it out.

“There are almost daily murders in the Nyangusu area and the real culprits are the various government officials who use the army and police to drive out settlers in Masailand so that the land can then be grabbed and sold for huge profits,” Kaiser wrote in the summer of 1991. He added that his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, now in his early seventies, “looks old & worn out and I suppose it is no wonder considering the chaos of his ministry.” Kaiser’s own energy was ebbing. Even a proud man had to concede the toll. A year would pass without a hunting excursion, apparently a record hiatus. “I have quite a bit of building to do in finishing up the convent & it poops me out in a hurry; in a few years I’ll have to find a rocking chair,” he wrote. Reminders of his mortality sometimes seemed to ambush him. Looking at himself, he glimpsed a reflection of his father, Arnold, who had died five years back. “I got a haircut a week ago & the guy had a mirror in front & another one in back & so I could see him trimming the back of my neck & I said, ‘Hey, that’s not John that’s Arnold Kaiser.’ Look at that grey hair & the wrinkles in the neck; it was a shock.”

An avid newspaper reader and BBC listener, he was closely following the unfolding political drama. International donors kept turning the screws on Moi’s increasingly desperate and beleaguered regime. The United States slashed nearly a quarter of its assistance, including fifteen million dollars in military help. In November 1991, an array of Western benefactors voted to suspend World Bank aid until Moi embraced democracy and curbed corruption.

Considering foreign aid comprised 30 percent of the national budget, this was no small blow. Days later, Moi hastily assembled party delegates at a Nairobi sports stadium and stunned them with an announcement. He would rescind Section 2A of the constitution, which had made Kenya a de jure one-party state nine years earlier.

He made it clear that the West was forcing his hand. “Tribal roots go much deeper than the shallow flower of democracy,” he would say. “That is something the West failed to understand. I’m not against multipartyism but I am unsure about the maturity of the country’s politics.”

What followed fulfilled his warning—or, as many understood it, his threat—that in an ethnically fractured nation, democracy would lead to bloodshed.

Facing ruin, he sought insurance in the usual playbook: the exacerbation of ethnic antipathies. To ensure party supremacy, militias descended on opposition strongholds, purging rival voters from areas where they were registered.

Village after village erupted in flames; within several years, more than 1,000 people would be killed and 300,000 displaced. Moi banned public rallies and sent helmeted agents plowing into defiant crowds on horseback and on foot, firing tear gas, swinging truncheons and pickax handles. By early 1992, even Kenya’s cautious Catholic bishops were uniting to accuse the government of complicity in the brutality. Regime hard-liners publicly urged the eviction of groups that had settled in the Rift Valley after independence. The Kikuyus were “foreigners” there, and the land they’d occupied for decades constituted madoadoa, or “black spots,” on the map: they needed to be erased.

6
THE CLASHES

AS VIOLENCE ROILED the countryside through the early 1990s, and as reports of the bloodletting reached Kaiser’s parish in increasing numbers, his rift with his elderly bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, grew wider. The two had been close; Kaiser regarded him as a “Spiritual Father.” Mugendi’s autocratic streak was deep: He bristled when subordinates challenged him. He would travel to the various parishes of his diocese to interrogate young catechists on matters of doctrine. They were to recite correct answers about the mysteries of the Host and the rosary; a sloppy answer might provoke a slap.

At one church meeting, Tom Keane, an Irish priest from the Mill Hill order, suggested this approach showed a lack of faith in the priests’ ability to teach the children. Other priests echoed the sentiment. Days later, Mugendi summoned Keane to his house, accused him of leading a rebellion against him, and ordered him out of his diocese immediately. Mugendi’s back was turned as he spoke, and Keane would remember, years later, the sight of the veins bulging on the enraged bishop’s neck.

Keane grasped the subtext: To criticize your bishop in public was to cause him to lose face. It was a display of Western effrontery. It was not to be done.

