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“The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” – Wole Soyinka
After a shared national loss, we’re only just beginning the journey of relinquishing memory. In another future, Raila – the man who stood as tall as the ageless baobab tree in the expanse of the savannah – will be a muffled mystery recorded in legend and histories that will be fighting for space against a new generation’s concerns. But let us linger a bit longer before we relinquish memory. Let us capture for ourselves that which we must store in safe places for the future Kenyan to return and fetch.
Encounter-
There is this photo. It’s on the Internet. Did you see it? It was originally a group picture, but someone has cropped it so that only two people appear in it, and one of them is me. It’s like the remnant of a diaspora wreckage, a time gone by when the ideas of Kenyans living abroad, ideas as big as Garvey’s return-to-Africa ship, almost became real.
In that picture, I’m standing there looking as young as the age of foolish dreams. We were ambitious in a foreign land. We talked about changing a world far away that still lived in us. That’s the diaspora experience – the duality of belonging. You are here, and you are there, and you demand your right to set the compass of that nation far away that is still inside you. We wanted to change Kenya. So we had formed an organization for that purpose. When that picture was taken, twenty-five years ago, I was the Vice President of the Kenyan Community Abroad (KCA), and we were pursuing a diaspora investment dream that would transform Kenya. We were sure of it.
There, standing next to me in the picture, is Raila Amolo Odinga.
Raila was the Member of Parliament for Langata at the time, with big aspirations of running the country, a high-stakes risk-taker and strategist who seemed to enjoy tightrope walking from dizzying political heights. Because how could a man who has been jailed and tortured over a period of nine years by a brutal dictatorship choose to shake hands with his traumatizer in a deal that kept that dictator in power? Raila had played his cards so President Moi, his torturer, would endorse him as the country’s next president-in-waiting. It was his first Handshake.
But Moi publicly picked his predecessor’s son, Uhuru, as his chosen successor and pushed Raila off the tightrope. The first betrayal following the first Handshake was swift and heartless. Mufasa came tumbling down that cliff, hit the ground below, and proceeded to pick up his broken pieces to create new alliances. He united a splintered opposition and rallied a Kibaki wave that defeated the anointed boy-king whose father had derailed the nation’s first promise of independence.
That’s the man who was standing next to me in that photo, taken while he was still in Moi’s government. He had been part of an entourage of visiting ministers and parliamentarians who had come to our annual KCA conference. We had pitched a diaspora investment plan that never saw the light of day despite intense lobbying. KAIF (Kenyans Abroad Investment Fund) was too simple and too ambitious all at once, a dream ahead of its time.
Inspiration-
Had it come to fruition, the Kenyan diaspora – there is not a shred of doubt in my mind – would have been instrumental in constructing Kenya’s major infrastructure, erasing its debt and putting the country toe-to-toe with the Asian tigers. Hunting political goodwill is an extreme sport. No one in government wished to lend muscle to pursuing what did not seem beneficial to them. The idea of fighting for a project that could not translate to votes on the ground seemed like a futile pursuit for any politician. KAIF, dual citizenship, or the institutionalization of presidential debates often felt like a Sisyphean task. And then, sometimes, the stars do align, and the struggle on the ground opens up to receiving the seed of a diaspora idea.
When Hon. Raila Odinga fired up the Orange Democratic Movement that sustained the struggle for a new constitution, it was the inspiration that revived another one of diaspora Kenyans’ big ideas: dual citizenship. Like the embers buried in ash that light up tomorrow’s fireplace, Raila had kept the fire of change alive.
Dual citizenship was entrenched in the law with the new constitution. When then President Kibaki came to Washington, DC in 2005, we read out our demand for dual citizenship in front of a crowd he had come to address. He shot it down with a quip – that you cannot have one foot in and one foot out of the country. That did not stop us because we understood that the post-dictatorship new Kenya that Raila had been instrumental in ushering in did not depend on the whims of a president. It depended on the power of a people, and five years later, we won.
When Raila declared his bid for the presidency in 2002, I wrote to him asking that he accept to participate in a presidential debate. I had worked on a proposal that pushed for the elevation of ideology above individualism in the race for the Kenyan presidency. Neither he nor any other candidate acquiesced. So we ended up having a mock debate, with surrogate candidates, at the National Republican Club in Washington, DC.
In 2007, Raila and other candidates agreed to attend a presidential debate we proposed to stage in the US. It seemed easier to do a pilot in the diaspora, with a Kenyan audience. Still, it did not happen. We started building a foundation for this initiative. I put together a Kenya Presidential Debates team, and for a year, planned, built partnerships, and met with the Executive Director of the US Commission on Presidential Debates just to get an idea of their structures.
Eventually, I put my playwriting skills to good use and drafted a comprehensive debate script. I shared this script with one of Kenya’s leading media houses to partner with us and implement the idea. They went ahead and used the document to hold the debate. Without us.
