Kaiser’s early years in Kenya seem to have reflected the country’s own mood of hope and possibility. He lived in a cool, high region of softly sloping green hills dotted with huts and little granaries and covered with groves of black wattle trees, eucalyptus, and cypress, grass pastures, and terraced fields. This was the land of the Kisii, or Abagusii, a place the British had declared off-limits to European settlers.
Crowds swarmed to meet the missionary as he settled into a parish with eighteen thousand baptized Catholics and eighteen Catholic schools. Winds from Lake Victoria rustled maize rows that soared above a tall man’s head, and from the high hills of Kisiiland he could glimpse the great gulf. Families tended small farms called shambas, growing tea and coffee, as well as sweet potatoes, finger millet, and corn. Along the narrow dirt roads the women toted heavy kerosene tins of corn kernels to the power mills. Sclerotic little buses called matatus raced by helter-skelter; frequent rains stalled them in thick, impassable mud.
English and Swahili were of limited use here. The Kisii, isolated in the hills for two hundred years, were Bantu speakers whose language was grasped by few outsiders. There were no dictionaries or written grammatical rules. Kaiser set to work mastering the language, and after four months he was conversant enough to hear confessions.
The Kisii were fond of late-afternoon drinking parties, and men clustered together on stools, thrusting three-foot-long bamboo drinking tubes into pots of boiling, gruel-thick beer made of fermented millet and maize flour. The sociable Minnesota priest, invited to partake, confided to friends that he found it awful-tasting but learned how to fake a sip.
John Kaiser during his first years in Kenya, in the 1960s. He lived among the Kisii in the fertile highlands of western Kenya. A stout six foot two, he built churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand, and went up ladders with pockets stuffed with bricks. Photograph courtesy of the Kaiser family.
The huts were windowless, with walls of mud and wattle. All night during the cold months, upward through fissures in the tight grass thatching of the high-coned roofs, filigrees of smoke curled from hearth fires where families huddled, asleep on cowhides scattered across floors of dried mud and dung.
On some levels, the area was as foreign to Kaiser’s native Midwest as it is possible to conceive. Despite the presence of Catholics and Seventh-Day Adventists, most Kisii remained animists steeped in traditional practices. Polygamy was ubiquitous. For a man, the highest ambitions were abundant offspring—the only insurance of personal immortality—and multiple wives, each with her own hut, between which he would rotate. Fecundity was celebrated, the ultimate badge of a woman’s worth, and she was expected to give birth every two years while it was biologically possible. Giving birth to fifteen children was common. The Kisii birthrate, one of the world’s highest, was to Kaiser “a great sign of Divine favour.” Population control he regarded as evil. In Kisiiland, a pregnant woman did not speak of her pregnancy for fear she would appear boastful and invite malevolent envy. Any perceived advantage, in fact, invited envy and witchcraft.
“No one dies without carrying someone on his back,” went one proverb. This reflected a dark vision of invisible forces harrying people to their graves. Everything required a cause, an explanation, especially major calamities. Rancor between co-wives was a given, and a woman who found herself infertile, or who lost a child during pregnancy, inevitably suspected some machination of the women who shared her husband. The wealthy lived in fear of the poor; the poor lived in fear of the very poor; the very poor lived in fear of the wretched. It was understood that for the powerless, the jealous, and the angry, there was no recourse except through magic, and so the community’s most miserable and reviled members—childless, neglected old women, for instance—were often the most feared and vulnerable to murder. The killing of accused witches was common.
Once, Kaiser would recall, he installed a drain under an old woman’s hut, but she remonstrated with him over the shallowness of the ten-foot hole he had excavated. No, she said—they might claw down into the earth and witch me with my used bathwater: the omorogi. These were malign grave-robbing entities in human form, witchdoctors capable of casting a hex on anyone whose clothing, hair, fingernails, or excrement they could lay hold of and boil into a lethal brew.
Against those forces stood friendly diviners who could diagnose frightful omens and determine whether they were a function of witchcraft or, perhaps, of ancestor spirits angry at some slight. Other divines prescribed the proper sacrifices to banish spells, indicating whether the occasion called for the slaughtering of a black hen or a white he-goat. Kaiser viewed these divines as “clever rogues and excellent students of human psychology.” Professional witch-smellers were paid to scour one’s hut and root out the charms hidden in the roof and the walls. Having surveyed the grounds ahead of time and planted the charms, they waited for a crowd to gather, removed the alleged artifacts with a flourish—animal tails, potions, little pots—and dramatically announced that they would identify the witches responsible unless the plots were ceased immediately. Even progressive-minded Christians, lectured at church not to believe in witchcraft, secretly kept potions as a hedge against it. Some converts to Christianity abandoned it to take multiple wives, and some abandoned it in the face of serious illness or death: Confronting such calamities, you took no chances with new and unproven gods like the Nazarene.
For the Kisii, the supernatural was everywhere, but they lacked what some anthropologists called “an organized cosmology.” Their religion was essentially an ancestor cult. In a volcanic peak, shapeless as the wind that swirled around its high ridges, dwelled immortal ancestor spirits called “grandfathers”—a fickle, prickly, demanding pack that meted out rough justice in human affairs, punishing homicide and adultery and incest. They sent death and disease, killing bolts and madness, barren wombs and ruined crops. They were not deities, the object of daily prayer and ritual, but their hand was detected when misfortune struck; in this sense, they more closely resembled demons or furies. When angry, they placed omens in your path—an aardvark or copulating snakes—to signal their need for appeasement by funerary and animal sacrifices.
Kaiser perceived the Kisii outlook as one of profound “fear and fatalism,” akin to the pagan Europe of his Irish and German forebears. This enlarged the exhilaration of his missionary work. He saw himself bringing the good news of Christ’s victory over death and evil, liberating a superstition-enslaved people from their terrors. People sought his protection against the curse left by a lightning strike on a homestead; a sprinkling of his magic water could remove it. Once, he came upon the corpse of a young girl killed by a lightning bolt, and was warned not to touch her: It was certain to bring death, unless goats were sacrificed. Kaiser disregarded the warning, hammered together a wooden coffin, and lifted her into it for burial. If he didn’t banish the belief in curses, he seemed at least to possess a special power to defeat them. His celibacy set him apart from the community’s normal rhythms and aspirations, and that sense of apartness—coupled with his connection to the spirit world, his ability to influence hidden forces—made him a relation of traditional Kisii diviners.
In a study of the Kisii conducted a few years before Kaiser’s arrival, ethnographers Robert and Barbara LeVine described them as a “distinctively paranoid” people who viewed families and neighbors as nests of potential enemies. They sued one another with astonishing frequency—over stolen cattle, boundary lines, beer-party brawls. Litigants were expected to fabricate elaborate stories to avoid admitting guilt, which is why, outside the courthouses, there stood small flowering omotembe trees—oath trees—on which they were made to swear; to lie was to invite supernatural disaster, and to refuse the oath was tantamount to confession.