‘A Welcome Guest’ – Corresponding with Victor Satya, Kenyan Friend of Israel

Lake Naivasha, Kenya (photo by Geoffrey Clarfield)

Kenya was my home for ten years, from 1985 to 1995. I was sent there as an anthropological researcher for McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I was tasked with chronicling and understanding social change among a non-literate, non-industrialized group of camel nomads called the Rendille, who live in the desert wastes of Northern Kenya.

Simply put, the Rendille, like their other pastoral neighbors the Samburu, Turkana and Somali were living in a manner that had not changed for centuries. They were part of what is called “Old Africa,” a way of life that was transformed first by missionaries, then colonial administrators and finally independent African governments bent on modernization.

Until the late 1980s the Rendille and their pastoral neighbors had avoided these modernizing trends. That is now changing, for rapid, accelerating social and cultural change is one of the leitmotifs of post-colonial sub–Saharan Africa. Each generation is often radically different from the one that came before them.

After two years of living among and studying the Rendille and their changing social environment (they were settling down and sending their last-born sons to school) my wife and our first-born son moved full time to the capital city of Nairobi.

Nairobi in those days was and still is a bustling, turbulent, dynamic capital city which also serves as a regional node in the relief and development world for Kenya’s less fortunate neighbors such as war-torn Southern Sudan, the Congo, Rwanda (during and after its civil war), Ethiopia (when in periodic turmoil) and the constant civil war of Somalia (in contrast to peaceful Somaliland which has just been recognized by the State of Israel-may other sane nations follow suit!)

In Nairobi I worked under the direction of the late world-famous paleontologist Richard Leakey. Soon after, the Museum appointed me Head of the Department of Ethnography and Special Projects Advisor to the Director of the Museum. During the careers of most thirty-something anthropologists who become even more specialized, in contrast I was thrown into an institution which had a wide, almost universal pure science research agenda with a public education dimension.

And so I became, through much trial and error, somewhat of an expert in the development of a national research institution in a developing country, which included a Ford Foundation grant that I co-wrote and got funded to develop a strategic plan for the Museum, where I functioned as the assistant project director. Our second son was born in Nairobi in1990.

Because of the regional functions of Nairobi it became a home for many thousands of expatriates from Europe, North and South America and parts of then non-communist Asia, giving Nairobi an international, multi-cultural “icing on the cake”  feel amongst the majoritarian, modernizing African middle class and wealthy political elites.

When we lived in Nairobi there was an American School, a German school, a Swedish School, numerous British styled schools as well as German, British and American cultural institutes and libraries. All of this was amplified by the presence of various UN institutions and their outrageously overpaid employees and wasteful bureaucracies.

Because of Richard Leakey’s fame and charisma (and the absence of opera and major theatre) the Museum became one of the main centers of public life in Nairobi through its “Know Kenya” lecture series presented to the public each autumn. There, once a week, starting with Richard’s standing room only lectures, each head of a department regaled the audience with a lecture on the cutting edge science that was used to make sense of this natural wonder; a multi tribal, multi-cultural, modernizing African state situated in the spectacular Rift Valley, bordering the Indian Ocean, the Sudan and the Horn of Africa to the north and northeast.

I had the privilege of being one of those lecturers. And so socially and professionally I got to know scores of Kenyans who had been born some time before independence, as well as a growing number of younger researchers, who were born after independence and were more worldly than their parents, as so many of them had done graduate work in the West.

When I lived in Kenya new colleges and universities were springing up quickly to train the growing number of specialized experts that it takes to run a modernizing state with aspiring farmers and a growing middle class. However, these institutions did not necessarily retain the best and the brightest, who often moved overseas after graduate school in Kenya and abroad, and their libraries were woefully understocked.

This changed suddenly in the 1990s with the rise of the Internet and by today, students at any Kenyan institute of higher learning now have access to data bases and libraries from the best libraries and research institutes from around the world. There is no longer any excuse to not be up to date in any field. This digital explosion has also opened the world of ideas in all its conflict and complexity, to a new generation of East Africans who were born in the late nineties or just around 9/11.

Speaking of 9/11 I want to go on record that as a Canadian Jew when I lived and worked in Kenya, I found the average Kenyan to harbor significantly less anti-Jewish and anti-Israel prejudice than the average Canadians that I grew up among after WWII.

