He is more than just a long-serving white priest residing in Kenya

The remandee section at the women’s prison got new bunk beds in 2009 from the foundation, Right, Fr. Peter Meienberg at the day care centre for children of imprisoned mothers. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • Fifty-five years later, Fr. Peter Meienberg, through Faraja Foundation, has initiated and funded numerous life-changing projects in prisons across the country, besides being involved in other humanitarian activities.
  • Among the projects the 87-year-old Swiss clergyman has pioneered include a kindergarten for prisoners’ children at Lang’ata Women’s Prison, an ultra-modern kitchen at Kamiti Maximum Prison, a library at Industrial Area Remand and Allocation Prison, and tailor-made courses for inmates and prison wardens, among many other projects.
  • The priest had met with Julius Nyerere, a staunch Catholic, in New York in 1959 where the Tanzanian leader had signed the churchman’s master’s degree dissertation on the study of social change in native Tanganyika.

The story of an old white man, priest or otherwise, working among the Kenyan poor communities is not news. It’s a narrative that dots many marginalised villages and slums across Kenya.

But what makes Fr. Peter Meienberg’s story worth telling is his unusual passion for the prison ministry, and priesthood underlined by the drive to instigate social, economic, spiritual and infrastructural reforms in Kenyan jails during the last 15 years.

Thanks to his unrelenting efforts, every major prison and its inmates in Nairobi and across the country bears some footprints of his work, implemented through Faraja Foundation, which he founded in 1999.

“I first came across the inhuman conditions that prisoners live under during my work with refugees from Rwanda, Burundi and D.R. Congo,” the Benedictine priest told us during the interview at his home in South B.

“I realised that prisoners needed more than just spiritual nourishment; they were living in very bad environments, and so I set up Faraja Foundation, and through the help of friends and my family, we have been able to touch the lives of inmates in a positive way.”

Among the projects the 87-year-old Swiss clergyman has pioneered include a kindergarten for prisoners’ children at Lang’ata Women’s Prison, an ultra-modern kitchen at Kamiti Maximum Prison, a library at Industrial Area Remand and Allocation Prison, and tailor-made courses for inmates and prison wardens, among many other projects.

PROPHET OF DOOM

Besides being in the team that recommended the current prison reforms, a 60-minute movie was shot by a Swiss company in 2008, narrating Fr. Peter’s love and passion for Kenyan prisons and prisoners.

The Prison and the Priest: Peter Meienberg in Nairobi, which was exhibited in several European film festivals, tells the clergyman’s story as a prison chaplain, inmates’ benefactor and philanthropist. It also tells of the challenges of being a prisoner in Kenya through individual stories.

Away from the prison pulpit, the Catholic priest, who has been in Kenya for 45 years, has courted controversy on several occasions over his comments on social and political issues in the country.

Upon his transfer to Kenya from Tanzania, where he had been a priest for 10 years, Fr. Peter worked in Eldoret, Pokot and Nanyuki, then journeyed to Ethiopia and then Cameroon. While serving in the Eldoret parish in 1972, he predicted the infamous Rift Valley ethnic clashes, whose first phase would appear 20 years later.

“The most influential and industrious Christians were the Kikuyu, who were fast expanding in Western Kenya...,” the priest, who was then the chairman of the Kenya Association for Liturgical Music, with several hymn books to his credit, said, and added,

“It (His prediction of the 1992 Rift Valley clashes) was just a gut feeling derived from talking to members of various ethnic groups, all of whom felt that the Kikuyus were as abrasive as they were aggressive in their land acquisition”.

He also projected, and correctly so, that the centre of such an explosion would be either in Nakuru or Molo towns. Many years later in 1994, after the first post-electoral violence was witnessed in Kenya, Fr. Peter, who had just returned from a month-long priesthood service in Kibumba Refugee Camp in Goma, which was hosting the Hutu refugees of the Rwanda Genocide, warned that if Kenyans were not careful, politically-instigated hatred would lead to bloodshed.

“The genocide was the talk of town; so I was given the opportunity to deliver a sermon at the Holy Family Basilica in Nairobi and narrate my experiences in Goma,” he recalls.

“I told the audience that if Kenya was not careful, we would end up experiencing politically-instigated killings just like Rwanda - we almost got there in 2007/2008, 13 years after I delivered that sermon.”

His forthright, controversial, tell-it-as-it-is sermon, which was typical of him, earned him a rebuke from the audience, and when he phoned his former Bishop, Ndingi Mwana ‘a Nzeki, in Nakuru, the Bishop told him to drop such offensive remarks.

