Читать книгу You Will See Fire - Christopher Goffard, Christopher Goffard - Страница 9
4 OATHS
ОглавлениеIN SEPTEMBER OF that year, in a town called Kikuyu in the countryside about fifteen miles northwest of the capital, a twenty-year-old student named Charles Mbuthi Gathenji stood beside the hacked and beaten body of his dying father. Hours before, the young Gathenji had been pulled out of his Nairobi classroom by a summons to the head-master’s office. There was a phone call waiting for him—a nurse from Kikuyu Hospital saying, “Your father has been admitted.” If he received further explanation in that conversation, he wouldn’t remember it later. He didn’t need much explanation anyway: The attack on his father was no surprise. He rushed from the school and found a bus. He climbed aboard, squeezing between a crush of bodies. He would remember standing for the interminable hour-long drive over the tarmac, jostled by bodies, thinking, I hope I will meet him alive. He would remember the kindness of the bus driver, a devout Quaker, who seemed to know exactly what had happened when he explained where he was going, and why. It was a terrible time for Christians.
THE ATTACK HAD its origins deep in Kenya’s bloody preindependence history, in the green and war-racked countryside in which Gathenji had grown up. He was the second-oldest boy in a family of seven children. His immediate family, poor and landless Kikuyus, lived north of the capital in a mud-walled house roofed with corrugated iron in what the British euphemistically called a “protected village,” a place he later regarded as a modified concentration camp. Ostensibly, they were being protected from the Mau Mau, Kikuyu rebels whose mass peasant insurgency was then at its height. White settlers had confiscated tens of thousands of acres in the Kikuyu heartland, and the rebellion’s rallying cry was ithaka na wiyathi, or “land and freedom.” Its tactics—machete attacks, arson raids, assassinations, decapitations—inspired terror even among sympathizers.
Gathenji had been three years old, in October 1952, when the colonial government declared a state of emergency. The British had responded to the rebellion by forcing most of the Kikuyu population into barbwire-enclosed camps and villages like this one, with its encircling spike-filled moat, one entrance and one exit. A cadre of Home Guards—Africans loyal to the Crown who had been given rifles and uniforms—policed the premises, collected taxes, and inspected the despised dog tag–like identity cards, called kipandes, that all adults were made to wear around their necks. The guards, with their berets, long black trench coats, khaki shorts, and heavy black boots, were remote and fearsome figures with a reputation for casual cruelty, more loathed than the British soldiers themselves. Their whistles would pierce the air before dawn; Gathenji’s parents and other adults would be herded off to perform compulsory “communal work,” digging ditches and clearing brush on the surrounding European farms.
Gathenji watched them beat anyone suspected of Mau Mau sympathies, and he watched them whip old people who were not quick enough in answering the whistle. Once, he was whipped himself after attempting to walk to school during a siege. Around their homes, villagers were forbidden from erecting fences or growing thickets that might impede the guards’ view as they patrolled the pathways between the long, straight rows of huts.
The village was structurally divided between the “Royals”—those seen as sympathetic to the government, like Gathenji’s immediate family—and Kikuyus deemed sympathetic to the insurrection, a group that included Gathenji’s paternal grandmother, a hard-eyed, slender woman clad in beaded necklaces and traditionalist wrappings and ornaments. Between the groups, there was always tension; their huts faced one another across a clear path. Now and then, boys from the other side pelted Gathenji’s hut with stones and chanted songs depicting his family as traitors.
Sometimes, during insurgent raids on nearby villages, Gathenji could hear the screams and smell the smoke, and the gates of his village would close, the guards stationed in a protective ring. Sometimes the British troops, known as “Johnnies,” poured into the village with their rifles, hunting for rebels. It was a childhood pervaded by fear.
If you were a Kikuyu boy growing up in a protected village in the 1950s, you knew certain things in the marrow.
You knew not to talk to the guards; if your people saw, you would be made to give explanations. You knew not to talk to the few white people you brushed past at the markets outside the village, or the ones you saw rumbling down the roads in their Land Rovers and Bedfords; they were armed, and any of them could do anything to you. You knew not to look in their eyes and draw attention to yourself. If possible, you disappeared.