Kaiser, for his part, never absorbed the lesson. He criticized not only the bishop’s method of grilling confirmation candidates, but of promulgating doctrines, such as a three-part liturgy, that preceded Vatican II reforms. Kaiser also attacked the bishop’s judgment in appointing a headmistress to the local girls school whom Kaiser considered dishonest. As was his habit, he carefully and bluntly enumerated his reasons in a letter, with numbered points and subpoints. The headmistress was often absent from the school, he explained, had collected money without reporting it, and lingered provocatively around married men. “Let me ask you in all respect, my Father-in-Christ,” Kaiser wrote. “What qualities did you see in this woman or in her past record that you would recommend her as the H/M of a Christian School?”

John Kaiser’s passport photo. One of the few American members of the London-based Mill Hill Missionaries society, he inveighed against what he saw as his order’s feckless response to state violence in Kenya. He would be past middle age himself by the time he began waging a public campaign against the Moi regime. Photograph courtesy of Francis Kaiser.

The dispute with his bishop ran deeper still. With villages erupting in a pandemonium of flame, arrows, and machetes, Kaiser questioned Mugendi’s refusal to take a forceful stand against what seemed clearer by the day: that the regime was exciting the Masai and Kisii to war. It was Kaiser’s insistence on doing so in public, before other churchmen—including young African priests—that Mugendi found intolerable. The American priest was breaching the deep-dyed cultural prohibition: An African bishop, like a president, was a paternal personage not to be challenged. “Here in Africa you never discuss the Father, much less criticize him in public,” Kaiser wrote.

Other priests warned Kaiser that his style was too confrontational. Ignoring pleas to back down, Kaiser wrote a letter, detailing his objections to Mugendi’s leadership and pointing out “the Catholic failure as regards Human Rights.”

Mugendi had had enough. He sent word to Kaiser’s superiors: Remove this priest from my diocese. Maurice McGill, the London-based superior general of the Mill Hill order, informed Kaiser that he should leave immediately, and invited him to spend some time at Mill Hill headquarters in London.

“I can hardly be appointed away from this place without an appointment to someplace else,” Kaiser wrote back. “Your invitation to visit Mill Hill is kind, but at this point I need clear orders and not an invitation. I will make no preparations for leaving here until I have heard from you and I would consider at least two weeks, but preferably four weeks, to be a reasonable time to finish up here and say goodbye to those I have lived with for nearly thirty years.” He said Mugendi had refused to speak to him that morning.

“I confess, Maurice, that I am deeply hurt by your action or rather lack of action as well as those Mill Hill superiors who have assisted you in withdrawing me. I would have thought that a minimum response from a superior would have been to ask the Bishop to put into writing the reasons for expelling me,” he continued. “I would not for any reason in the world contradict Bishop Mugendi except that I should think that not to do so would be disobedient to the clear teaching of the church. I will make a report of this affair for the priests here, the Kenya Hierarchy & the papal representative & also send you a copy.”

He distributed his letter widely within the Mill Hill organization and the African Church. He also reportedly sent a copy to the Vatican, a further humiliation for Mugendi. “I told him not to write the letter,” Keane recalled. “If he had something to say and do, he had to do it, regardless of whether it destroyed you or not. John would reprimand you and he wouldn’t care if you were hurt or not. He had also that cruel side in him, that justice was everything.” Keane said that Mugendi wept when he read the letter, and that it caused “tremendous hurt” between the mostly European Mill Hill members and the African Church. “They didn’t like the white man attacking the black bishop,” Keane said. “It wasn’t in John’s vocabulary to express regret.” It seemed no coincidence that people called him the “rhino priest.” This was the same John Kaiser, Keane recalled, whose answers to a psychological test administered by Mill Hill earned him a comparison to the animal said to charge friend and foe alike.

“My conscience is clear and I will not apologize for any of my statements or opinions,” Kaiser wrote to a friend that June. “I can always admit & lament the fact I am an undiplomatic clod, but for me that is not the point.”

Kaiser remained in Kisii as the elections approached. There was little doubt about the outcome. Violence was not Moi’s only tactic. The registration forms of illiterate voters could be invalidated by purposely misspelling their names; by these and other means, an estimated one million Kenyans were prevented from voting. The American ambassador was troubled by his nation’s decision not to boycott the election. Hempstone reasoned that such a boycott might have led to civil war, and yet “having put our imprimatur on a flawed electoral process, we seemed to be certifying that second-rate democracy was good enough for black people.”