While I was in Kenya the Kenyan government bucked the leftist, mostly Marxist inspired, anti-Israel trend that permeated the African Union at the time (and that has since taken over Canadian institutions and government) recognized the state of Israel and reopened the embassy in Nairobi while sending its own to Israel.

Diplomatic, economic, military and cultural cooperation ensued as the Somali Jihadis who want to conquer and enslave the rest of Kenya, many of whom live inside and outside its northeastern frontier  are also publicly committed to the Jihad against Israel.

And so having experienced Kenya “from the ground up” so to speak, and ending up working among elite Kenyans and expatriates in Nairobi (and then having a similar experience in Tanzania some years afterwards for just under a decade) I developed a sympathy with tribal, modernizing and modern Kenyans from across the country (I have been to every province of Kenya and many in Tanzania on numerous occasions). I developed sympathy with their personal and national aspirations based on experience, not on ideology.

I am also lucky, for young anthropologists do not really know the people whom they will soon study and live among. I have found East Africans overall to be hospitable, gregarious, addicted to the humor of daily life and for a variety of sociological reasons, natural orators and communicators. If you want a taste of this marvelous humor do yourself a favor and follow some of the routines of Kenyan comedian Eric Omondi. He is hilarious and has appeared on TV in the USA.

One of these Kenyans born at the start of the last century is Victor Satya whose writings I follow in the online Newspaper, the Times of Israel. The Times of Israel is a recent start up that is now the most widely read English language news operation in the country. Politically, its editorial position is center/left (which after October 7^th may now be meaningless) and it is open to and cultivates a wide number of bloggers from around the world, who comment on Jewish and Israeli issues.

I am one of them. And as Kenya was my home for ten years, and Tanzania for another seven years, I am particularly interested in East Africans who blog for the Times of Israel. That is how I discovered Victor.

After readings some of his remarkable contributions, thinking that he wrote like a middle aged man perhaps in his late forties or early fifties I discovered that Victor is 26 years old, reminding me once again how swiftly East Africans mature, as they have a country to build and cannot indulge in the extended adolescence that pervades a growing percentage of aimless young Canadians and Americans.

Here is just one articulate, eloquent and understated quote from his analysis of the failure of UNRWA and its participation with Hamas before, during and after the October 7^th massacre:

The facilities told the same story. UNRWA schools, warehouses, and compounds—supposedly sanctuaries of neutrality—were repeatedly found to be integrated into Hamas’s terror infrastructure. Weapons storage. Command activity. Operational cover. The humanitarian emblem didn’t deter terror use; it enabled it. A UN logo turned out to be less a shield for civilians and more a camouflage net for militants. This is where the mask truly slipped. Because neutrality is not something you announce in a mandate—it’s something you demonstrate under pressure. And when October 7 applied pressure, UNRWA didn’t bend toward humanitarianism. It leaned into the same ecosystem that planned, executed, and celebrated mass murder.

I encourage readers to read the full article in his blog of January 23, 2026, as well as his earlier pieces.

Victor Kipkoech Satya was born on August 28, 2000. He is a quarter of a century old, a young man. He belongs to the tribal/ethnic group called by anthropologists the Highland Nilotes or Kalenjin. These are the less famous branch of Nilotic speakers. They are historically, culturally and linguistically part of the wider Nilotic tribal configurations who include the Turkana and the Masai. The Kalenjin have never quite got the attention that the Masai have received during colonial and post-colonial times and were relegated to the sidelines of Kenyan development after independence.

At that time, the government was dominated by the Bantu Kikuyu of central Kenya who had comprised the majority of Mau Mau and other rebels who opposed the continuation of British colonialism after WWII (so many of whom fought for the British during WWII  as far away as China). The Kikuyu elite then insured that they were on the boards of the multi-national companies that were allowed to stay in decidedly pro-Western and anti-communist independent Kenya and that their clients areas were the ones that got the best roads, schools, clinics and scholarships.

When vice president Daniel Arap Moi became the second president of Kenya he took these unquestioned national resources and redirected them to his own Highland Nilotic people spurring economic growth in that part of the Rift Valley that had been neglected and thus giving new opportunities to people like Victor’s parents whose father is a farmer and whose mother is a primary school teacher. New colleges and universities were opened in the Highland Nilote areas and that part of society and country quickly caught up with the former Kikuyu elite.