While we received no credit for seeding the first Kenya Presidential Debate, we succeeded in getting these contestants to showcase their ideas. Politicians employed their personalities as spanners to tighten the bolts on a political culture fuelled by parochial ethnic calculations. It was primitive politics, the kind that many nations in Europe had engaged in before they found a new equilibrium.
The African-
Raila understood this. He would on occasion narrate the history of the Germanic tribes and their endless wars; how one political architect, Otto von Bismarck, eventually united warring tribal kingdoms and nations. Raila saw Kenya and Africa’s discord in the same light: a people stuck on small thinking and ethnic divisions in a time that demanded a far-reaching Pan-Africanism, starting with overcoming the senseless discord in our own country.
The man also came into the political field when Moi was struggling with the implications of IMF and World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programmes. This reality required Kenya’s president to have a solid grasp of Pan-African solutions to a common enemy. But internal jostling to maintain power had blinded Kenyatta and now Moi to the great need to push for a continental front that could counter a West that fed on the dysfunction of the African continent. The goal of the Western power axis was one: to put a check on the rise of powers from any corner of the globe that might threaten its global hegemony. For the West, the possibility of Africa rising as one must be scuttled.
Whatever one thought of Raila’s bid for the chairmanship of the African Union, no one could deny the man’s brilliance in understanding the Pan-Africanist identity.
From a pan-Africanist to a man relatable to all Kenyans, Raila did transcend the smallness of ethnic enclaves. That he never once raised a militia to fight his enemies was a mark of his belief in using our better sense of humanity to solve our big problems. Still, he deeply identified with his ethnic belonging and could not surrender the lures of Luo kingship, a non-institutional position that gave him immense power and influence among the Luo.
In the diaspora, the ethnic walls can be impervious. While we fought for ideas, most diaspora Kenyans slid back into ethnic belonging in their socialization. It is a place of familiar comfort. It can also be a place of silent rejection, of Kenyan against Kenyan, far stronger than the racism we faced in a foreign land.
The disciples’ table and Mary Magdalene-
One day, circa 2006, as I was minding my own business, a friend called me and said, hey, Raila is in town, come over to Safari DC and have a meal with us. Ok, why not? I was going to commune with fellow Kenyans. I expected some of my friends to be there, and a good time to be had. Upon arrival, it was empty downstairs. I made my way upstairs, where I was told I would find my friend and Raila and his entourage. There, in the middle of the room, was a long table around which the dinner guests sat, tight, shoulder to shoulder, silently dipping their fingers into the trays of food laid out at the centre. It was a communal meal where no one spoke.
Raila sat at one end of the table. There was a palpable sense of power, not the kind that felt like cold steel, but the kind you encounter when daddy is finally home to visit briefly, and the children cannot express their joy, a feeling of completeness so that any outsider coming to visit immediately knows they are trespassing on grounds where they will never belong. I was the trespasser.
The only female, I was most likely also the only non-Luo. I sat shoulder to shoulder with other guests, but the seat wouldn’t offer me even a sense of temporary belonging. I stood up after three seconds, mumbled something, and walked out. It didn’t take long to find the humour in it. I laughed long and deep on my way home. I had thought I’d find the face of Kenya mingling freely at a Kenyan restaurant, excited by the visit of a Kenyan hero.
I have no doubt Raila would have been fascinated to know how I had ended up at that disciples’ table in the first place, a Mary Magdalene who had come uninvited. I would have been animated in telling my story of how we carry a splintered Kenya with us to other lands, how we sometimes find embrace within foreign gatherings easier than we find it among fellow Kenyans of different ethnicities. Our community dinner tables are rarely Kenyan, and no, the in-law from another tribe does not redeem us from ethnic prejudice. Kenya is still struggling to be Kenyan.
A man died, a king, they say. Kings don’t always come enthroned by the dictates of established palace protocol. Sometimes, they come into a space forcefully, unstoppable, like the sudden rush of tropical rain amid thunderclap and lightning. And it scares those who feel threatened by this elevation into prominence.
In a country where every election cycle is a battlefield of ethnic kings jostling for one throne, Raila’s candidature would always be greeted with near adoration by the majority in his ethnic Luo community, and with equal disdain by those who saw him as usurping the powers of the rightful king. These sentiments are often intensified in the diaspora, with warring camps in cold war jujitsu moves that spill over onto the pulpits.
Inferno-
At a church service in Baltimore organized by a majority Kikuyu community – and just to be clear, diaspora Kenyan churches are split along ethnic lines, but that’s politics for another day – a sermon was given. In it, the deeply revered community preacherman said that he had a vision – that the next president would come from Gatundu. He gave specifics about this vision, leaving no doubt that the preacherman’s oracle had made it clear it would be Uhuru Kenyatta. It was election season, 2017.
For the main attraction, a visiting preacherman had been invited to take to that same pulpit that had already been set ablaze against Raila. The man of god – you must read this title with the greatest of sarcasm – proceeded to castigate Raila, calling him the devil’s tool, Beelzebub, a witch, everything but a child of God. Holy hands were raised in feverish imbuing of the message, Pentecostal fire sent prayers up to the heavens, calling out the evil that had come to Kenya in the form of Raila. Words could not describe that scene. I sat there and took in the inferno.
