8 oribi—40–50 lbs
6 grey duikers—30–40 lbs
2 Reedbucks—100 lbs
2 warthogs—120 lbs
1 waterbuck—300 lbs
That is 40 animals in a bit over a year which is not bad—about 3,560 pounds of meat after butchering.”
Another letter from the mid-1980s described the abiding exhilaration of missionary work. “I have just come back from a sick-call which I was lucky to sneak in just before dark & not get rained on,” he wrote. “The sick-call was for a young girl who is dying apparently having returned from hospital where the doctors have given her up. She is a very beautiful girl of 18 who received the Sacraments most beautifully and serenely. At such times I would not trade being a priest for any position.”
THEN THE SOVIET empire collapsed, and with it the West’s justification for reflexive support for Moi. In May 1990, soon after his arrival, Hempstone, the improbable U.S. ambassador—a blunt-spoken former editor of the conservative Washington Times who’d parlayed connections in the Bush administration into a diplomatic post—galvanized a weak and demoralized Kenyan opposition with a speech at the Rotary Club of Nairobi. From now on, he said, the United States would steer money to nations that “nourish democratic institutions, defend human rights, and practice multiparty politics.” The regime’s mouthpiece, the Kenya Times, answered his challenge with headlines like this: SHUT UP, MR. AMBASSADOR.
Dissidents took courage, even as the regime characterized the call for democratic pluralism as the latest thrust of white domination. The year was full of grim and portentous spectacles, including the murder of Robert Ouko, the country’s urbane foreign minister, who had been compiling documents on high-level corruption. He was discovered on a hill, shot twice through the head, his body charred, a .38 revolver lying nearby. Suicide, announced police. The president promised that “no stone would be left unturned” in finding answers. To demonstrate his commitment to the truth, he called in New Scotland Yard, which took four hundred depositions over four months and discovered that Ouko had been at odds with Nicholas Biwott, Moi’s widely feared right-hand man. The investigation also pointed to Hezekiah Oyugi, the secretary of internal security.
The head New Scotland Yard detective, John Troon, complained that he was not allowed to interview either of these two key suspects, who were briefly arrested and released for “lack of evidence.” Moi closed the investigation and refused to accept New Scotland Yard’s report unless Troon delivered it personally (a condition tough to meet, since Troon had already left the country). Moi appointed a commission of inquiry to take testimony, then dissolved it before it reached conclusions, sending the case back into the hands of the Kenyan police. By such methods, Moi could drag out an investigation forever. This would prove one of his signature moves. Memories would fade, and witnesses would vanish (within a few years after the killing, eleven people connected to the case, including Oyugi, would perish, some under strange circumstances).
The Ouko case would be etched in the national psyche as an illustration both of Moi’s ruthlessness and his wiliness. The U.S. ambassador, for his part, had no clear evidence of who had killed Ouko, or why, but “what did appear obvious was that the murderer was too highly placed and powerful to be apprehended,” Hempstone wrote.
It was a season of smoke and truncheons and proliferating dissent. Activists and lawyers launched a group called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD). Moi rounded up dozens of opposition figures; police fired on protesters and raided an Anglican cathedral where they sought sanctuary. The country’s seventeen Roman Catholic bishops—representing Kenya’s largest Christian group—issued a pastoral letter denouncing the ruling party’s “unlimited authority,” and complained that “the least sign of dissent” was deemed subversion. Mild as this seemed, it represented relatively bold language for the cautious bishops. In late summer, a milk truck plowed into a car carrying an Anglican bishop named Alexander Muge, who had denounced corruption and land grabbing by unnamed regime potentates; a parliamentary commission ruled it “death by misadventure,” a verdict tough for many Kenyans to embrace. Moi’s labor minister had recently warned that Muge would “see fire and may not leave alive” if he strayed into his district.
Though Kenya remained the largest recipient of U.S. assistance in sub-Saharan Africa—it had received $35 million the year before in economic aid and another $11 million in military aid—American congressional leaders now urged a freeze. With the Marxist menace dead, Moi’s carte blanche had been yanked.
One day, the phone rang on Charles Mbuthi Gathenji’s desk. The man on the other end was a reporter for the state-run television station. He wanted to know the lawyer’s views on a recent controversy: The new chairman of the Kenyan Law Society, Paul Muite, was using his platform to denounce the president and call for reforms. Pro-government lawyers, for their part, had decried such “meddling” in politics.
Where did Mr. Gathenji stand?
He saw nothing wrong with Muite’s remarks, he said; they reflected the sentiments of a good portion of Kenya’s legal community, and nobody called it political meddling when lawyers praised Moi.
Gathenji hung up. Soon, he learned that his statement had made the nightly news. He realized that he’d been incautious. He knew this even before the letter came in the mail demanding payment for back taxes he supposedly owed, equivalent to more than six thousand U.S. dollars. He had ten days to pay, or his home would be seized. He knew other lawyers were getting similar letters. He called his accountant. Numbers were examined. He did owe money—about a fourth of the figure claimed. He paid up. He didn’t want to give the government any excuse to harass him.
Now he understood the reason for the reporter’s call. As dissent grew bolder, Moi wanted to know who was on his side.
MEANWHILE, IN KISIILAND, Kaiser, already in his late fifties, was feeling the effects of age. He described himself as “the chap who never got malaria for 20 years”—he’d been able to banish the early symptoms with a course of chloroquine—but in early 1990 the disease sent him to the hospital for a five-day course of quinine, incapacitated him completely for three days afterward, and stripped twenty pounds from his frame. “Malaria is no longer a minor nuisance & from now on wherever I go the net goes along,” he wrote. Soon he was racing around on his Honda motorbike—a piki-piki in Swahili—joking, “I use a motorcycle every day but at a sedate & dignified pace such as befits my age & position.” There had been some bad spills in recent years. Once, as he rode after dark, the blinding light from an oncoming bus sent him off the tarmac, and a sharp edge of asphalt opened a big gash in his shin. Another time, doing forty as he headed down a narrow gravel road to a sick call, he swerved to avoid a cow, breaking his collarbone and two ribs. Alone on the empty country road, he’d been forced to pull himself to his feet and find his way to the hospital without fainting from the pain.
The culture of corruption was making itself felt at every level. To repair his motorcycle meant paying a 200 percent bribe for the spare parts. The corrosion of the rule of law was increasingly painful and personal. That March, he learned that a friend named James Ongera had been working on his farm when three agents of the General Services Unit attacked him, for reasons that were unclear. His spine was broken, and his body was dragged to the Masai border and mutilated, apparently to convince the Kisii that the Masai had been responsible. The family brought suit against the three agents; the courts threw it out.
“There are almost daily murders in the Nyangusu area and the real culprits are the various government officials who use the army and police to drive out settlers in Masailand