In one sense, Moi had read his country accurately: The vote fractured along ethnic lines. By and large, political loyalties were not animated by ideology, not defined by particular stances on foreign and domestic issues, but by the understanding that whoever controlled State House would lavish the national resources—jobs, schools, roads—on their own. When the results were counted, Moi had won 1.9 million votes, 36.5 percent of the total. His three opponents divided the rest. He solemnly lifted the Bible and took the oath of office for a five-year term. After riots and protests, after tear gas and truncheons, after a crush of domestic and international pressure, after the long-awaited introduction of multiparty politics, the dictator had wrested from his ordeal a new prize: the veneer of democratic legitimacy.

KAISER CLUNG STUBBORNLY to his job in the Kisii Diocese, until finally, in the summer of 1993, his superior general sent him what he called “a letter firm in tone,” ordering him to leave immediately. He said one final Sunday Mass, packed his few belongings, and departed for the missionary house in Sotik, a few hours east. He was sixty years old, and devastated. “Exile,” he called it. He had given three decades to the Kisii people; he knew their language and customs; he had baptized thousands and heard countless confessions; he considered himself one of them. And he had loved Bishop Mugendi.

Kaiser was frustrated by the superior general’s failure to give clear orders regarding his next assignment. “These days it’s mighty hard to get a superior to say ‘I appoint you to Timbuktoo, period,’” he wrote.

Kaiser would not be nudged out noiselessly; he was unwilling to establish roots elsewhere without having had a face-to-face meeting with Mugendi. He wanted an official release from his duties in the diocese. It’s possible that Kaiser realized he’d gone too far and wanted forgiveness.

Kaiser drove to the bishop’s house in Kisii and insisted on seeing him. Mugendi declined. Kaiser waited. Hours passed. Finally Mugendi emerged, walked past Kaiser, and climbed into his car. He refused to acknowledge the priest.

“I want your blessing,” Kaiser said. The man who would hurl his body before the bloody juggernaut of Kenyan history, daring it to change course or crush him, lowered himself to his knees before the bishop’s car. The bishop must have known that his most obstinate priest was prepared to wait forever. He relented, dismissing him with a quick and perfunctory wave, his hand tracing a cross in the air. It was enough. Kaiser climbed to his feet.

SINCE LATE 1992, Gathenji had been receiving ominous reports about the storm brewing in Enoosupukia, a high, fertile plateau of terraced hills in the Rift Valley. Once the grazing area of Masai pastoralists, the land was now tended by Kikuyu farmers who grew maize, beans, and potatoes. The Catholic Church had asked Gathenji to investigate claims that Kikuyu landowners were being threatened with eviction by the fiery William Ntimama, Moi’s minister for local government and the nation’s most powerful Masai. He was the most flamboyant advocate of Majimboism, which called for a constitutional reform that would turn the clock back a century. Groups lacking ancestral roots in a particular region would be forced to abandon their lands without compensation.

“Lie low like envelopes or be cut down to size,” he reportedly told the Kikuyu, warning them that their fate would match that of the Ibo, a reference to the Nigerian ethnic group slaughtered en masse in Biafra. It didn’t matter that the Kikuyu had been settling in this area of the Rift Valley for decades, and that he’d sanctioned the influx himself. Nor did it matter that the Kikuyu possessed deeds to land they’d legitimately purchased; he declared them “mere pieces of paper.”

Ntimama portrayed himself as a man betrayed: The Kikuyu had backed his rival in the recent election. “People say I hate the Kikuyu,” he was quoted as saying. “But it is they who have driven me to that extremism. Because they were never grateful for what we had done for them.” He ordered their eviction. His pretext: to preserve the land as a water-catchment area for the Masai, whose traditional grazing grounds were supposedly parched by the misuse of the Kikuyu interlopers. In his rhetoric, the Kikuyu were an extension of the colonial yoke. “The British suppressed us

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