Kenya The Plot That Never Was

By Margot Hornblower

Talk about a preposterous plot. An obscure fundamentalist church in Boone, N.C., raises millions of dollars from Ku Klux Klan members. The mission: to topple the governments of Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The conspiracy is carried out by American missionaries, all of them part of a sophisticated network that includes a satellite, a radio station and an oceangoing ship.

These details come not from a pulp adventure novel but from a fund-raising "memo" written on the stationery of the Foscoe Christian Church in Boone. Addressed to "Klu ((sic)) Klux Klan members," it boasts that $80 million has already been collected to overthrow the governments opposing South Africa but that an additional $20 million is urgently needed. The memo goes on to laud missionaries in Kenya who are ostensibly working with "backward, stupid natives" but are actually attempting to oust Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi.

As absurd as that sounds, the memo is creating an uproar in Kenya. Revealed first in banner headlines in Nairobi's three national dailies, it has led Moi to deport 15 American missionaries, some of whom have run schools in the impoverished countryside for more than a decade. "They claim to have come to work with us in our development efforts," said Moi. "Their real work has been sabotage and destabilization." But the State Department has branded the memo a "forgery" and the coup charges "patently absurd." Said Paul Hamilton, one of the ousted missionaries: "We knew nothing about it. The government is paranoid."

Kenyan newspapers will not say how they got the memo, but Hamilton believes it is the handiwork of David Kimweli, 33, a Kenyan-born preacher who lives in Carrollton, Ga. For two years, Kimweli has toured parishes in the U.S., raising money for missions in Kenya. Last February he visited Boone's Foscoe Christian Church, where he told of whole villages converted from "witchcraft" to Christianity, of sight returned to the blind, of a woman in a wheelchair getting up and walking. "He delivered an electrifying message," says Pastor Kenneth Caswell.

One of those he electrified was Hamilton, 37, who met Kimweli when the Kenyan was studying at Johnson Bible College in Knoxville. Hamilton, a television technician, was so impressed that he sold his house and in July headed for Kenya with his wife Marty and three children. Once he got there, however, Hamilton found that Kimweli's crusades did not exist. Enraged by the deception, he fired off letters to Kimweli's American supporters and complained to U.S. embassy officials in Nairobi.

Then, suddenly, the memo appeared, fingering Hamilton, his wife and the other missionaries who had come to Kenya after hearing Kimweli's sermons. Kimweli, reached in Savannah last week, claimed to know nothing about the memo. "It is confusing and embarrassing," he insisted. He said he sent $4,000 to enlarge the church in his home village of Machakos and ten tons of clothing for distribution in the region. The dispute with Hamilton and the other missionaries "is just a religious difference," he explained. Meanwhile, a few chastened missionaries feel that they have been had. Rued + Hamilton: "If someone says, 'Hey, I'm doing the Lord's work,' we don't check his credentials." And the government of Kenya apparently does not question the authenticity of unsigned memos.

With reporting by Clive Mutiso/Nairobi