I came of age as a law student in the long shadow of the Moi era, when fear was ambient and courage was a scarce, almost reckless resource. In those years, we learned the law not only from books but from whispered names, men and women who showed up when showing up carried consequences. Pheroze Nowrojee was one of those names spoken with reverence. Alongside a small, fearless cohort of advocates, he stood between the state and the citizen, insisting, often at great personal risk, that the law could be more than an instrument of power. Through their defiance, some of our earliest human rights jurisprudence in Kenya was carved, not delicately, but with resolve. To an impressionable student, they seemed almost mythic: lawyers who understood that the courtroom could be a site of moral struggle, and that justice, however fragile, was worth defending.
I first met Pheroze years later, when I was a junior legal officer at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. I remember being utterly dumbfounded, conscious of my own smallness in the presence of a man whose work had loomed so large in my formation. And yet, almost immediately, the awe dissolved into something gentler. He was disarmingly simple, unassuming, and kind, so free of pretension that it felt as though he was welcoming you into his confidence. That was his gift: to make you feel at ease, even as you stood before a giant. I would go on to work with him on other human rights cases, learning not just from his formidable legal mind, but from his patience, his listening, and his deep moral clarity.
In later years, I was fortunate to grow closer to him and to his family. His home, shared with his beloved wife Villoo, was always open, a living, breathing commons. People came from every walk of life, as though on pilgrimage, seeking advice, help, solace, or sometimes simply a hug of solidarity. The house felt like a Mecca for the weary and the hopeful alike. Conversations with Pheroze were like reaching into a vast library and pulling out, at random, a volume brimming with knowledge. My favourite exchanges drifted into ancient Persia, the early development of Zoroastrian theology, or his vivid recollections of how legal practice took shape in East Africa. Time bent in his presence. He gave it freely, extravagantly, even when it meant almost missing his flights. Everyone left feeling seen, heard, and somehow enlarged.
Losing Pheroze this year has not been easy. He was to me a mentor, teacher, poet, friend, and one of the most beautiful human beings ever to grace my life. His passing left an ache that words struggle to carry. He embodied, with rare integrity, every moral principle one hopes to find in a human being: an unwavering commitment to truth, honour, and justice. A gentleman in the truest sense, he lived his values rather than proclaimed them. Pheroze showed us, through both his work and his way of being, the quiet but formidable power of the law to dignify lives, to protect the vulnerable, and to lift those most in need. His faith was never loudly worn, but gently visible, in his eyes, in his generous smile, in a humility that shone like a torch in a tunnel.
It is said that one should never meet one’s heroes. I now understand why. No one prepares you for how devastating it feels when you lose them. I have taken long to write this because each attempt was overtaken by that sinking sense of absence. I realise now that the feeling will always be there. And so I pretend, sometimes, that he is still on the other end of the phone line, ready as ever for me to pick his brain, to test an idea, to be gently corrected.
What remains is not absence alone, but inheritance. People like Pheroze leave behind a legacy that still find us in our quietest hours, words that continue to sharpen our conscience, images that remind us what true justice could look like. We grieve him because he mattered. We give thanks because he gave us so much. In his work, his risks, his defiance, and his generosity, he handed us something enduring: proof that a single life, fully lived, can widen the world for those who follow.
At one of his memorials, held in the warm, intimate refuge of Gina Din’s home, we were gifted a story that felt at once lighthearted and deeply apt. Her husband, Captain Chris Kariuki, recalled a moment from the skies: a flight he was piloting, a mischievous collusion with Pheroze, and a gently executed ruse on an unsuspecting first officer. Throughout the journey, Chris kept addressing Pheroze as “Captain,” until the title, half-joke and half-incantation, settled into permanence. From that day on, Pheroze was simply Captain.
I remember smiling at the elegance of the mischief, and then feeling the quiet click of recognition. How fitting the name was. For Pheroze had always been a captain of a different order, steady-handed, morally alert, guiding others through turbulence with calm authority and an unerring sense of direction. My mind drifted immediately to Walt Whitman’s elegy, O Captain! My Captain!, written at the passing of Abraham Lincoln: a poem of grief for a leader who had steered a battered vessel through peril and paid dearly for the voyage. In that moment, the title no longer felt playful, but prophetic. For in law, in conscience, and in life, Pheroze Nowrojee had long been at the helm, and we, his grateful passengers, had trusted him with the journey.
Like Lincoln, Pheroze’s final voyage is complete. The oars are stilled, the charts set down, and the watch has quietly changed. He leaves us not at harbour, but at the helm, hands steadying the wheel where his once rested. Before us stretches a vast and unfinished ocean, uncharted waters, hard crossings, and the relentless labour of justice still calling. And so we sail on, carrying forward the work he consecrated with his life, knowing that the truest tribute to our Captain is not mourning alone, but the courage to keep the ship on course.
NOORMOHAMED 