Ghastly accidents were common in the cramped tents. Children jostled cooking pots and were scalded by boiling water. Infants were asphyxiated by charcoal smoke. Disease flourished. "This terrible place," he called it. "A wasteland."
The refugees, mostly from the Kikuyu tribe, a bastion of the opposition, had been chased from their farms by rangers, police officers and Masai warriors. When word of the conditions reached the international press, Moi decided to erase the camp. As government men razed it on Dec. 23, 1994, police restrained Kaiser. He watched as the tents blazed and refugees were beaten and herded onto trucks to be scattered unsheltered across the countryside.
Four days later, police officers came for Kaiser and several hundred people he was protecting in a church. He announced that he would not go peacefully. They overpowered him, cuffed his wrists behind his back and carried him to their Land Rover. The truck lurched through the night, police boots crushing Kaiser's limbs and head against the metal floor. Then they dumped him outside a church.
"A great grief," Kaiser called his removal from the refugees. Later, he would brag about how it took a pack of police to get an old man into their truck. The newspapers reported his arrest. He had become a spectacle, albeit still a minor one.
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That is what brought him, finally, to a far-flung brick house in the heart of Masailand. His new bishop had sent him all the way to the country's southwestern edge, to a lonely township called Lolgorien. "No doubt to protect me," Kaiser wrote.
It was a place where Masai herdsmen used thorned acacia branches to shield their mud-hut villages from lions at night. Even in his 60s, Kaiser was quick enough to kill a rabbit with a stone or a dik-dik with a thrown ax. Enlisting villagers, he built a plain red-brick church topped with corrugated metal, like many he'd thrown up across the countryside.
Maela haunted him. At his parish house, he wrote a short manuscript about his experiences there and sent it to everyone he could think of: friends, church leaders, his missionary society. He wrote to Paul Muite, an opposition politician who had befriended him, and asked for help getting it published. People warned him it could get him deported or killed.
"I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and the hyenas many, that I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction," Kaiser wrote.
