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.
Alliance Girls High School, established in 1948 as the first school for African girls in Kenya, 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.
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One former student, Christine Mungai, recounts her experiences starting in February 2000.
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.
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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.
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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.
Boundaries- student:teacher relationships
Mr. Ayiro's Influence and Teaching Style
Sheilah Mwiti, who joined the school in 2010, recalls Mr. Ayiro as her class teacher. 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 Christian Union and Mr. Ayiro's Role
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.
Institutional Dynamics and Perceptions of Favoritism
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.”
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