Kenyan businessman Joseph Sitati felt like a new man when he, his wife, Gladys, and their five children encountered and then joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1986.
And the transformed Latter-day Saint couldn’t wait to share the news with everyone he met in the East African nation’s capital, Nairobi.
Trouble was, the U.S.-born faith was not legal in Kenya so any proselytizing was strictly forbidden. The government did not even allow any unregistered religions to build churches and it limited gatherings to a mere nine members at a time.
So these Latter-day Saint “pioneers” met in homes to share their faith and make connections.
They complied because “it was best to keep in line with the law,” Sitati recalls in an interview, “and partly because of the distances people were traveling to meet.”
[Learn more in this special report and special “Mormon Land” podcast about the challenges faced by today’s Latter-day Saints in Kenya.]
The emeritus Latter-day Saint general authority — Sitati was the first Black native-born African and first Kenyan to reach that level of church leadership — was named the “presiding elder” for the country since there were no organized congregations.
In 1989, Sitati heard about three Latter-day Saints in a Virginia stake (regional) presidency, who had been “fasting” (forgoing food) on a rotating basis for their Kenyan counterparts to be recognized by the government.
He thought that was a wise idea so he enlisted 14 Kenyan members to fast and pray for governmental registration on alternate days (“we kept a close calender”) for nearly 18 months. Finally, in February 1991, Sitati led a delegation to meet with Kenya’s president, and the government approved the request. By July, the church opened a mission and the first missionaries were assigned there.
“I came to know,” Sitati says, “the power of prayer.”
Then came another “miracle.”
Trekking to the temple
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) With the Christus statue overlooking the temple grounds, attendees gather at the Nairobi Temple dedication in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, May 18, 2025.
Church recognition arrived a year after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. For the first time, Kenyans were allowed to travel to South Africa.
Almost immediately Sitati and his family began preparing to make the nearly 2,500-mile journey to the nearest Latter-day Saint temple, in Johannesburg.
The only way for them to get there was by road, so they planned to drive with their children in the back of their truck. They bought a Michelin map to mark the best route, established in-depth daily scripture study and started saving money.
It was going to be “physically exhausting,” Sitati reasoned, so they instituted a rigorous exercise program of waking up early and “running up and down a steep hill in our neighborhood five or six times every morning.”
One day, a friend asked the Latter-day Saint elder to give him a ride to the airport and he reluctantly agreed. It was inconvenient with Sitati’s work schedule, and he wondered why the man didn’t just take a cab. But he decided to do it anyway.
“On the way to the airport, he told me his family had decided to give them [the Sitatis] airplane tickets to Johannesburg for our temple sealing,” he says. “I was overwhelmed. We donated what we had saved to start a fund that would help others [get to the temple].”
That trek to South Africa is no longer necessary for the 21,000-plus Latter-day Saints in Kenya to receive their faith’s highest ordinances. Nairobi has its own temple, dedicated on May 18 and the church’s first in East Africa.
Sitati says he did not imagine he would live to see a Latter-day Saint House of the Lord in Kenya. “The temple was like something that was completely out of reach…You cannot even say I dreamed about it then because that would have been speculative.”
Moving to Utah, returning to Kenya
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) General authority Seventy Joseph W. Sitati speaks at the 3rd All Africa Congress on Religious Freedom in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2018.
Sitati was tapped as a mission president to Nigeria in 2007, and two years later as a general authority Seventy, when he and Gladys moved to Utah. That meant he was away from his homeland until 2020, when the church created the Africa Central Area with him as its first area president.
“When we went back to Kenya,” Sitati says, “I was just amazed by how many people I did not know.”
The church “has grown beyond my comprehension,” he adds. “This is where faith is.”
Though some see the Sitatis as trailblazers, he says, “we have nothing to do with the growth of the church. This is the Lord’s work, and he does it despite us anyway.”
(Courtesy of James Findlay via The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Gladys N. Sitati is a former teacher and employee of Kenya’s Ministry of Education. With her husband, Joseph Sitati, she has addressed congregations around the world.
Since receiving emeritus status as one of the faith’s high-level leaders, Sitati has remained in Utah, living and working in Tooele, while partnering with some 5,000 small farmers in Kenya to produce and market macadamia nuts.
The couple hope their system can become “a model for others to do similar things,” Sitati says. “The object here is one of self-reliance.”
It is, he says, a kind of “missionary work.”
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