The Lower Eastern Times Opening The Third Eye
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By: Vincent Mumba
He died in the season of forgetting. A year after the youth he once called his children were shot on the streets, their blood darkening the tarmac like ink, he joined hands with the very men who had ordered it. They said it was Broad-based Governance. They said it was dialogue. They said, Baba wants peace. But peace, in Kenya, has always been a word soaked in betrayal if you look closely.
And that is how Raila Odinga left us, not as the thunderous voice of opposition and not as the man in the trenches as we see in many memes but as a weary old prophet who had outlived his own prophecy.
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The young called him a sellout. The old called him tired. And maybe both were right. Because somewhere between the Finance Bill protests and his final bow, you could see it in his eyes, the fatigue of one who had wrestled too long with the same ghost and realized that the ghost was his country. Might he have stared too long into the abyss?
They said Jaramogi’s rebellion condemned Raila to a lifetime of almost. That every time he came close to the throne, the wind turned. Every time he rose, the country shifted beneath him, as if the soil itself conspired to keep the Odingas at the gates. And yet, like his father, he never stopped trying to enter.
When he entered Moi’s Nyayo torture chambers, they tried to break him. They fed him darkness. They drowned his name in the smell of urine and dirty water. But the man that walked out was not broken but instead he was reborn. He carried the dampness of that place in his voice, so that every word he spoke afterward carried the echo of resistance. That voice, half rage and half faith, became the sound of democracy itself. Even when we lost faith in the ballot, in our leaders, in ourselves, we still said, Let’s hear what Baba will say. Because Baba had been to the pit and returned. Because Baba had seen the inside of tyranny and still believed that Kenya could be good.
’’He was both Moses and Sisyphus, leading people who would never reach Canaan while pushing a boulder that would never stay still.’’
But time has a way of bending even the strongest spirits. When he shook hands with Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the man who once betrayed his father, history sighed. It was as if the circle had finally closed. Some called it reconciliation. Some called it surrender. And again, maybe it was both. And yet, when he did the same with Ruto, the man the streets once called the face of the very system he fought, it felt like the river had turned back, that the current which once carried revolution now flowed toward comfort.
Still, I cannot bring myself to curse him. Because to curse Raila is to misunderstand him. He was not a saint; he was a man who believed too much and who refused to rest even when rest was the only victory left. He was both Moses and Sisyphus, leading people who would never reach Canaan while pushing a boulder that would never stay still. And maybe that was the Odinga curse, to see the promised land, but never to sit in it.
They said he died in Kerala India, far from home, where his heart gave away during a morning walk. But men like him do not die; they just dissolve into memory. They become wind, folklore and heroic songs. They become that resistance that stirs in the chest when the police raise their batons and that courage that floods the streets when the youth say hatutaki! Imetosha. He becomes every chant, every placard and every trembling voice that refuses to be quiet.
But some of us knew, Raila had been dying for years. He was dying in every election, in every betrayal, in every handshake and nusu mkate and every silence. By the time his body gave up, his spirit had already been weeping for us. We will remember him as he was, brilliant, flawed, stubborn, generous and impossible. The man who kept believing long after belief had become foolish.
The man who refused to let Kenya forget its own conscience. And maybe, when history finally forgives him, it will also forgive us, the nation that made him carry all its dreams, only to laugh when he stumbled.
And so farewell, Raila Amollo Odinga. The river that never reached the sea, yet watered every root along the way. The son who inherited a curse and turned it into a covenant. The father who outlived the revolution, yet refused to stop dreaming.
Baba, sleep.
Nyikwai will fight again.
And this time, maybe, we will win.
Vincent Mumba is a writer, reporter and social commentator based in Nairobi. He tweets @Vincent-Mumba14.