If white people asked you a direct question, you knew to answer as briefly as possible and then shut up, to turn your face into a mask and your words into riddles, and never—never—to volunteer information. In many cases, your lingering distrust of white people would remain ineradicable even half a century later, and you would find yourself weighing your words carefully around them. You knew not to take shortcuts across the European farms, because you’d heard stories of other kids being shot as trespassers. You knew not to confide in the blacks who worked as field hands and domestic servants at those farms, because their allegiances were in doubt from every side: They might pass information about your family on to the whites, or they might be secret Mau Maus.
Above all, you were made to understand that talk was dangerous. You knew this at a cellular level, as law so universal and mundane that you couldn’t even recall when you had first learned it, in the same way you had always known that the gigantic armor-plated ants known as siafu would draw blood if your bare feet landed in their nest for more than a few seconds.
AT THE CENTER of the insurgency was its loyalty oath, which drew on—and bastardized—a long Kikuyu tradition. In earlier times, oath takers held a Bible in one hand and a pile of earth in the other; now, as the fighting intensified, Scripture was scuttled in favor of goat meat. At secret ceremonies, initiates would pass under an arch of banana leaves and strip naked in a symbolic shuffling off of their old selves. The goat would be slaughtered, a piece of its flesh ingested, its hot blood smeared on the bodies of oath takers. A series of vows was affirmed: Kill the enemies of Mau Mau. Never betray Mau Mau. Never reveal the oath to whites.
To the British, the oathing represented the atavistic savagery of their enemy, “the most bestial, filthy and nauseating incantation which perverted minds can ever have brewed.” To the Kikuyu, most of whom reportedly took it in some form, it was regarded as transformative, a rebirth, a thing of transcendent power: God, or Ngai, would visit death on those who broke it. In detention camps, the oathing flourished, sometimes accompanied by the promise that initiates would get a plot of land once the whites were banished. The oath was often coerced, and as the war dragged on, it came to involve the drinking of blood and the binding of initiates with goat intestines.
To reject the ritual meant one was too dangerous to live, a potential stooge. Kikuyu Christians, a minority, were especially vulnerable. Many refused the oath, not out of colonial sympathies necessarily, but because the Church portrayed the goat blood as a blasphemy, the satanic counterpart of Christ’s blood. Militants strangled obstinate Christians with blankets, slashed their throats with jerry-rigged blades, and—if they were suspected informers—cut out their tongues.
On his mother’s side, much of Gathenji’s family sided with the rebellion, but his father, Samuel, an itinerant carpenter, occupied the gray and dangerous zone of staunch Christians.
After serving with the King’s African Rifles in the battle against Mussolini in Ethiopia, where he had lost many of his front teeth, he had become a pacifist and an evangelist with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa. He preached at the pulpit and on the streets, anywhere he could find a crowd, and his themes were peace and reconciliation. He recited the story of the Good Samaritan and hummed “Nearer My God to Thee” when he walked.
He was a puzzle to his traditionalist, fervently Mau Mau in-laws. He had adopted the unswerving missionary stance against the genital mutilation of girls, which his in-laws clung to as an indispensable rite. He abjured old rituals, like spitting on your own chest as a blessing and offering goat sacrifices at the sacred mugumo, or fig tree. He rejected the notion that his wife, who had died as a young woman in childbirth in the late 1950s, had perished as a result of mistreating ancestor spirits, or, as her grieving mother insisted, by a curse placed upon her by a jealous neighbor.
He had a reputation as a consummately gentle man who avoided quarrels. When neighbors argued, they inevitably found themselves in Samuel Gathenji’s hut, seeking a peacemaker’s counsel. Still, he retained basic Kikuyu notions of child discipline and the importance of instilling obedience toward elders; he didn’t hesitate to raise the cane when young Charles came home muddy from fishing for tadpoles at the lake or had strayed beyond the compound into areas where so many hazards waited—colonial soldiers, settlers, feral animals, and Mau Maus, who were rumored to anoint children into their cadres by smearing castor oil on their faces.
Though he had no interest in politics, some fellow Kikuyus perceived Samuel Gathenji as an ally of the Crown, so deeply was Christianity associated with the establishment. The churches had helped to provide the Manichaean language of the struggle, after all. Through the detention camp’s loudspeakers, some missionaries railed against the evils of the rebellion, urging detainees to repent of their oaths and accept Christ’s salvation.
