Story from: The Teacher and the System, Part I - by Africa Uncensored
Prologue: #IWentToAlliance
I joined Form One at Alliance Girls High School in February 2000. Established in 1948 as the first school for African girls in Kenya, Alliance - or ‘Bush’ as it was nicknamed – carries a storied legacy of excellence, discipline, and leadership. It shaped generations of formidable women and is widely regarded as the country’s most prestigious girls’ secondary school.
I was 13. My parents were in the process of divorcing and it had been difficult to understand what was going on. I mean, I had never heard them fight or argue. That’s what makes parents divorce, right? I was eager to leave home, its hurt and confusion behind, and start a new chapter in my life in boarding school.
On the second day of school, February 4th, 2000, there were just over 40 students in my class, most of us having obtained some of the highest marks in the end-of-primary school exams. Regardless of our achievements, at Bush we somehow knew that we were part of a constellation – we would no longer be the lone bright star of the dusty village school.
Only time would tell whether we had just been big fish in small ponds, and whether we really deserved all the accolades, the awards, and the adulation for being so clever. I wasn’t from a dusty village school and, in any case, we were all there in our freshly starched uniforms that still had the smell of School Outfitters. A new chapter had opened in our young lives and we were ready for the door to fling open.
And then he walked in. My history teacher, Mr. Peter Ayiro.
I remember him as confident, funny, teasing, making little jokes about everyone. I remember being struck by his accent. He stressed his consonants and opened his vowels a little too much; it was an urbane, Nairobi, middle-class accent. At just 25, he was one of the youngest teachers in the school – most of the rest were as old as our parents. I didn’t know that people like him became teachers. I thought he could have done anything with his life. But he was a teacher.
Most remarkable of all, I think, it is that he had a sense of purpose. There was something laser-like in the way he taught us about the Arab Slave Trade and Berlin Conference of 1884. It burned most brightly in the mornings and on the weekends when he would teach the Bible and preach at the Christian Union meetings. I didn’t know anyone like him. We would talk and chat for hours – before or after C.U., in between lessons, here and there at the school.
By the time I left high school in 2003, I was 17, and Mr. Ayiro was more like a friend than just a teacher. In November that year I joined his church, where his father pastored at.
His friends became my friends and, now that I wasn’t that 13-year-old any more, my being his former student faded into a little quirky biographical note that was only mentioned in passing. During this time I saw him every week. I was involved in youth leadership at the church; regularly serving, planning events, and participating in group activities. I was older, but he was still on that pedestal. He was the most upright man I knew.
Then, in July 2006, he invited me to his house on the Alliance school campus. There was a mentorship event for the students to be held on a Monday morning, so he suggested maybe it would be easier for me to spend the night at his house on Sunday, then I’d start the day in school instead of juggling three matatus from home. That made sense, so I agreed. I got there on an ordinary Sunday afternoon. He was 31. I was 19, turning 20 in a couple of months. (I was a little apprehensive about leaving the ‘teen’ suffix behind forever. It seemed daunting, so I’d joke with my friends that I was actually turning ‘twen-teen’).
What happened that day was a physical, sexual encounter. There was no penetration, but a lot can happen without that. The encounter wasn’t forced, in the way we usually understand force. But it also wasn’t something I had the tools to fully process or navigate. In that moment, I didn’t say no – but I also didn’t fully understand what I was saying yes to. I felt disoriented, like I had stepped outside myself, like this couldn’t really be happening.
He was someone I had known for years. I trusted him. He still was a spiritual authority in my life. That context made it nearly impossible to see clearly, let alone resist. I remember feeling like I was swept up in a storm of conflicting emotions: excitement, terror, thrill, disbelief.
What shocked me more than the encounter itself was what followed. It felt like he pulled away completely – he became emotionally cold, and incredibly distant. I would see him every Sunday, but it was as if I didn’t exist. What I felt as that silence, that erasure, was somehow more disorienting than the act itself.
I didn’t expect to be discarded like that – that’s what it felt like at the time. And I didn’t have the language then to understand what had happened. I confided in two friends – both of whom knew him personally – about what had happened. They were surprised, and genuinely wanted to help, but it felt as though the focus was on helping me move on, not on addressing what he had done. One of them encouraged me to pray about it. I don’t remember feeling very angry. Instead, I felt hollow, lost, and very alone.
I went away to university, and when I returned to Nairobi a few months later, he instantly became friendly again, like nothing had happened. So I compartmentalised. I buried the experience so deeply that I convinced myself it hadn’t affected me. But like a tree stump with deep roots, it was always there, unseen. When the dissonance became overwhelming, I left that church.
