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,” 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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.
The dispute with his bishop ran deeper still. With villages erupting in a pandemonium of flame, arrows, and machetes, Kaiser questioned Mugendi’s refusal to take a forceful stand against what seemed clearer by the day: that the regime was exciting the Masai and Kisii to war. It was Kaiser’s insistence on doing so in public, before other churchmen—including young African priests—that Mugendi found intolerable. The American priest was breaching the deep-dyed cultural prohibition: An African bishop, like a president, was a paternal personage not to be challenged. “Here in Africa you never discuss the Father, much less criticize him in public,” Kaiser wrote.
Other priests warned Kaiser that his style was too confrontational. Ignoring pleas to back down, Kaiser wrote a letter, detailing his objections to Mugendi’s leadership and pointing out “the Catholic failure as regards Human Rights.”
Mugendi had had enough. He sent word to Kaiser’s superiors: Remove this priest from my diocese. Maurice McGill, the London-based superior general of the Mill Hill order, informed Kaiser that he should leave immediately, and invited him to spend some time at Mill Hill headquarters in London.
“I can hardly be appointed away from this place without an appointment to someplace else,” Kaiser wrote back. “Your invitation to visit Mill Hill is kind, but at this point I need clear orders and not an invitation. I will make no preparations for leaving here until I have heard from you and I would consider at least two weeks, but preferably four weeks, to be a reasonable time to finish up here and say goodbye to those I have lived with for nearly thirty years.” He said Mugendi had refused to speak to him that morning.
“I confess, Maurice, that I am deeply hurt by your action or rather lack of action as well as those Mill Hill superiors who have assisted you in withdrawing me. I would have thought that a minimum response from a superior would have been to ask the Bishop to put into writing the reasons for expelling me,” he continued. “I would not for any reason in the world contradict Bishop Mugendi except that I should think that not to do so would be disobedient to the clear teaching of the church. I will make a report of this affair for the priests here, the Kenya Hierarchy & the papal representative & also send you a copy.”
He distributed his letter widely within the Mill Hill organization and the African Church. He also reportedly sent a copy to the Vatican, a further humiliation for Mugendi.