In young Charles Gathenji’s government-run elementary school, he and other children were tutored in the splendors of British civilization, made to memorize “God Save the Queen” and to recite the names of the royal family. They were taught the backwardness of Kikuyu traditions, from genital mutilation to the way one’s grandparents dressed. To Gathenji, the intended message was unambiguous: African ways are evil.
In the ongoing Mau Mau war, he was taught, virtue resided solely on the colonial side. In civics class, teachers posed the question “Who are the enemies of your country?” The boy dutifully recited the required answers: rebel leader Dedan Kimathi and Jomo Kenyatta, the alleged mastermind of the revolution. Kenyatta was feared by settlers across the continent, and described by one governor of Kenya as “an African leader to darkness and death.” In reality, he was a moderate with little sympathy for the Mau Maus. His imprisonment—on evidence now accepted as fabricated—did not have the intended effect of decapitating the movement. Instead, it transformed him into a living martyr and created a power vacuum into which militants swarmed.
The rebellion was crushed, but the nerve for continued occupation had raveled. In the summer of 1961, his cult having grown during his incarceration, Kenyatta was released. The man portrayed as the country’s greatest enemy would soon be its first president. Gathenji stood with the masses when he came to Kikuyuland to speak. Thickset, with his gray beard and resonant voice, Kenyatta was the most eloquent man the boy had ever heard. Speaking in English and Gikuyu, defying calls for vengeance against those who had taken the colonial side, Kenyatta talked rousingly of harambee—transcending ethnic divisions and coming together as members of a single, self-governing nation. He urged the Mau Maus to come out of the forests. It was time to prepare for independence.
The protected villages were dismantled. Samuel Gathenji bought a small plot of land and built a three-room timber-walled home. In their new village there were no guards, no colonial chiefs and subchiefs to answer to, no forced labor, no curfew, no one telling them how to build. The sense of perpetual menace was gone.
Gathenji was fourteen years old on the night in December 1963 when he stood outside Kikuyu Station, the local government headquarters, to watch the Union Jack lowered for the last time; in its place rose the red-and-green-and-black flag of independent Kenya. It was the thirty-fourth African country to achieve independence. The cheering was ecstatic. The tribal songs and dances lasted through the night, and the free food seemed limitless, no small thrill for a scrawny boy who got a single full meal of ugali, a cornmeal porridge, on good days. It was an unalloyed joy to be young in a country that now belonged to its people, with a hero at the helm. It was the last nationalist celebration in which he would be able to lose himself.
Despite his talk of harambee, Kenyatta’s policies would baldly favor his own ethnic base. On well-connected Kikuyus he would lavish prime land, jobs, generous funding, and contracts, with this explanation to those who remonstrated: “My people have the milk in the morning, your tribes the milk in the afternoon.” As for the years of civil bloodshed, they were to be consigned to the past, banished to the sinkhole of national memory: “Mau Mau was a disease which had been eradicated, and must never be remembered again.” Yet memory abided, and unhealed traumas lived close to the surface. Former guerillas and former royalists were now living side by side.
Young Gathenji understood there was a price to pay for the perception that his father had been on the wrong side during the independence struggle; he sensed it was the reason behind his eviction from one of the best local schools. Other factors militated against the likelihood that he’d complete his education. For years, he’d been shuttling between schools, forced to leave when money ran out. At night, he studied by the dim light of a paraffin-filled tin can.
He had been nine when his mother died during labor, and he still felt her loss sharply. He remembered her beautiful hair, her impressive height, her Somali profile, and how lovingly she had prepared him and his siblings for school every morning. During canings, she had told him she was beating the sin out of him. As her body was lowered into the grave pit, he felt a strangling in his throat and a numbness in his body. He could neither move nor cry. Staring hard at the sky, he heard one of his sisters wailing. It was his first real experience of loss and helplessness—a feeling that returned a few years later, when his older brother, Henry, was killed crashing his motorcycle. This left Gathenji to shoulder the burdens of the eldest boy. There was always water to be fetched or other chores around the house.
His father remarried and picked up steady work for the government and kept his home immaculate. On weekends, Charles accompanied him on long walks to construction sites, carrying the woven basket that contained the screwdriver and hammer and saw, the red dust rising at their feet as his father sang hymns.