And for twelve years, I carried on, believing that I was the only one. Thinking this way somehow made that moment such an aberration that I almost believed there was something about me that brought that out in him. That that wasn’t truly him. We even carried on being friendly, though we were never as close as before.
Then, in 2018, someone else told me it had happened to them, too. That changed everything. The moment I heard their story, mine became real. The distance I had constructed fell apart. Everything shifted.
All it took was one more voice. Until that moment, for 12 years, I had truly believed I was the only one. And that belief had made it possible to forget, to survive by not naming it.
What I’ve outlined above is my recollection of events. Peter Ayiro has never been charged in a court of law in relation to this or any similar incident. He has, to the best of my knowledge, never been held accountable in any professional sense either.
For a long time, I had no intention of writing this story. It was only when I began to hear multiple accounts that bore uncanny similarities to mine – accounts that spanned different years, generations, and settings – that I began to see a potential pattern; a forest, not just trees. Even then, I hesitated.
What pushed me over the line were two failed moments of accountability, in 2018–2019, and in 2021. In both instances, credible concerns were raised through both informal and institutional channels, and still, nothing changed.
This is not only a story about one man.
This is a story about the system that seemingly enabled him and appeared to protect him. It’s about how institutions knowingly or unknowingly close ranks. It is about how justice flounders in silences.
This is the story I’m here to tell, drawn from more than two dozen interviews with former students, teachers and staff of Alliance Girls High School, in their recollection, and largely in their words. Some sources have requested pseudonyms, marked with an asterisk () at their first mention.*
At the time of publishing, the school’s board of management was made aware of the content, claims and concerns raised in this story. The board expressed shock and outrage, and promised “strong, decisive and immediate” action.
Ask anyone who studied at Alliance Girls High School at some point in the past 25 years, and they can tell you about Mr. Ayiro.
He was Sheilah Mwiti’s class teacher when she joined the school in 2010. She had studied hard to pass her primary school exams, and felt lucky to be there. But the culture shock, the stress of being away from home, and what she immediately felt as immense pressure to live up to the legacy of Alliance, weighed heavily on her in those first weeks.
“He came across as warm and kind – like someone who really cared about the outcome of your life,” she recalls.
In Form One, he gave the class copies of the book ’The Purpose Driven Life’ by Pastor Rick Warren and told them to write an essay about what they thought their life’s purpose was going to be. They were 13-14 years old.
“It was a bit of an abstract exercise for Form One students, but he really seemed to want us to think about long-term vision,” she remembers. “He always emphasised kindness, and acknowledged that boarding school, and Alliance in particular, could be terrifying. But he reminded us to be nice, to be kind, and to look out for each other. That was very much his vibe.”
Peter Ayiro began teaching History and German at Alliance Girls in 1999, arriving at the school with a degree in Education from Kenyatta University. From early on in his career, he wasn’t exactly a rule-follower in the classroom. Ex-students describe him as a bit of a maverick when it came to his style of teaching.
Unlike many of his colleagues who stuck closely to the textbook and rote note-taking, ex-students say he often incorporated outside materials, like videos and supplementary readings, and encouraged students to think critically about the content.
His teaching style was at times unusually dynamic and engaging, more reminiscent of Western education systems that the students caught on television or in movies, than the traditional Kenyan emphasis on memorisation and exam preparation.
Some students thrived in that environment, but some struggled.
“Not everyone appreciated his Socratic methods of teaching through open-ended questions and conversations,” recalls one student, who asked to remain anonymous. “Especially if in primary school you thrived off of remembering facts, the Socratic way just feels strange. But I think it was something that I quite enjoyed, and so I very much looked forward to his classes.”
Sheilah remembers him having a bit of a “rogue teacher” reputation.
“Sometimes he’d just use the whole lesson to hang out with the class, just talking with them and giving them stories. And a lot of students really liked that, obviously, because it meant you got to chill instead of learning.”
Then, out of nowhere, he’d show up and give you a really tough exam, just to remind you that he was still a teacher. “I’d say he was kind of an oddball.”
Evelyne*, class of 2006, was one of those who didn’t like his teaching style. Outside the classroom, however, she considered him more like a friend.
“His office was one place I could walk in-and-out of freely. As a teenage girl in boarding school, it was just nice to get good attention. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
Their conversations, she says, could be about anything – stories from home, how her day was going, how she was feeling. “There was always friendly chit-chat. I wouldn’t describe all teachers that way, though. To me, he wasn’t just a teacher – he was my friend. I respected him as a teacher, but I also knew he was my friend.”
The other thing old girls of the school will tell you about Mr. Ayiro, is that he was a born-again Christian, the co-patron and later, lead patron, of the Christian Union (C.U.) from the 2000s onwards. They talk about his undeniable role in their spiritual formation, in a school that has a strong Christian heritage and tradition.
