{UAH} THE LATEST KENYAN NEWS: The story of Raila Odinga

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The story of Raila Odinga

Posted  Friday, October 4  2013 at  14:06

IN SUMMARY

• This book, like that of the father, is a tale of dreams dreamed and lost, flames lit and extinguished. It is a book as much about Kenya as it is about the Odinga family.

The Odinga family has been a prominent fixture of Kenyan politics for more than five decades, so it is understandable that Raila Odinga's autobiography should come in at almost 1,000 pages.

In many ways, this is a book about the continuation of the political house that Jaramogi Oginga Odinga built. Many readers will find the references to Not Yet Uhuru — the patriarch's own autobiography — too extensive and drawn out, like unending movie trailers in a cinema.

Similarly, the lengthy anthropological thesis on the genealogy of the Luo people, which draws heavily on the published work of Prof Bethwell A. Ogot, feels important but overdone, like a trench coat on a warm summer day.

Yet beyond these walls lies a garden whence the green shoots of Odinga's political culture and ideology can be traced. They are planted on a teenage trip to Uganda where, accompanying his father, Odinga meets Kabaka Mutesa II, the traditional leader of the Buganda Kingdom, and soon-to-be prime minister Milton Obote in a journey he describes as "a real political eye-opener."

This is followed, soon after, by a rally hosted by Jaramogi in Kisumu that attracts doyens of the African Independence movement, including Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Joshua Nkomo and local politicians including Tom Mboya.

The seed germinates behind the Iron Curtain when Raila is sent off to school in East Germany via Egypt, where a two-month wait for a scholarship allows him to take in the pyramids and the River Nile, but also to drink from the fountain of pan-African nationalism that was flowing in Cairo under Abdel Gamal Nasser. Soon Raila is an integral part of European student movements. On his return to Kenya, he quickly runs into trouble with the Moi regime, which eventually throws him into jail. It does not seem to matter whether the "sins" are his or Jaramogi's.

Raila's recollection of his time in jail and his dramatic escape into exile — he had to disguise himself as a Catholic priest, a Ugandan peasant and a Muslim pilgrim, all within in a matter of days — are well told and reveal as much about the man as they do about Kenya's struggle to expand the political space and contest the Kanu one-party hegemony.

If the recollections about the bloody 1990s sound familiar, it is because the story has been told before and could be told of most African countries as the Cold War thawed into heated contests over political participation and contestation.

The chapters on the post-millennium and post-Moi era are more interesting, in particular the alliances and marriages of convenience that litter that first decade like confetti at a mass wedding.

Fresh insights and details are revealed around the 2007 election, the violence that followed, and the arm-twisting over building a government of national unity between Kibaki's Party for National Unity and Raila's Orange Democratic Movement.

There are refreshing glimpses of emotion here — mostly betrayal — but Raila remains largely stoic, the walls of his memories painted in calm colours.

As with most autobiographies, the tone of the book is one of self-diagnosis — descriptive but not always critical. This is to be expected. It might have been cured by a more detached ghost-writer but Sarah Elderkin, who has known the Odinga family and worked with it for decades, does a splendid job of not getting in the way of the story, and of helping to tell it with clarity and care.

The book is an important contribution to the much-needed debate on Kenyan politics and the larger questions of identity and inclusiveness. It is also a reminder of how far Kenya has come and how far it still has to go as a state and as a society.

Supporters of Raila will see in this book a patient statesman who allows the wider good to subsume his ego. More cynical critics will see a lack of ruthlessness where it mattered most in politics, a failure to close the deal and achieve the grand prize. Both are views that are as widely held about Jaramogi Oginga Odinga as they are about Raila Amolo Odinga.

The apple does not fall far from the tree, after all. This book, like that of the father, is a tale of dreams dreamed and lost, flames lit and extinguished. It is a book as much about Kenya as it is about the Odinga family.

THE LATEST KENYAN NEWS: The story of Raila Odinga

http://kenyauptodate.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-story-of-raila-odinga.html?m=0