Moi grudgingly approved multiparty politics in late 1991, but the months that followed seemed to bear out his warning -- or, as many saw it, his threat -- that in a country of divided ethnic loyalties, democracy would lead to bloodshed. To ensure his party's supremacy, Moi launched militias into war against opposition strongholds.
As villages erupted in a pandemonium of flame, arrows and machetes, Kaiser spoke up in church meetings, questioning Mugendi's refusal to speak out forcefully. He also attacked the bishop's judgment in running the diocese, his choice of a school headmistress, his method of questioning catechists. Kaiser's conduct breached a deep-dyed cultural prohibition: An African bishop, like a president, was a father figure not to be challenged.
"My conscience is clear and I will not apologize for any of my statements or opinions. I can always admit & lament the fact that I am an undiplomatic clod, but for me that is not the point," Kaiser wrote a friend in June 1992.
Other priests warned Kaiser that his style was "too American," too confrontational. Undeterred, he put his complaints in a letter and distributed it around the church. The bishop sent word to Kaiser's missionary society: Remove this priest from my diocese.
Kaiser, who had spent decades with the Kisii people, was devastated. He would not leave without Mugendi's direct order. For hours he waited outside the bishop's house in Kisii, demanding to see him. Mugendi emerged and climbed into his car. He refused to acknowledge the priest.
"I want your blessing," Kaiser said, planting himself on his knees before the car. He stayed that way until the bishop relented, dismissing him with a quick wave, his hand tracing a cross in the air.
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That was how, exiled from Kisii, he found himself appointed chaplain of a starving hillside tent city 100 miles to the east. It was July 1994. He was 61. The place was called Maela, and Kaiser said he learned more about the Moi regime's cruelty in his six months there than in the preceding three decades.
Of Maela, people remembered the dust. They tasted it in their teeth and coughed it into their hands and slept with it in their blankets. It enveloped the polyethylene hovels where families huddled against the cold. It coated the wattle-and-daub shack where Kaiser lay at night, unable to sleep for the wailing that reached him.