Evelyne remembers starting her day with Morning Devotion, a morning prayer time that Mr. Ayiro started at the school in 2003.
“Morning devotion was a great way for me to start the day – personally, it just set the right tone. Since it was every day, it just became part of my routine. He’s the one who began it, which means I was seeing him every day.”
By the mid 2010s, Peter Ayiro’s status, influence and position in the school had expanded as he became a more senior teacher, and on the back of his born-again identity and patronage of the C.U.
In addition, his father, Pastor Aggrey Ayiro, had been one of the pastoral leaders of Chrisco Church in Nairobi in the 1980s and 90s. Peter was the first-born in the family of four sons, although there were numerous cousins and extended family members who grew up together and who, even in adulthood, would be considered part of the Ayiro home.
Pastor Aggrey would leave Chrisco in 2003 to start a new congregation, Kingdom Life Centre, but for a generation of evangelicals in Nairobi, Pastor Aggrey was widely known. Chrisco, too, was well-known as a nationwide network of evangelical congregations.
When Sheilah was a student in the early 2010s, Mrs. Dorothy Kamwilu was the school principal. She, too, reportedly professed her faith as a born-again Christian, as did her deputy principals. However, Sheilah recalls Mr. Ayiro as almost being a de facto deputy principal himself, due to the trust that the school administration, and particularly the principal Mrs. Kamwilu, had in him. Several former students and teachers have corroborated having this perception.
If you think of a school not just as a place where lessons are taught, but as a power structure of sorts, with ordinary students at the bottom, prefects slightly higher, then teachers above them and the school administrators over them all, Sheilah describes Mr. Ayiro in her time (2010-2013) as “right next to the principal” in the power structure.
“When I was there, Mrs. Kamwilu really liked him – like, really liked him… he and the principal were besties. He could do whatever he wanted. He could pull you out of class and take you to Chicken Inn – just for the vibes, I guess.”
Mrs. Kamwilu declined to comment on this story, saying she was now retired.
It’s not unusual for a teacher – especially one with such rapport with them – to reward students with small gifts to recognise their effort or good performance in a test, and the like. But several students from the early and mid-2010s say Mr. Ayiro went over and above, for instance by taking small groups of girls out of school to go to eat at city restaurants, like Java House, in the evenings, in his car.
That would be unusual for a teacher to do, especially because from the reports gathered as part of this investigation, there is no evidence to suggest that these were official trips sanctioned by the school.
It wasn’t always the same girls, but there did seem to be a favoured group at any one time. Other former students recall the teacher organising birthday parties for his favourite students – complete with cake – which by 2012 was against the school rules.
Several students from different years – even as recently as 2023 – said that being close to Mr. Ayiro came with benefits. Apart from the small gifts earlier mentioned, there was access to junk food to blunt the monotony of a boarding school diet. There were bigger perks too, like getting to be on a list of an official student excursion out of school, to outside church services, concerts, music festivals, and the like.
One student (class of 2020) described how Mr. Ayiro even seemed to have the power to influence who would go out of the country for international student exchanges or post-school scholarships – at least that’s the impression he gave them.
“It was almost like if you were going to hang out with Mr. Ayiro, you didn’t even have to do prep,” Sheilah (class of 2013) explains, of the weekday evening time for students to do assignments and independent study in class.
“You could leave dinner from the dining hall [at 6:30pm] and go straight to [his office] the German department, and leave there at 10pm – basically when you’re going to bed. You didn’t have to go to prep, you didn’t have to attend a class. If you were in the German department hanging out with Ayiro, you could ‘unofficially’ miss classes,” says Sheilah.
The German department, along with most of the other teacher’s offices, was right opposite the main classroom block. If the lights were on at night, you could see right into the office – which means this was happening in the full view of anyone passing by.
How was this possible in a school with daily roll-calls, intricate rules about where students had to be at any given minute of the day, and prefects to monitor it all?
“Honestly, I think it was just audacity,” reflects Sheilah. “It was that kind of energy. And after a while, people started to believe it. Because if the principal is your homie like that… I really think that relationship is what catapulted him.”
Being friends with the principal seemed to give him a lot of credibility, she says.
It wasn’t just during Mrs. Kamwilu’s time. In the years that Mr. Ayiro has been teaching at Alliance, there have been seven school principals. Several teachers have described him as being “very close” to many of the previous school principals, especially from the mid 2000’s onwards.
Sheilah adds, “There’s also the fact that there never seemed to be any consequence, for what he did just solidified the idea that whatever he was doing wasn’t that serious. Like, it just became ‘his thing’, something quirky or funny that he did – haha – and not something to question.”
