THIS WAS STILL Kenyatta’s country, a prosperous and relatively stable land whose capital, with its bright bougainvillea-lined corridors, was known as the “City in the Sun.” The president had embraced capitalism-friendly policies and had enlisted the skills of Europeans and urged them to stay. For all that, his one-party state adumbrated horrors to come, from corruption to ethnic chauvinism to the assassination of political rivals. The so-called Kenyatta royal family grew wealthy smuggling coffee, jewels, and poached ivory (even as hunters eviscerated the nation’s elephant population). The ruling family was untouchable, a fact Father John Kaiser witnessed firsthand one day when he came across a group of elephant poachers on the savanna and asked a game ranger if he planned to take action. The ranger explained that they were connected to mzee Kenyatta: certain people he could not arrest.
THE MAN KENYATTA appointed vice president in 1967, Daniel arap Moi, belonged to the small, pastoralist Kalenjin from the far hills of the Rift Valley, and was thus deemed peripheral to the Kikuyu-Luo rivalry. He was lanky and gravelly-voiced, a former herder and schoolteacher, a stolid, awkward teetotaler with a reputation for servility. He seemed little threat to the interests of the Kikuyu elite, who derided him as “the passing cloud,” a marionette who could be counted on to serve their interests and then discarded. This was a miscalculation in the extreme. He assumed power on Kenyatta’s death, in August 1978, outmaneuvering Kikuyu plots to thwart his ascent.
Moi made it a point to advertise his Sunday attendance at religious services. For a time, the country’s churches embraced this pious mask at face value. “Indeed, we regarded him as a great Christian prince, ‘Our Beloved President,’” John Kaiser would write in a memoir years later.
Moi liked to call himself the “Professor of Politics” and identified his philosophy as “Nyayo,” or footsteps—suggesting he was following the path blazed by Kenyatta. Yet he lacked much of what had made Kenyatta effective: personal charisma and oratorical flourish, the mythic gravitas of an independence hero who’d endured exile and a nine-year prison term. Nor did he have the luck, as Kenyatta had had, of a good economy to help obscure his greed.
Crucially, Moi also lacked the backing of a powerful ethnic group. He would embody, and skillfully exploit, free-floating anxieties about the dominance of the populous, advanced, urbanized Kikuyu, anxieties that had been amplified by their rush into the Rift Valley under Kenyatta. Moi rewarded fellow Kalenjins with top posts in his cabinet, the military, the banks, and the civil service, while publicly condemning tribalism as the “cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation.” Despite his rhetoric of a unified Kenya, division was the spine of Moi’s rule. The Kikuyu and the Luo together comprised more than a third of the nation’s population; their numbers would overwhelm him should they ever unite in opposition. A fractious and tribally minded country was one he could rule indefinitely.
GATHENJI ENTERED PRIVATE practice in 1980. On his wall hung a photograph of Moi standing with Kenyatta. He represented clients who had been swept up in government raids in the northeast province bordering Somalia, which was under emergency rule amid threats of succession and widespread violence from militias and bandits, called shifta. Suspects were hauled in on gun-running charges on flimsy evidence. Residents were required to be in their homes between the curfew hours of 6:00 P.M. and 6:00 A.M.; someone caught outdoors fifteen minutes later would be charged. Gathenji argued for a broad interpretation of the definition of home: If you lived in a hut or a tent and stepped into the bush to relieve yourself, you were still on home ground. Few lawyers took these cases. He risked the perception that he was collaborating with the government’s enemies.
The unhappiness with Moi already ran deep, and talk of coups was everywhere. Gathenji was not entirely surprised when, one morning in August 1982, he turned on the radio and heard that the government had been overthrown. He was living with his wife and two young sons in a Nairobi suburb. Disgruntled junior officers of the Kenya Air Force—mostly Luos—had seized the airports, the post office, and the Voice of Kenya radio station. The country’s new masters announced that existing codes of law had been suspended, effective immediately. Gathenji said to his wife, “Did you hear what happened? I no longer have a job.” It was impossible to gauge the seriousness of the danger. The continent had become an ever-changing map of violent and quickly deposed strongmen.
In the pandemonium, rioters looted Nairobi, inflicting a disproportionate toll on businesses and homes owned by Asians, who occupied the merchant class and were widely resented as outsiders. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Asian girls were raped. Moi’s loyalists swarmed the city, fanned across the rooftops, and gunned down suspected insurgents and looters. The coup was crushed, and Moi was restored to power almost immediately.
Gathenji drove into town days later to inspect his office. He’d heard a rumor that the capital was safe, but it took only a cursory glance to sense it had been a false one. Bodies were still slumped inside bullet-riddled cars along the road. Televisions were lined up on the sidewalks, and broken glass glinted on the pavement. Every rooftop seemed to bristle with rifles. Soldiers were jittery. They ordered Gathenji to step out of his car and place his hands above his head and his ID card in his mouth. One soldier insisted that Gathenji had stolen his car, and he demanded that he prove otherwise by furnishing registration papers. Gathenji didn’t have the papers on him. For a moment, he thought, This is where I am shot. On Uhuru Highway, heading back home, he drove frighteningly close to a camouflaged tank, planted in the road, before he realized what it was. He turned the wheel hard and found another way home.
Soon after the abortive takeover, when the courthouses reopened, Gathenji arrived in court and found the dock crowded with defendants, some of them wildlife rangers and civil service workers, who had been charged with celebrating the coup. He watched a few plead guilty and receive jail sentences; in an atmosphere still so highly charged, no judge would leave them unpunished. Gathenji gave the others some advice: Enter not-guilty pleas and wait until the temperature abates. It proved a solid hunch: The cases were soon dismissed. The president wanted to discourage the impression, it appeared, that any of his subjects had reason to celebrate his ouster.
Meanwhile, in Kisiiland, an obscure middle-aged missionary named John Kaiser was trying to assess the country’s trajectory. “The coup attempt was a terrible shock to our Asian community & many of them are leaving the country,” Kaiser wrote in a letter to Minnesota. “The result will be great harm to the economy of Kenya but you sure couldn’t tell the average African that. On the day of the coup attempt I knew all policemen, G. wardens, etc would be in their barracks and huddled around radios so I took the opportunity to picky picky into Masailand a few miles and harvest a nice fat young w. hog.” His humor veered into a rare, dark register. “We had to do without such delicacies for many months due to the pressure of the special anti-poaching unit in the Kilgoris area, so we were grateful to the coup leaders & look forward to many more.” By the end of the month, Kaiser was sensing the atmosphere had changed permanently. “Things are quiet,” he wrote, but added, “I’m afraid the country won’t have the same easy peaceful aspect from now on.”
5
THE DICTATOR
IT WAS A prescient assessment. The violence, and the fears it unleashed, proved useful to Moi,