During the nineteen nineties I worked on projects in this area, and you could feel the energy and upward mobility in the air. It is also a drop-dead beautiful part of the country, cool, green, well-watered, forested and a dreamland for hikers, trekkers and mountain bikers. Peace Corps directed many of its volunteers to this region during the 1990s. Nakuru city is the big city of this Rift Valley area and Victor lives and studies there.

Nakuru, unlike Nairobi, would maintain its dynamism if all the expatriates who make Nairobi so expensive would disappear overnight. This is because this province is peppered with beautiful lakes and game parks that attract international tourism, and Nakuru supplies the needs for the pastoral and agricultural peoples who live in and around this growing city.

And so, one must understand that Victor has been raised and educated in that part of the country which is aspirational and “happening.” He has grown up with satellite TV, free access to the Internet (which is heavily censored in neighboring Islamic states like the Sudan and Egypt), growing numbers of colleges and universities and like so many citizens of developing states he has been studying engineering for the growth, expansion and maintenance of infrastructure is still widely and fairly understood to be a pillar of national development and economic growth.

One of the unsung and unappreciated democratic pillars of Kenya is the widespread dedication to religious freedom. That does not mean that Kenyans are not religious nor committed to their sect or church. Far from it. Kenya is a lively, competitive and theologically disputatious country.

And Kenyans, unlike most young Canadians can quote their Old and New Testaments chapter and verse. A someone who has read the OT and NT in their entirety twice and then some, I would often quote the Bible when working on projects with Kenyan and Tanzanian colleagues for I knew they would know what I was talking about.

Victor was raised Catholic and is a believer. He strikes me as a “Vatican II” type of guy, but we have yet to discuss that in any depth. He has explained to be that by being Catholic, his faith guides  daily life and draws him closer to the shared roots of Christian and Jewish tradition. He interprets the relationship between the Old Covenant and modern Israel through a Catholic lens as enduring and divinely connected.

Theologically he has told me that he “shares in the testimony of God’s promises in Israel’s existence and prosperity.” He  nurtures his spiritual life through prayer and reflection, and his support of the State of Israel strengthens his  worship as he sees evidence of God’s present in the world that we live in.

In his correspondence and Zoom discussions with me so far, he explained that his interest in Israel and thus Jewish history is as one can say, “multi determined.” The first is the regional security threat. Although Europeans ignore the fact that Israel is not only a Mediterranean and Near Eastern country it is also a Rift Valley country. The greatest threat to Kenyan independence is in the northeast where many Somalis are committed to the radical Islam of Al Shabab, who make common cause with the alphabet soup of Isis-like entities that also want to destroy Israel like the Houthi and Hamas.

The second is historical. Being fully aware that not all white people are the same (which was one of the mantras of leftist Africans of the Marxist type) Victor has read enough history to see a parallel with Kenyan freedom fighters who having fought for the British during WWII came to the natural conclusion that they could rule or misrule their own state as an independent people. He sees the spirit of Kenyan Freedom fighters against the British in Kenya as similar in kind to the Jewish fight for independence against the failed British Mandate for Palestine in the land of Israel.

Then there is a commonsense argument that he makes. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish state in the Middle east that has reconstituted its nationhood based on a return to its indigenous homeland. Common sense supports the fact that it should be allowed to flourish. At the theological level, Victor believes that there is room in the world for a Jewish state without any violation of Christian faith which in the past often argued that Jewish statelessness was punishment for rejecting the teachings of the church.

Finally there is the recognition of history. Before the rise of the Internet young Kenyans had little access to good historical documentaries, primary documents and written histories. That has all changed and those of Victor’s generation know about antisemitism and the Holocaust and see the outrageous double standards that are used to demonize Israel today.

Victor does not deny the Palestinians or Palestinian people a future side by side with the Jewish people in the holy land, but he believes that they have yet to show any real commitment to peaceful coexistence and October 7^th is just one more example of this. He reads, he watches the news, thinks independently  and he writes. I for one find his writings to be eloquent and persuasive even though he is writing about people and a country that I have lived and worked in and he has not yet visited. Hopefully, he will get there soon.

Victor wrote to me that he is saving money to buy a ticket to visit Israel, see it for himself and experience it with his own eyes meeting and speaking with the people who live there. I have pledged some money towards his airplane ticket.

I encourage you, dear reader, to do the same. Israel needs visitors like Victor. He is a welcome guest.