You Will See Fire

In one sense, Moi had read his country accurately: The vote fractured along ethnic lines. By and large, political loyalties were not animated by ideology, not defined by particular stances on foreign and domestic issues, but by the understanding that whoever controlled State House would lavish the national resources—jobs, schools, roads—on their own. When the results were counted, Moi had won 1.9 million votes, 36.5 percent of the total. His three opponents divided the rest. He solemnly lifted the Bible and took the oath of office for a five-year term. After riots and protests, after tear gas and truncheons, after a crush of domestic and international pressure, after the long-awaited introduction of multiparty politics, the dictator had wrested from his ordeal a new prize: the veneer of democratic legitimacy.

KAISER CLUNG STUBBORNLY to his job in the Kisii Diocese, until finally, in the summer of 1993, his superior general sent him what he called “a letter firm in tone,” ordering him to leave immediately. He said one final Sunday Mass, packed his few belongings, and departed for the missionary house in Sotik, a few hours east. He was sixty years old, and devastated. “Exile,” he called it. He had given three decades to the Kisii people; he knew their language and customs; he had baptized thousands and heard countless confessions; he considered himself one of them. And he had loved Bishop Mugendi.

Kaiser was frustrated by the superior general’s failure to give clear orders regarding his next assignment. “These days it’s mighty hard to get a superior to say ‘I appoint you to Timbuktoo, period,’” he wrote.

Kaiser would not be nudged out noiselessly; he was unwilling to establish roots elsewhere without having had a face-to-face meeting with Mugendi. He wanted an official release from his duties in the diocese. It’s possible that Kaiser realized he’d gone too far and wanted forgiveness.

Kaiser drove to the bishop’s house in Kisii and insisted on seeing him. Mugendi declined. Kaiser waited. Hours passed. Finally Mugendi emerged, walked past Kaiser, and climbed into his car. He refused to acknowledge the priest.

“I want your blessing,” Kaiser said. The man who would hurl his body before the bloody juggernaut of Kenyan history, daring it to change course or crush him, lowered himself to his knees before the bishop’s car. The bishop must have known that his most obstinate priest was prepared to wait forever. He relented, dismissing him with a quick and perfunctory wave, his hand tracing a cross in the air. It was enough. Kaiser climbed to his feet.

SINCE LATE 1992, Gathenji had been receiving ominous reports about the storm brewing in Enoosupukia, a high, fertile plateau of terraced hills in the Rift Valley. Once the grazing area of Masai pastoralists, the land was now tended by Kikuyu farmers who grew maize, beans, and potatoes. The Catholic Church had asked Gathenji to investigate claims that Kikuyu landowners were being threatened with eviction by the fiery William Ntimama, Moi’s minister for local government and the nation’s most powerful Masai. He was the most flamboyant advocate of Majimboism, which called for a constitutional reform that would turn the clock back a century. Groups lacking ancestral roots in a particular region would be forced to abandon their lands without compensation.

“Lie low like envelopes or be cut down to size,” he reportedly told the Kikuyu, warning them that their fate would match that of the Ibo, a reference to the Nigerian ethnic group slaughtered en masse in Biafra. It didn’t matter that the Kikuyu had been settling in this area of the Rift Valley for decades, and that he’d sanctioned the influx himself. Nor did it matter that the Kikuyu possessed deeds to land they’d legitimately purchased; he declared them “mere pieces of paper.”

Ntimama portrayed himself as a man betrayed: The Kikuyu had backed his rival in the recent election. “People say I hate the Kikuyu,” he was quoted as saying. “But it is they who have driven me to that extremism. Because they were never grateful for what we had done for them.” He ordered their eviction. His pretext: to preserve the land as a water-catchment area for the Masai, whose traditional grazing grounds were supposedly parched by the misuse of the Kikuyu interlopers. In his rhetoric, the Kikuyu were an extension of the colonial yoke. “The British suppressed us

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