He broke bones in motorcycle spills, survived typhoid and hepatitis and a roof beam crashing on his neck. A crack shot, he would vanish into the elephant grass with his shotgun, stalking wildebeests and impalas, wart hogs and zebras. He hacked up the meat with his ax and distributed it among the schools.
He whittled the stocks of his guns and made his own bullets. He shook in half-rounds to conserve gunpowder and to mute the noise when he hunted, in case a game warden was within earshot. Poaching had been outlawed since the late 1970s, but that was one of man's laws and therefore negotiable.
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Kaiser chronicled his life in letters to friends and family, tallying the animals he had killed, writing home for a crossbow, describing close brushes with lions. The letters also recorded his disenchantment with President Daniel Arap Moi, a man he had once regarded as a "great Christian prince."
Moi took power in 1978, succeeding independence hero Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, the country's largest ethnic group. Moi came from the smaller, weaker Kalenjin tribe and had none of Kenyatta's magnetism.
Yet he would become one of the continent's longest-reigning dictators. Moi gutted judicial independence, outlawed opposition parties and held enemies in torture chambers, naked in fetid water.
Tribal territories had been scrambled under the British and later Kenyatta, and Moi exploited the long-simmering resentments. He made a practice of wholesale land-stealing, rewarding allies and dispossessing rival groups.
In the late 1980s, Kaiser, then working in the Kisii diocese in western Kenya, watched thousands of peasant farmers streaming through the countryside with their belongings. Political bosses had unleashed Masai warriors to oust them from their land, he wrote, burning their homes and destroying their schools.
Kaiser brought the news to his bishop, Tiberius Mugendi, an aging Kenyan whom he regarded as a spiritual father. Impossible, Mugendi said. The involvement of government forces would mean the sanction of Moi, and Moi was the country's father.
"Like Pontius Pilate I washed my hands on the grounds that I had plenty of other work in a busy parish," Kaiser wrote. "In so doing I stored up more fuel for a long hot purgatory."
Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union and an end to reflexive Western support for Moi, who had cast himself as a bulwark against Marxism. Donor nations insisted on free elections.
