By Cde Wanjohi wa Makokha
Fellow citizens, scribes,
If it were possible to measure the worth of a Kenyan by the ease with which words are found to describe him, I would fear I’ve been tasked by the Muse with praising too ordinary a life. Yet, in standing before the memory of Mzee Raila Amolo Odinga, I am struck less by the difficulty of speech than by the ungraspable vastness of the man himself. While we knew him, we never fully understood him – our enigma. While we followed him, we rarely reached the places he saw.
Scribes of our land, there are men whom history elevates through conquest, and others who are shaped in the crucible of renunciation. Raila’s place in the arc of our national memory rests upon a truth more elusive: that some destinies unfold through attainment, yet through a persistent, almost inexplicable presence across time, trial, and transformation, dwell other destinies as well.
Born of a legacy already steeped in our national struggle against empire and the renaissance of a continent, he emerged as the echo of his father’s voice and as a sound all his own – a sound both old and new, deepened with every silence he endured and every protest he embodied.
Although his early years were molded in the precision of engineering and the rigors of education abroad, it would be within the rough terrain of postcolonial politics and public pain that his enigmatic figure would take shape right here in Kenya. Raila’s decisions, often inscrutable in their moment, appeared guided by a vision obscured from most.
If his actions at times confounded even his followers, including myself, it was because they stemmed from a conviction located in the realm of ingenious strategy and the deeper soil of conviction. When he declined vengeance, it was not to please the crowd; when he embraced compromise, it was not to surrender his ideals; and when he stood back from power, it was never in retreat.
As the last of his generation of political top leaders of our second republic, born out of the repeal of Section 2A of the old constitution and the promulgation of the new one, he played a crucial role in shaping our nation’s history. The constitution that anchors our common life bears his imprint in footnotes and in the principles that allow dissent to breathe and dialogue to flourish.
His detentions and political betrayals, which to most would signify failure or defeat, became the very mythopoetic landscape through which his enigma grew. For while others sought definition in power attained, he seemed to accept that his role lay in something subtler. Think of Raila, son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, as a threshold through which the nation might repeatedly confront itself after each cycle of 60 months since the turn of the century.
The voice of Baba was never strident, though it carried through generations; his steps were never hurried, though they traversed decades and bespoke of his sporting days; and his inimitable presence was never fleeting, though history often left him waiting just beyond the gates of formal triumph.
To speak of Comrade Raila is to speak of a paradox formed by indescribable contradictions and by the incredible hidden design of a man who chose to be loyal to a dream even when the dream delayed its arrival. His was not the clarity of those who draw straight lines through history; I believe he walked in spirals, not aimlessly so, but in the slow uncoiling of a vision larger than any single moment could contain.
Now that he has left us, I shut my misty eyelids, and behind my misty spectacles, I see not a victor ascending but a servant completed of tasks set before him by the heavens and ancestors.
What shape does a nation, a sanctuary of black lives, take when its most persistent advocate has stepped away? What remains of a dream when its steward is no longer here to chase it? And how do we measure a life whose greatest contributions may yet be ahead of us, living on in the laws we uphold and the courage we muster?
Let no one say that Baba was ever misunderstood simply because he was mysterious, for mystery is not confusion. Mystery requires silence rather than speech to reach its essence and existence. In the silence of Raila Amolo, son of Odinga, now, we hear the echo of all he could not yet say.
May his name, the Right Honourable Raila Amolo Odinga, not be entombed in marble and black firestones! Let us let it be engraved upon the conscience of this Republic of Red, Green, Black, and White! Let it be so not because he was flawless, but because he was faithful. Let it be so because he never withdrew.
And, fellow people of this republic, let it not be so because he gave us all the answers; let it surely be so because he dared to ask questions we are still learning how to face!
Kenyans, mourning Kenyans, though Baba Raila lies now beneath the black skies of the bright republic he loved and contested to lead into visions in his wise eyes, his legacy remains suspended as a question still alive. And perhaps, in that final enigma, he becomes most fully ours.
Long live Raila, son of Jaramogi! Long live Raila Amolo, son of Kenya! Long live Comrade Raila Amolo Odinga, son of Africa and the Earth!
A luta continua! Victory is certain.
-Dr. Makokha is the Secretary General, Literature and Performing Arts Society of Kenya (LPASK).