Book review: ‘You Will See Fire’ by Christopher Goffard

You Will See Fire

A Search for Justice in Kenya

Christopher Goffard

W.W. Norton: 317 pp., $27.95

The body of John Kaiser, an American Catholic priest, was found in a ditch outside the Kenyan market town of Naivasha on Aug. 24, 2000. A gunshot had blown off the back of Kaiser’s head. He was 67, and for years he’d been a thorn in the side of Kenya’s violent and corrupt ruling regime. A supposedly thorough FBI investigation concluded that Kaiser, with a history of manic depression, had killed himself. Many others, both inside Kenya and out, believed he’d been murdered.

Christopher Goffard is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the author of a novel, “Snitch Jacket.” The title of his new nonfiction book, “You Will See Fire,” is taken from one of the many threats that Kaiser received, a warning whose seriousness Kaiser never doubted. Goffard skillfully assembles the details of his life and death, counterpointing these narrative strands with the story of Charles Mbuthi Gathenji, a Kenyan attorney determined to discover the truth about the case. Out of the synthesis emerges a fable of post-colonial Africa that moves like a thriller while achieving the tragic dimension associated with Graham Greene’s bitter explorations of good crushed by evil in the world’s far-flung places.

“He arrived in December 1964, stepping off a freighter into the harsh equatorial sunlight at Kenya’s eastern port of Mombasa, into a country that had just reeled exuberantly through its first year of independence from the British,” Goffard writes. Kaiser had grown up on a farm in backwoods Minnesota. He’d learned to hunt and had spent three years in the Army, serving as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, before he decided to become a priest and enrolled in Jesuit missionary school. Kaiser wanted adventure and headed to Africa, where the work exhilarated him. He undertook herculean building projects as well as baptisms and sick calls. He traversed the countryside on his Honda motorcycle.

“He took confession in the shade of eucalyptus trees and threw up churches across the countryside, quick, crude structures of red earth and river-bottom sand,” Goffard notes.

A crack shot, Kaiser hunted for meat that he distributed to his parishioners. “He earned a nickname, ‘Kifiaru wa Maskini’: Rhino for the Poor.”

Goffard thumbnails those early, almost innocent years and springs forward to the time when the furious purity of Kaiser’s energy ran smack into the hard wall of post-colonial politics. This process began in earnest in 1978 when Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, was succeeded by Daniel arap Moi, the soon-to-be dictator who carried a silver inlaid ivory mace and liked to wear rosebuds in the lapels of his Savile Row suits. Moi contrived to hold onto power for more than 30 years, by stages transforming Kenya into a West-favoring police state, a country where, as Goffard writes, “paranoia became entrenched as a national policy.”

The British pith helmets were indeed gone but replaced now by “a vast network of chiefs and subchiefs that provided Moi with intelligence and control all the way to the village level.” Bribery and corruption became endemic, likewise torture, conveniently timed car crashes that wiped out opponents, and bungled robberies in which everybody, including the apparent criminal and the apparent victim, conveniently lost their lives. Moi kept a million dead Kenyans on the electoral rolls, ensuring that democracy tilted his way.

Kaiser witnessed land grabs, murder, rape, the horrors of a refugee camp. He’d known, even on his arrival in Africa, that he might well be risking his life for his faith. Maybe he’d even welcomed the idea. Defying his superiors in the church, Kaiser took the fight so effectively to the Moi regime that he became a threat. People pressed him to leave, but the headstrong Kaiser plowed on. It was only a matter of time, really, before the inevitable happened, and he, like so many others who had dared to oppose the sinister and all-powerful Moi, was found dead by a dusty road.

Goffard doesn’t idealize Kaiser. Rather, he shows us Kaiser’s idiosyncrasies, his moods, his “hard-charging, elbows-out” determination to go his own way, even if he knew deep down the likely destination would be a terrible lonely death. In this telling, Kaiser comes off as charismatic and indeed heroic, but a little mad too.

Beside him, Gathenji, the book’s other main character, strikes the reader as a beacon of reason and sanity. Gathenji, whose own father had been the victim of Kenyan political assassination, befriended Kaiser and was a fellow crusader against the excesses of Moi’s regime. But he was “quiet, methodical, and preferred to operate behind the scenes.” After Kaiser’s death, Gathenji hoped the FBI investigation would reveal the truth. But Moi succeeded in snowing the FBI, as he had so many others in the West, and Gathenji took up the task of discovering what had really happened. While achieving no definitive answer, he was able to establish that Kaiser, the devout Catholic, did not commit suicide, and was indeed killed by somebody else. Just who remains a matter of conjecture.

One man died; the other, no less brave but rather more prudent, prevailed and achieved some measure of justice for his dead friend. History swept away Moi and his crew while, Goffard notes, in Kenya today many young men are named John Kaiser after the flawed American priest who became a folk hero.

“You Will See Fire” pinpoints such ironies, but its real achievement is to let the reader feel the sadness and emotion behind them. So much about Africa feels both seductive and somehow doomed, filled with dramas proving the ultimate powerlessness of the Westerners who try to sway its destiny. Goffard’s book puts us right there; it’s a moving and powerful story, rigorously researched and documented through interviews and access to Gathenji and to Kaiser’s letters and papers.

Rayner is the author of “A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age.”