Gathenji began attending an integrated government-run high school in Nairobi. Nobody thought he would go very far. His father disliked the idea of his being alone in the city: There were too many temptations and bad influences for a boy. You’re wasting my money on that school, he told his son, urging him to drop out and train as a flight attendant. The son insisted on staying in school. In the capital, he’d found access to a good library, with shelves of American books. He absorbed tales of Abraham Lincoln and the war for the American West. He read Tom Sawyer and Gone with the Wind. He relished Erle Stanley Gardner’s pulp novels about Perry Mason, the defense attorney who always managed to untangle the web of lies entrapping his clients, and to demonstrate—often by eliciting a courtroom confession—that the government’s version of reality was illusory.
IN JULY 1969, assassins gunned down a young cabinet minister named Tom Mboya on a Nairobi street. He was a prominent member of the Luo, a populous ethnic group whose rivalry with the Kikuyu dominated the country’s politics. Each group spoke a language incomprehensible to the other and looked askance at the other’s rituals (the Kikuyu practiced circumcision, for instance, and the Luo did not). Stereotypes fueled mutual contempt: The Kikuyu were thrusting, greedy, and eager to emulate the West; the Luo were backward and in thrall to atavistic tribal beliefs. The Luo masses, who nursed a sense of bitter exclusion as their rivals came to dominate politics, business, and the civil service, perceived the hand of the Kikuyu elite in the assassination. Street riots and mob skirmishes erupted, crowds hurled stones at Kenyatta’s motorcade, and there were reports that Kikuyus were being murdered.
Gathenji avoided the streets. As the sense of siege became widespread, and as Luo anger threatened to tilt upcoming elections, the Kikuyu resurrected a tactic from the years of insurrection: mass oathing ceremonies. Officially, nothing of the sort was taking place. When church leaders visited Kenyatta to express concern, he feigned ignorance.
But from cities and villages, on foot and by bus and hired truck, thousands made their way to secret ceremonies, some of them at Kenyatta’s own compound, where they affirmed their loyalty to the House of Mumbi—the Kikuyu people—and to Kenyatta himself. It was the year of the American moon landing, and the pilgrimage was called “going to the moon.”
Mercenary motives exacerbated the mania: Fees were demanded of the oath takers. To any number of teachers, government ministers, civil servants, professors, and other intellectuals, the ingestion of goat blood was a meaningless humiliation, the oath a coerced recitation of empty, superstitious words. As in the Mau Mau era, however, those who refused the oath—often on religious grounds—were considered dangerously unreliable, potential turncoats.
One day that September, Charles met his father during a lunch break in the capital’s Uhuru Park, where the elder Gathenji was building the framework for a series of ponds. “People are looking for me,” he told his son. The village headman and the regional parliamentarian had been organizing mass oathing trips; in some cases, gangs had been snatching people from their homes.
Samuel Gathenji, not content with quiet resistance, had been publicly denouncing the oath as divisive and un-Christian. When they found him—and sooner or later they would—they would give him a choice between the goat’s blood and death. “This is the time for shujaa,” he told his son. The word meant heroes in Swahili.
The younger Gathenji knew what could happen, but he respected his father’s position. There would have been no point in challenging him, even if such a thing had been conceivable, which it was not: He was an obedient Kikuyu son.
Now, both of them understood, it was only a question of when it would happen and who would do it. The elder Gathenji guessed Christian friends with the Presbyterian Church of East Africa would betray him to the oath men. Some had initially joined him in defiance, only to acquiesce to the oath after beatings and threats. Some were hiring out their trucks to carry people to the ceremonies.
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 of office and was now a lawyer in private practice. Gathenji encountered him constantly in courtrooms and in corridors. It was unavoidable. Sometimes they’d be on opposite sides of the same case. Their exchanges were formal and tight. Gathenji had determined to bite back his bitterness and anger, knowing they might consume him. There was nothing to be gained by a confrontation. He was young and relatively powerless, recently married, with two young sons, plus five siblings who depended on him. He was just beginning to build a career and establish a foothold in the country’s growing middle class. Gatuguta’s manner seemed to suggest that he was punishing himself. In Gathenji’s presence, he looked like a man in torment. Gatuguta knew who the young lawyer was, of course. As if to confirm their connection, he would address him as “Kijana wa Gathenji.” Son of Gathenji.
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.”