Commenting on the 2017 General Elections, the priest says that a dark gloomy cloud hangs over the nation like a bunch of blood thirsty vultures circling over an injured prey.

“I am really afraid of next year’s elections, because there is so much hatred between the two political alliances, that something drastic has to be done to prevent an imminent explosion of violence,” Fr. Peter observes.

“The clergy, civil society and other opinion leaders should preach peace to stop the country from being plunged into another round of violence and bloodshed.”

PASSION FOR YOUTH

A graduation ceremony at the Latia Farm in November 2011. PHOTO | COURTESY

Reading through his recently published book, Africa - my Destiny, 50 years of service in East Africa, which is compiled from letters, journal entries and notes written over his more than 50 years stay in Africa, it is obvious that the Swiss priest is not new to controversy.

While serving in Tanzania, President Julius Nyerere, through the clergy, commissioned him to write the first civics book for the school curriculum of the newly formed republic. This prestigious project made Fr. Peter a target of his fellow clergymen and a host of jealous local politicians.

“This project plunged him into a lot of problems. Alone, without support and conspired against by his colleagues, the unsuspecting newcomer developed the textbook under difficult conditions in four-and-a-half months,” explains Alois Riklin in the Africa - my Destiny, 50 years of service in East Africa book forward.

“At first it was disqualified by the Secretariat of Bishops as useless… thereafter, it was officially approved by the government as a school textbook. Then, due to political reasons, it was banned for years, but finally introduced once more”.

The priest had met with Julius Nyerere, a staunch Catholic, in New York in 1959 where the Tanzanian leader had signed the churchman’s master’s degree dissertation on the study of social change in native Tanganyika.

Apart from prison, politics and pulpit engagements, the Benedictine Father is also very passionate about youth empowerment, a mission that saw him acquire 24 hectares of land in Isinya, where he built a high-tech training farm, Latia farm.

“This is where we take the youth who have just completed Form Four for a half yearly semester on agricultural skills, with the course being 70 per cent practical and the rest theory,” the octogenarian priest explains.

“With the institution sustained with funding from the Swiss government and other organisations, most of the students get work immediately after training, since they have the practical skills in matters agriculture.”

Due to old age, Fr. Peter now carries out his engagements through Faraja Trust, which has now extended its prison philanthropy beyond Nairobi.

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FASCINATION WITH THIS CONTINENT LED ME HERE

Fr. Peter Meienberg’s is the story of a man who left the comfort of a home in Switzerland to come to Africa with no extraordinary mission in mind besides serving as a Catholic priest.

But destiny and fate thrust him in unexpected directions.

“I had a maternal uncle who would go to Egypt to buy cotton, from where he would return with books and stories of the pyramids, the Nile and the desert,” he recalls.

“This, alongside other stories, like the biography of Charles de Foucault - planted a deep seed of interest in me to come to this fascinating continent.”

“In my hometown St.Gallen in Switzerland, I went to upper primary school in a former Benedictine monastery, after which I was admitted to a famous monastic college up to Form Six, where time and again we were visited by missionaries from Tanganyika who whetted our appetite to follow them to East Africa.”

In October 1961, he was eventually posted in the then Tanganyika as a young man of 32, where he worked for 10 years.

“During the Ujamaa period,  local politicians were becoming more and more envious of our work in rural areas and would politicising everything; hence we decided to explore other countries to establish a new monastery,” Fr. Peter explains.

“I suggested Nairobi and explored the area of Mathare North, and that’s how St. Benedict’s Monastery on Thika Road (Ruaraka) was established.”

He would later, in 2000, leave the monastery to focus on philanthropic and humanitarian work by setting up Faraja Foundation, which is an entity.

“Although we have many donors overseas, 40 per cent of our income is generated through local sources, with two houses in South B and 24 luxury apartments in Westlands, furnished and serviced by our own personnel – this was originally sponsored by my family and friends.”

These measures, he says, are meant to ensure the posterity of his work after he is long gone.

“The book that I published recently is also an effort to make the work of those who wish to study my undertakings after I am gone easier,” he jokingly says.

“It’s also a story of my many trips and discoveries across this beautiful land and its charming people.”

Among the white priests that have left deep marks in Kenya include Fr. John Anthony Kaiser, whose death in 2000 remains a mystery, and Fr. Gabriel Dolan, a Mombasa parish priest and a human rights defender.