Achieng*, another student who joined in 2014, attributes this freedom and immense trust – and what appears to be clear boundary-breaking – to Mr. Ayiro’s reputation as a man of God, a person of integrity, and a faithful and dedicated Christian.
“Mr. Ayiro, along with the principal and the deputies during my time [2014-2017] were perceived as carrying a certain level of ‘anointing’, which was significant in shaping the way the school’s administration functioned,” she says.
Alliance Girls’ High School’s motto, “Walk in the Light,” is meant to be a guiding principle – calling students and staff alike to live with honesty, courage, and moral clarity. But for some former students, that light may have cast long shadows too. The reverence afforded to figures like Mr. Ayiro seemed to create an environment where authority and anointing were conflated – and where questioning such figures was akin to questioning God himself.
As Achieng recalls, Mr. Ayiro’s apparent closeness to the administration gave him permission to bend the rules, all while cloaking his behavior in spiritual legitimacy. In such a context, “Walk in the Light” appeared to not be a standard to uphold, but a slogan that deflected scrutiny.
“He enjoyed full support from Mrs. Kamwilu, which is the reason why he told us he could take girls out of school. He openly attributed this trust to Mrs. Kamwilu, even when concerns were raised about his behaviour. It was a very tricky situation because everyone in the school knows Peter is a dangerous man to have around girls,” says Achieng.
Achieng was an active member of the Christian Union at Alliance Girls.
“I think that teachers, especially male teachers, should never cross certain boundaries with students. But Mr. Ayiro did. I would say he would make inappropriate comments and give hugs that crossed the line – hugs where you could clearly tell something wasn’t right. You could see it, you could sense it, and it was impossible to ignore,” she says.
Achieng recalls witnessing him hugging girls tightly, “with his pinky finger and ring finger touching their bum,” but she would look away.
“I didn’t want him to see that I’d noticed. I did that so many times… I couldn’t let myself act shocked or uncomfortable. Instead, I’d look away and pretend it was normal, even though it made me uneasy.”
Achieng also got to witness how these things were handled in the C.U.
“I remember [him making] inappropriate comments to girls, saying things like, ‘You’re so hot,’ or ‘I love you’, – comments that were entirely out of line. But if you ever asked him about it, instead of outright denying it or apologising, he would…deflect responsibility, by sometimes even volunteering more information, unprovoked…about how so many women [out there] want him.”
Peter Ayiro has denied ever hugging students in an intimate or suggestive way.
However, more than a dozen former students and teachers have corroborated that by the mid 2010s, there were widespread rumours about Mr. Ayiro and his conduct towards the students. And every year there seemed to be an inner circle – and muted discomfort.
“It wasn’t overt, like, ‘Oh, I think he abused this girl,’ but there were always whispers. It was like, ’I don’t think he’s doing good things in the German department’, that kind of thing,” Sheilah says.
“There was definitely competition for his attention,” she adds, describing how her deskmate once constantly tried to befriend him and get his validation.
“My deskmate would sometimes ask me, ‘Can you take me to the German department? I want to ask him something. I wrote him a letter. I want to give it to him. I want to give him this gift.’ It was that kind of thing.”
But this wasn’t merely adolescent frivolity or just crushing on a teacher. These were girls coming of age in a high-pressure academic environment, where excellence was the norm and adult validation was a scarce but prized currency. To be noticed by a teacher – especially one seen as cool, kind, and spiritually grounded – felt like a signal that you were not just smart, but seen.
What they were seeking, ultimately, was recognition. And in him, they found an adult who made them feel as though their voices, ideas, and presence mattered. It was that deep adolescent desire to be taken seriously.
He had a really “shiny” persona, as Sheilah describes it. “He came across as – ‘I can pull you out of class. I can take you to Java. I’m super religious. I’m chill and funny. I’m kind and fair.’ That made you crave his attention – it felt prestigious.”
Was he aware of the effect he was having on the girls?
“Of course he did. Do you know what a 14-year-old looks like when they’re really interested in something? They’re bright-eyed, eager, and hopeful,” says Sheilah. “Even without context, you can tell when someone is desperate for your attention. That’s not hard to see – especially for someone who’s intelligent.”
He couldn’t have missed it, Sheilah says.
“And on top of that, people were talking. There were whispers: You’re hanging out with these young girls a lot. It’s suspicious.”
“So, he knew. He knew there was some disapproval. But I think he got bolder. It was like – ‘yeah, people are saying things – but so what?’”
Four former teachers at the school interviewed as part of this investigation all say that the rumours were well-known, but there was never any first-hand, “concrete” evidence of anything untoward. No student ever came forward.
“This is something that has always disturbed me,” says one former teacher, who retired in the early 2020s. She asked not to be named. “There have been rumours all through, but he was so close to almost every principal in the school over the years.”
Read the full story on the link provided above…
