Father Kaiser, Justice, and Memory

Remarks prepared by Gitobu Imanyara on the occasion of his nomination for the Father Kaiser Human Rights Award at the Law Society of Kenya Annual Awards 2026, reflecting on Father Kaiser’s fearless witness, the cost of defending human dignity in Kenya, and the enduring duty of lawyers, citizens, and public institutions to resist impunity, uphold constitutional freedom, and stand without compromise on the side of justice. The President of the Law Society of Kenya, members of Council, distinguished judges, learned friends, fellow Kenyans: I cannot receive this nomination as though it were only a pleasant professional courtesy. It bears the name of Father John Anthony Kaiser. That fact changes the register. It forces seriousness. It makes vanity impossible. One does not stand under that name and offer a speech made of safe adjectives, easy gratitude, and polished emptiness. Father Kaiser was not that kind of man, and the life for which he is remembered does not allow that kind of language. So let me begin where one ought to begin, with him Father Kaiser was not merely a priest who happened to care about justice. Justice was part of the shape of his priesthood. He came to Kenya in 1964 as a Mill Hill missionary, served for years in Kisii, and later in Nakuru and Ngong. In Nyangusu he was called Kifaru, the rhinoceros, because he was tenacious, stubborn, and not easily frightened. He worked among the poor, stood with the displaced in Maela, spoke against forced evictions, and publicly challenged the violence and impunity of the Moi years. He did not love justice as an ornament of Christian speech. He loved it as a duty owed to people whose suffering power preferred not to see. 

That is why his name still carries moral force. He was not a national mascot for vague good intentions. He was a witness. He was difficult. He was inconvenient. He saw too clearly what many would have preferred to keep blurred: that in Kenya, violence was often explained away before it was confronted; that the poor could be displaced and then lectured about order; that public authority could invoke peace while tolerating cruelty; that respectable institutions could learn, through habit, to look past the suffering of ordinary people. Father Kaiser refused that training in selective blindness. He insisted on seeing. He insisted on speaking. And in this country, that has often come at a price. We know how that story ended. In March 2000, the Law Society of Kenya honoured him for courage, sacrifice, and his stand on behalf of the weak and oppressed. Five months later, his body was found along the Nakuru-Nairobi highway. A theory of suicide was advanced. Yet, after an inquest that heard 111 witnesses, the presiding magistrate held that he had been killed, and rejected the suicide account as resting on a preconceived view. Even in death, Father Kaiser exposed one of the oldest vices of public life in our country: not only the doing of wrong, but the hurried manufacture of a false explanation after the wrong has been done. That history is the reason this nomination humbles me. It humbles me because the Father Kaiser Human Rights Award does not merely celebrate service. It asks a sterner question. It asks whether one has been willing, in however small a measure, to incur cost in the defence of the dignity of others. It asks whether one has treated rights not as a fashionable vocabulary, but as claims that bind us even when their defence is unpopular. It asks whether one has stood anywhere near the weak when power was irritated by their presence. No one answers such a question alone. If this nomination means anything, it cannot mean that the work of justice in Kenya is the achievement of isolated heroic figures. Our history does not support that fantasy. Freedom in this country was widened by a fellowship of stubborn people, lawyers, journalists, clergy, students, workers, mothers, detainees, exiles, judges of conscience, citizens without office, who refused to let fear become the organising principle of public life. Some were read more...