Celebrating Pheroze Nowrojee, a legal giant and relentless advocate for justice
Senior Counsel Pheroze Nowrojee at a past function. He died on April 5, 2025.
In a turn of events stranger than fiction, Senior Counsel Pheroze Nowrojee was the keynote speaker at an event held in the US in June last year to honour author Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
A year later, both have died in the US, and their remains have been cremated. Mr Nowrojee died on April 5 at the age of 84, while Prof Ngugi died on May 28 at the age of 87. They died 58 days apart, both just short of 90.
Equally, both were creators of literature, with Prof Ngugi writing across genres and Pheroze penning mostly poetry and short stories when he was not handling legal matters.
“They are now together in heaven,” said Dr Saisi Marasa, the founding president of the Kenya Diaspora Alliance-USA that gave Prof Ngugi the lifetime achievement award on June 22, 2024 at the Georgia State University, with Mr Nowrojee being the keynote speaker.
And whereas Prof Ngugi’s Kenyan memorial was held at the University of Nairobi on June 20, Mr Nowrojee’s will be held on July 10 at the Louis Leakey Auditorium of the National Museums of Kenya. It will start at 3pm.
Mr Nowrojee’s eldest child, Binaifer, said their father died following a bout of pneumonia while he was visiting his children and grandchildren in the United States.
“He was cremated and his ashes brought home,” she noted. “The memorial on Thursday is to celebrate him and welcome him back home.”
Sia, the second child in the family, said: “The memorial is moment we’ve been waiting for for a long time because we wanted to do something that would capture the love that we, as a family, have been receiving since he died.”
The late Pheroze Nowrojee.
Binaifer, Sia and their brother Elchi – who are based in the US – are all in Kenya for the memorial. In separate interviews with Nation, they painted a picture of a doting father whose influence shaped their lives.
Mr Nowrojee’s memorial page on the Internet is glowing with tributes from far and wide. The people he taught, mentored or simply interacted have been writing about their encounter with the man. Some still remember his submissions before the Supreme Court in election petitions in 2017 and 2022.
“Humble to a fault, the towering veteran of the courts was an intellectual who lived a simple life and interacted respectfully with all, even the most junior members of the legal profession and the judiciary,” wrote Deputy President Kithure Kindiki.
Chief Justice Martha Koome stated: “To many of us in the legal profession, Senior Counsel Pheroze Nowrojee was simply ‘Mwalimu’—our teacher, our mentor, our conscience.”
“His legacy lives on in the landmark cases he argued, the scholarly works he authored, and-perhaps most enduringly-in the many advocates, judges, and legal scholars whose thinking he shaped and whose careers he nurtured,” she added.
Law scholar Makau Mutua wrote: “In most eulogies, society valorises even villains. Rare is the person who speaks only the truth at a dead man’s send-off. But with Mr Nowrojee, it’s difficult to find fault with the man, although I am sure his family knows of some, as all our families do. I have scoured his public life and found none.”
When the Nation visited the Nowrojee family home on July 6, his three children had numerous fond memories of their father.
Binaifer, the president of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), said one of the indelible memories is the fact that their house became a home for children of political prisoners being hounded by the government in the 1990s.
“After someone was taken from their home and disappeared, my father and some of these other lawyers would go chasing from police station to police station looking for them,” she said. “And the young children of these political families would come and stay at our house during that time.”
Mr Nowrojee’s wife, Villoo, would spend time with those children.
“And so, our house became a house not just of a house for finding a lawyer but the sanctuary for families of political prisoners,” said Binaifer, who is a human rights lawyer.
“He gave me the interest in justice and in wanting to uphold justice,” she added.
OSF, which Binaifer leads, is a human rights advocacy organisation that works through grant-making and investment strategies. It was founded by American philanthropist George Soros in 1979, and Binaifer is the first head from the Global South.
Just society
She noted that in his final days, Mr Nowrojee was working with young voices in the civic space to nurture the spirit of advocating for a just society.
“He was working with younger Gen Zs… to make sure that the next generation of Kenyans continued the work that he had done through his life—to make sure that Kenya is a more just and equitable country.”
At the time of his death, she added, he had published a number of books that included a family memoir and two short story collections. Post-humously, she noted, the family is going to gather his poems and publish them.
Sia Nowrojee, the middle child in the family, said her father was not just a lawyer but also an artist, poet and writer.
“There were two sides to him. There was the legal side…and he was a poet and a writer. He wrote short stories. He wrote about our family a lot, but he also painted he did watercolours,” said Sia.
“Whenever I watched him painting, he would paint the smallest details in things and I realised he was capturing the minutest beauty in the world,” she added. “He was able to see beauty in the smallest things. So, his art for me was an important part. Almost the flipside of the legal mind was this beautiful artistic mind.”
“He wrote poetry. He wrote poems for us; my brother, sister and I for his grandchildren; for Villoo, my mother; and those were his gifts to us. These very personal bits reminded us to see the beauty in the world.”
Good listener
Sia is a women’s rights advocate. Unlike her two siblings, she did not become a lawyer but went into social work in the footsteps of her mother. While reminiscing about the moments with her father, she also mentioned a trait in Mr Nowrojee that has been mentioned in the tributes published online — being a good listener.
“He was never distracted. If he was talking to you, he was talking to you. If you were telling him your worries, he was listening. He was trying to find a way to take care of you,” she said. “I think that the part I miss the most is literally his face lighting up when any of us walked in a room.”
Sia said Mr Nowrojee worked very hard, “all driven by this love of this wonderful country that he knew could be better”.
“[He was] a son of Kenya in every sense,” she added.
The lastborn, Elchi, is a commercial lawyer based in New York.
Senior Counsel Pheroze Nowrojee. PHOTO | FILE
“My father had a very tangible sense of justice,” he said. “He viewed his professional responsibility not simply as being a technical practitioner, as someone who filed cases and drafted affidavits in the correct way, but something broader than that. Really, he saw the purpose of the rule of law as bringing about the fulfilment of people’s rights and really truly the fulfilment of the potential of the country through the rule of law.”
Recalling the times when his father defended “enemies of the State” when most lawyers could not dare do so, Elchi noted that Mr Nowrojee contributed to the growth of civil society in Kenya.
Mr Nowrojee’s work with Kenyan youth, noted Elchi, was to keep that fire burning.
Gen Z movement
“He was continuing to engage in the struggles of the day. And in the last few months of his life, this was centred around the Gen Z movement that we’ve witnessed over the last 18 months in this country. My father viewed the Gen Z movement as the next step,” he said.
Elchi noted that one of the biggest lessons he picked from his father was how to push back against a system that assumes too much power.
He added: “My father had a huge influence on me, my sisters, on very many people. In terms of my professional life, I have taken away a number of things from my father. One is that it is necessary to be technically excellent. He was truly one of the best lawyers of his generation. And I don't just mean in Kenya. He has lectured in a number of universities in Tanzania, in the United States. And as I became a lawyer, I was able to recognise just how good he was. He truly was a technically excellent practitioner of the law.”
Thursday’s memorial, according to an invite to the Press, will bring together the family, legal peers, civil society and the wider public.
“Across five decades”, the invite says, “Mr Nowrojee stood for constitutionalism, human rights, and civic courage. He defended political prisoners, taught generations of lawyers, and left behind a written legacy that shaped Kenya’s public conscience.”