By Dr. Justus Kizito Siboe Makokha
The nation has lost a part of itself, and the republic, a portion of its soul. On Wednesday, October 15, 2025, as dawn broke gently over the backwaters of Kerala, Raila Amolo Odinga took his final breath on the grounds of an Ayurvedic hospital in Koothattukulam. He had gone there not for politics but for healing. AH is a hospital, a research centre, a quiet place of medicine. But in the stillness of his morning walk, his heart betrayed him. At eighty, he left the world not in fury, nor spectacle. He left in soft finality, far from the crowds that had so often lifted or cursed his name. The sun climbed over Ernakulam that morning, and somewhere far away, a people began to mourn.
And I, like many, have not yet found the full shape of that mourning.
I last met him in person at Taifa Hall, in the soft echoes of tribute, when we gathered to honour Micere Githae Mugo: poet, rebel, beloved, whom Raila admired deeply. That day, I had spoken from the podium as the Secretary General of the Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya, pouring out grief into words, unsure they would carry. When I stepped down, he called to me through his personal assistant.
He had listened. He remembered. He was keen to note that I had studied at the Herder Institute in Leipzig, the same place where, decades earlier, he too had walked the snow-wrapped corridors, dreaming in exile, hoping in German. That unexpected kinship opened a moment. He gave me his number, freely. We later spoke on the phone and he asked me after my wife and children. He asked for her by name, insisted they speak. And they did.
His voice was warm, textured with kindness. He invited us for tea with Mama Ida. “Come one day,” he said. “Let’s sit and talk.” But that day will now never come. The number is still in my phone. If I ring it now, the voice will not come through.
What remains is memory and memory, like a well, keeps giving even when the bucket trembles.
He lived many lives in one: engineer, rebel, exile, prime minister, father, myth. Born in Maseno in 1945 to Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Mary Juma, he was baptized not in water but in politics, in the long ache of liberation. He carried the weight of ancestry like a mantle, moving from Kisumu Union to Maranda High, and then across continents to East Germany, where he trained as a mechanical engineer and learned the language of precision, of systems, of cause and consequence. But Kenya, unpredictable and fevered, would not give him clean lines.
The 1982 coup attempt became a wound from which he never fully healed. Arrested. Tortured. Held for six long years in Kamiti, where even the air resists breathing. Yet he emerged an enigma sharpened, each scar a map toward change. When he joined the push for multiparty democracy in the early 1990s, he did so with dissident slogans tinged with a moral ledger: he had paid in flesh, in silence, in solitude. In 1992, he entered Parliament under FORD-Kenya, and never left the people’s side. He did not just contest elections; he contested the very terms of power.
From the violence of 2007 to the co-signed peace of 2008, from the new Constitution of 2010 to the Handshake of 2018, from petitioned courts to streets humming with protest, he remained the figure to whom many turned because he always won and he never betrayed the cause. His five presidential runs were not failure. He stood for more than victory. He eschewed spirits of tenacity and insistence. Each ballot he lost etched his name deeper into the architecture of the republic.
He was a reader of people, a keeper of the flame of Uhuru, and of grace. And those of us who work with words knew his value. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, that other titan, also gone this same year, walked beside Raila in defiance, in human rights struggles. Both men caged for their conscience, both punished for daring to demand freedom. From the dirty cells of the Nyayo era, from the surveillance and silence, they emerged without bitterness. Ngugi with pen. Raila with voice. They are now joined in memory and myth—figures of struggle, who taught us that liberty must be paid for again and again. Because of them, we scribes now write freely. Because of them, we citizens now vote, however flawed the count, the ritual remains ours.
Raila’s story has been written, and will be again. In his own words, The Flame of Freedom still burns with the intensity of one who walked through fire. It is more than a memoir; it is a reckoning, a long letter to the nation. Others have written too, Babafemi Badejo’s An Enigma in Kenyan Politics and many more will follow.
But no book captures fully the weight of his gait, the curve of his patience, the thunder of his protest. His legacy is not bound between covers. No. I say it lives in counties empowered, in roads where silence once reigned, in ballots still inked with belief.
Now, as I write this, the heartdrums in Nairobi are silent. The moon sits low over Kisumu, reluctant to rise. Somewhere, an eagle drifts over Lake Victoria, tracing the outline of a country half in mourning, half in search. The Luo wind carries his name without a shouted and more as whispers with weight. Baba… Baba…
We will bury him with flags, with songs, with dust in our eyes. But his story will not stay underground. It will rise. I sat it will in market cries, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in the clenched fists of the next generation. And though his phone will ring no more, I will keep the number. As a relic. As a memory. As a private monument. I wail now!
The nation has lost a part of itself.
The republic, a portion of its soul.
But he has not gone quietly. He has left us with a long, bright echo.
And in that echo, w. e will plant his light. A luta continua.
– Dr. Makokha is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Linguistics and Foreign Languages (LL&FL) at Kenyatta University.