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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo).” 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,” (#litres_trial_promo) 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” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). “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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo).” 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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.
