Smith Hempstone Jr., 77; U.S. envoy to Kenya, conservative columnist

Smith Hempstone Jr., a conservative syndicated columnist who as U.S. ambassador to Kenya from 1989 to 1993 became an effective, aggressively undiplomatic critic of the country’s ruler, Daniel arap Moi, died Sunday at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., after suffering complications from diabetes. He was 77.

He was credited with helping to introduce multiparty elections in an African country that, although an American ally, had little tolerance for political dissent.

Moi was Kenya’s second president since its independence in 1960, and his Kenya African National Union was by constitutional decree the only legal party.

Hempstone covered Kenya’s independence for the Chicago Daily News and wrote two well-received modern histories of the region. He went on to work for the Washington Star, which his mother’s family once owned, and the Washington Times, where he was briefly the top editor.

Several of his jobs ended in a clash of personalities. His service as President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Kenya was also testy, a point he appeared to relish by titling his memoir “The Rogue Ambassador.”

In Nairobi, Hempstone advocated the end of KANU’s dominance. He gave refuge within the U.S. Embassy to a noted human rights lawyer sought by the police and spirited the man, Gibson Kamau Kuria, to safety in London. He denounced economic corruption, which he said prompted greater furor in Kenya than any human rights matter.

The KANU-backed Kenya Times denounced Hempstone with a pithy headline: “Shut Up, Ambassador.”

He did not.

The foreign minister called the ambassador a racist with the perspective of a “slave owner.” Hempstone denied the charge, noting that the political opposition he championed was also black. He called himself a convenient “blue-eyed demon” for Moi and his cronies.

After increasing condemnation from abroad and sanctions by major lending agencies, Kenya held free elections in late 1992. With opposition parties splitting the results, Moi received 36% of the vote and won five more years in office. After another election win in 1997, Moi stayed in office until 2002.

Hempstone was not above reproaching American policy in the region and once sent a prescient, if impolitic, note to his superiors warning the White House against sending a humanitarian mission to Somalia.

Smith Hempstone Jr. was born Feb. 1, 1929, in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Indiana’s Culver Military Academy and the University of the South.

After Marine Corps service during the Korean War, he spent four years in Africa as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs.

The institute had a long affiliation with the Chicago Daily News, and Hempstone became the paper’s Africa correspondent in the early 1960s.

During that period, he wrote “Africa: Angry Young Giant,” a survey of 26 countries; and “Rebels, Mercenaries and Dividends,” about the attempted secession of Katanga, the mineral-rich southern province of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Kathaleen Fishback Hempstone of Bethesda; a daughter; and a grandson.