Gathenji watched his father’s face. It had a faraway look. His father asked how he was doing in school. It was the kind of thing he never asked. Then he did something else that was out of character. He handed his son a few shillings to buy food, though he knew he would have been fed. Money had always been tight, and ordinarily he frowned on adults giving money to children, who were expected to spend it frivolously. But now he seemed to be reaching out. The abyss between them was imminent. The son sensed what was happening. He took the money, dread twisting in his stomach. For years, he’d comforted himself with the notion that God, having taken his mother and brother, would spare the rest of his family. His father, in particular, had seemed invulnerable. But now he told his roommate, “They will probably kill him.”
WHEN THE BUS from Nairobi dropped him off at Kikuyu Station, he rushed to the hospital on foot. The first thing to strike him, when he found the room where his father was being kept, was the smell of blood. Samuel Gathenji lay on his back, breathing with difficulty. He asked his son to turn him over and said, “You see what they’ve done to me.” His back had been skinned from the neck to the buttocks with a simi, a Kikuyu sword. During the accompanying beating, his internal organs had been crushed. He was barely alive, spasming when he tried to speak.
Gathenji read to him from Revelation, and they prayed. His father told him to take care of the family, to have courage, and to be careful whom he trusted. He said that he held no bitterness and that he forgave his attackers, and that he wished his son to do the same. Finally, he said, “I am cold.” The son covered him with a blanket and walked out of the hospital room. Within minutes, his father was dead.
Later, a photograph of his father’s hacked body—taken by a journalist who had found his way into the hospital room—was slipped to Gathenji. He would keep it in a file, along with newspaper clippings about the killing and accounts he’d taken from a handful of local women who had been snatched with his father that night. He’d tracked the women down and given assurance that he would not expose them: He just needed to know what had happened. From them, and from the account of his stepmother and younger brother Edwin, who had been at the house during the abduction, he pieced together the details.
He learned that about ten young men had converged on the house, and that some had worn the red shirts of the youth wing of the ruling party. Some were members of the campaign team of the local parliamentarian, Joseph Gatuguta, a longtime Kenyatta confidant who owed his power to the president. Some were unemployed young men to whom Samuel Gathenji had thrown construction jobs. Some were true believers, whipped into a frenzy by calls for tribal solidarity. Some just viewed the snatching as another job; incredibly, they would return to the Gathenji house afterward, having helped to kill their benefactor, looking for more construction work.
Gathenji was given further details: that his father had been packed into the back of a covered Peugeot pickup for a drive into the countryside to the oathing center. That he’d preached to the women who accompanied him in the truck. That they’d been singing. And that the attackers had had to force open his mouth to pour the goat blood down his throat.
THE STORY WAS carried in Target, a newspaper published by the National Council of Churches of Kenya. The accompanying photographs included one of the pastor’s coffin as it was being carried to its grave, and a portrait of his bespectacled twenty-year-old son, Charles, his features rigid with fear and the weight of his new knowledge. Christian leaders mounted protests and visited Kenyatta, urging him to stop the oathing campaign. It ceased shortly afterward. The president had reportedly been unhappy with the evangelist’s slaying. It hadn’t been meant to happen, Gathenji thought. It had probably been intended as a beating—they’d inflict pain until he relented. They had misjudged their victim’s nature.
Gathenji expected the Presbyterian Church of East Africa would honor his father with a memorial. Instead, local church leaders balked at the perceived danger; Kenyatta’s security men were shadowing the family. Gathenji borrowed money for a tombstone. At the funeral, he found himself studying the faces of the mourners, wondering who had betrayed his father to the oath men. With his mother dead, his brother Henry dead, his father dead, and whatever trust he had in friends now an impossibility, he felt a deep and ineradicable sense of isolation.
He was not surprised that no inquest was conducted and no one was prosecuted. Everyone wanted the case forgotten. To dig too deeply into it would have implicated the nation’s legendary founder and the men he kept closest.
Though he prayed for the strength to forgive, he wasn’t sure he was capable of it. He was not his father, and the killers weren’t coming forward to ask his forgiveness, in any case.
Replaying their last exchange, he came to think that his father had been trying to warn him away from the quicksand of bitterness. Telling him to find a way to move on, because there was no way to right this particular evil. Telling him not to let it become a devouring obsession. Telling him not to waste his life.
No, he thought, he couldn’t forgive, but he couldn’t realistically expect justice, either. He would have to accept that the situation was hopeless and make peace with it.
With help from his extended family he transferred to a government-run boarding school near Mount Kenya. He felt safer there; he wouldn’t leave the compound for the whole term.
People still doubted he’d go far, as his education had been so erratic. No one in his immediate family had attended college. But the need to finish school had never felt more urgent. Quietly, he’d taken an oath of his own. Later, asked to explain his decision to pursue the law, he would never hesitate to point to his father’s murder and the subsequent inability to bring anyone to book. Along with a deep wariness, he had developed a preoccupation with justice. He thought that the law, properly wielded, might be a searchlight, an antidote to historical amnesia, a counterweight to arbitrary state power and the madness of the mob. For all the ways it could be corrupted, the law lived on the ideals of order and reason and discipline; these would be his plank against the undertow of despair. “I want to be rational,” he would say with characteristic terseness, trying to explain himself years later. “I think law assisted me.”
Government scholarships paid his way through three years at the University of Dar es Salaam, across the border in Tanzania, then in the throes of socialist fervor. It was a scorching, mosquito-infested place, where, between law classes, he endured malaria and ideological instruction in the wisdom of Lenin and Mao. At times, he had an exhilarating sense of a broader philosophical world than his British-based schooling had exposed him to, though he regarded revolutionary ideology, like alcohol, as being best consumed in measured doses. His classmates nicknamed him the “Chief Justice,” or “CJ,” a nod to the air of gravity and conservatism with which he carried himself. After another year at the Kenya School of Law, where he was apprenticed to a criminal defense lawyer, he joined the attorney general’s office as a prosecutor in 1975. It was a small office, and experience came fast.
The Kenyan courts were independent from the Crown but retained the trappings of Mother England. Lawyers appeared in black robes, and judges, called “Lords,” most of them still English, wore powdered wigs. In one of his first High Court cases, he prosecuted a farmhand who had strangled a baby. He went at it with vigor, arguing that the man should be hanged. His anger and disgust were so obvious that the judge cautioned him to moderate his tone. A finding of insanity won the defendant a reprieve. Such outcomes rankled the zealous young prosecutor. So much seemed to ride on each case; he internalized the defeats. It was not long before he understood the importance of a more clinical approach. He would be seeing death every day, after all. Domestic homicides, bar-brawl homicides, slum homicides; greed-motivated murder, lust murder, stupid, logic-defying murder; bludgeonings, stabbings, shootings.
During those years, Gathenji haunted the Nairobi Law Courts. One of the fixtures there was Joseph Gatuguta, who had been a member of parliament at the time of Samuel Gathenji’s death and was widely believed to have organized the oathing in the Kikuyu region. He had been voted out