That visiting preacherman would soon be sorry I was ever born. Right after the service, while the congregation was still seated, a few people standing up to greet each other, I went up to the pulpit, extended my sincere handshake to the visiting preacherman, and quietly said to him – Thank you for coming to visit us. A visit from Kenya is special. But, Sir, what you preached was wrong. You called Raila a witch. You said he deals in dark spells and he is the darkness that has come to Kenya. You are wrong to speak things you cannot prove, but worse, to preach divisiveness from the pulpit.
I said that to him. He wasn’t expecting it. He just listened and nodded. His host, the revered Baltimore preacherman who had invited him, had it coming, too. I went up to him next and said – Mchungaji, give me a day to come to your office, please. I’d like us to talk. He obliged. When I went to see him on the appointed day, he ushered me through a wide doorway that had “War Room” written above it. I chuckled because I had come to wage war.
Mchungaji and I sat facing each other. I told him – you do good work for the community, a comforter in times of sorrow, a celebrant in times of joy. But Pastor, you did wrong on that day at the pulpit. You spoke of a vision that would have greatly aggravated the other Kenyans who supported Raila had they been present. They, too, would swear they’ve had visions telling them the man from Bondo would take the throne.
It is alright for ordinary Kenyans to make these claims, but you are an authority. You throw in accusations of demonic influence against Raila, and you become an instrument of hate and unrest. What you preached was dangerous talk. I told him that.
All this time I was talking, he thought I was a Kikuyu. When I took a pause, he asked me a question in Kikuyu. I said – Excuse me? He realized I did not understand what he said. I helped him out of the embarrassing situation and told him my name. He did defend himself, especially about the vision, stated that it was his faith and he believed it.
It was right there, beneath the cross inside a church, where hundreds of Tutsis were massacred in Rwanda. It was inside a church in which they had sought refuge, where mothers, children and young men were torched to death in Kiambaa.
I did not speak to him of these examples. In my departing, I invited him to come out to the streets of Washington, DC, and march with us against the cruel state-sponsored disappearings and killings of Baby Pendo, Msando, Bogonko, and others. When I later sent him a text with location details, he responded that he did not believe there were any killings at all. The fear of Raila had created a grotesquerie out of preachermen who were supposed to carry light but who, instead, planted ethnic fear and hate.
Raila was feared at the height of election cycles because he was the crack through which the burning fires of a betrayed nation found a place of entry. And so his life became a fire dance – spectacular, consuming, confounding, liberating, searing. His politics became the embers that landed on the skin of many Kenyans who did not really know him, but who knew he was a man who had eaten fire.
And I was one of the many who did not really know him, but had known him through knowing what he went through. Railaism was forged out of the kiln of a nation’s emerging, and towards the sunset years of the man who bore that fiery branding, Baba emerged.
Baba-
Baba. A father to a stubborn democratic process that had failed to sustain the dream of independence for many Kenyans. More than any other crowning, it was the title of Baba that allowed for the expansion of the man’s embrace across Kenya. Beyond this familiar warmth, Baba’s life spoke to Kenyans of all ethnicities who knew the pain of political oppression. Kenyans, no matter their brand of politics, felt the man’s dedication to a cause larger than himself.
Because how else could you explain the fate of a man who kept being thrown in jail and tortured for no crime except for being a pebble in the shoe of a dictatorship?
When the Union Jack came down, a heavy burden went up; the burden to belong to something new. Beneath the feet of those who danced to the frenzy of uhuru! uhuru! uhuru!, that something new was a country that demanded that the Turkana of the north and the Teso of the south, the Sabaot to the west and the Somali to the east, all be accorded the same rights, provided with the same opportunities, and given equal recognition as co-owners of a new nation.
It would have required extraordinary leadership to make one nation out of many. But alas, Kenya was not so blessed. The leaders who came could only smell the breath of kin, and like the predators who rule the jungle, they chose to protect power and bloodline territory.
One after the other, these leaders betrayed the nation and elevated their kin and their close circle of enablers. Fortunes stolen from the people through the violence of colonization shifted to connected families. Participation in democratic processes was controlled and orchestrated to produce outcomes friendly to a few.
Moments of getting it right were overwhelmed by regimes that could not get the nation-building formula right. The pressure from external influence to stifle the emergence of African nations was immense. It placed an extra burden on naive African leaders who had no control of the global stage upon which their new nations were set.
Raila’s story has always been captivating, a tragedy of sorts that keeps you shocked and puzzled at how a man shakes hands over and over again with his torturers, his betrayers, those who mock him and steal from him and dismiss him, to the extent of turning the handshake itself into a tool of betrayal. Perhaps it is the confounding confrontation between surviving the beast that ripped you apart and having nowhere else to go but into the lair of the same beast.
The man dies, and a new generation now begins to understand his complexity. Most importantly, to understand that no sense of betrayal by the man who died will ever diminish the fact that he never stayed silent in the face of tyranny.
