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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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), ‘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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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,” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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,” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), Moi accused an Oregon-based missionary group (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)—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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) the absurd nightmare that is existence under a Moi-like dictatorship. It describes a megalomaniacal ruler who has been “on the throne so long (#litres_trial_promo) that even he could not remember when his reign began,” and who yearns to erect a tower that stretches to heaven (#litres_trial_promo), 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.” (#litres_trial_promo) 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.” (#litres_trial_promo)
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.” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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” (#litres_trial_promo) and dismissed the possibility of government involvement: “Impossible!” (#litres_trial_promo) 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” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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,” (#litres_trial_promo) 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” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo). The year was full of grim and portentous spectacles, including the murder of Robert Ouko (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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” (#litres_trial_promo)—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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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,” (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.