The priest planned to name names. He asked for prayers. He felt "very out on a limb." Still, he told a Kenyan friend, carpenter Melchizedek Ondieki: "I have America to defend me. I have the church to defend me."
To keep Kaiser company as he prepared, the bishop sent another priest from the Mill Hill order, a companionable Irishman named Tom Keane, to live with him in Lolgorien.
Keane quickly sensed the depth of Kaiser's fear. He heard him wake screaming from nightmares. He watched him carry his shotgun to Mass, in his truck, on his motorcycle. Kaiser slept beside it on his mattress, Keane said, "like having a woman."
Keane watched Kaiser swing from heights of energy, aflame with purpose, to depths of despondency. Kaiser played solitaire on his bed. He read Ecclesiastes. He made bullets.
At night, Keane invited him to sit on the veranda of the parish house that looked out past a sausage tree toward the rolling savanna. After the day's pastoral duties, Keane liked to relax with a beer and listen to the hyenas. "It's a beautiful evening, John," he would say.
Kaiser refused to join him. The darkness ran deep and unbroken. He would not make himself a target for enemies who might be hiding in it.
--
"I have been working in this country for 35 years as a missionary but I should feel like a guest," Kaiser began his testimony on Feb. 2, 1999. "There are things which a guest does not normally do when he is in his host's house or country. One of those things. . . . is to criticize the government of that country."
But that, he made clear, was what he planned to do. He detailed the horrors of Maela. He described farmers fleeing police violence by the thousands. He aimed his attack at Julius Sunkuli, a Masai lawyer and a fast-rising member of Moi's inner circle. He called Sunkuli's reelection to parliament fraudulent and accused him of orchestrating land seizures in the days before the December 1997 voting.
He named more names. He declared it "general knowledge" that Cabinet ministers William Ole Ntimama and Nicholas Biwott had organized the training of thugs to terrorize farmers.
Biwott's lawyer rose to denounce Kaiser, calling his allegations "absolutely worthless."
To reimburse the dispossessed, Kaiser continued, government officials should sell their own property. There should be prayers, he said, "for their confession, conviction, repentance, and for the restitution of the landless people."
