by OP | Oct 23, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
When Baba died, I became numb.
He died of a heart attack at eighty years of age. He collapsed in a modest clinic in Kerala India one morning after his routine walk. They said his body guard and personal doctor tried to revive him with CPR and that his last born daughter was there to hold him as he took his last breath. At my age, I had witnessed the passing of many national figures, but I’d never imagined that this one would feel so personal.
Baba had spent five decades as a political engineer, engineering a new vision for a better Kenya. He rose to the apex in his political career as the symbol of democratic reform and even though he was never elected president, he was the beloved people’s president. An elder statesman and a master bridge builder.
He first came to my attention as a political prisoner in the 80s, spending a total of 8 years in harsh detention conditions and surviving it to move out of his father’s shadow and build an illustrious career in political defiance, before becoming the ultimate pragmatist who always pulled the country from the brink with recurring political handshakes. His life was never quiet despite his advanced age and he continued to build, mentor and raise the political consciousness of the nation.
He was the man everyone thought to call when the nation itself was burning.
Over the years, I had learnt how to see him as a man and not just as a political figure. He embodied the hopes of my generation and he was the last of our second liberation heroes who remained relevant straight to our adulthood. Baba, was a constant of our political reality and for my parents generation who revered him, he stood like a lighthouse.
Baba was a complex character and I didn’t always understand his political motivations. He broke my heart many times but I never stopped admiring his ability to stay relevant and his impeccable sense of occasion. Baba embodied all our political disillusionment and hurts, our historical wounds of exclusion, the ethnic prejudice, and the elusive yearning for a just future.
Now, the biggest tree in the homestead had fallen and the people were discombobulated.
When the news of Baba’s death arrived, I worried about how the country would react. He had died abroad and the announcement came that Baba had to be buried in 72 hours. I had never felt such a seismic shift in the political atmosphere and my world was spinning, all I could see was darkness.
I knew Baba’s tears would come and I braced for the tension of the wake. This was no time to be stoic, for our symbol of stoicism had breathed his last.
I remember watching the hysteria take over as his body arrived from India. Mourners overran the airport, unruly grief was on display that degenerated into chaotic scenes at Kasarani stadium where the body was taken for a public viewing. I watched in dismay at the government’s irrational response of tear gassing and firing shots to contain overwhelmed mourners.
The trigger-happy security forces, the ethnic profiling, the lack of empathy, the denigration of the ordinary citizen’s grief.
I remember watching the next day as his body lay in state in Parliament, as the country’s political class got a chance to pay their last respects. I watched their faces, caught the performance, the bewilderment, the genuine grief that bared itself. He laid there, draped in an orange sash and black suit, an odd sight for a man remembered for his boundless energy. The ordinary people who truly loved him held nothing back when his remains were wheeled to Nyayo stadium in Nairobi and later to Mamboleo Grounds in Kisumu. I thought about the millions watching it on livestream around the country and the world. We were all escorting Baba, united in our grief.
I had not seen such a unified gathering of Kenyans since the first election of Barack Obama in 2008 as the first Black President of the United States of America. That moment was solidarity; this was an unprecedented grief.
This was the first time I had seen my country come together in the same emotional space. Hundreds of thousands of citizens from all sides of the political divide paid their final respects to Baba. The country stopped for the four days leading to his final interment. Many were given a proper introduction to Baba’s extended national family and political networks that consisted of multiple generations, all claiming an intimate association with the man everyone called Baba.
The country was steeped in pensive mourning. That spirit combusted the moment the body arrived in Kisumu, where Baba was met with the deafening wailing of multitudes, crying out for a glimpse of Raila, Agwambo, Jakom, Tinga, Wo nyalego, Wuod Mary.
Lit, lit, ndii!
It was in Kisumu, after the moving sigweya, the funeral dirge by the Luo elder Ajiki Koth Yamo that Baba’s tears finally arrived, rolling freely down my cheeks. I knew then I wasn’t weeping alone; the elder’s sonorous chant was the nation’s permission to grieve.
I remember the date of the state funeral was set for Sunday, four days after his death. The burial date would be on the 19th day of October, in Kang’o ka Jaramogi, in his ancestral homeland in Bondo where he laid next to his father’s mausoleum.
Funerals are also history classes, sites of memory where forgotten branches of the national family tree are traced. In the shadow of the coffin, the country revisits the archives of its pain and is forced to confront the unfinished lessons of its struggle and reform.
I found it mildly amusing but mostly sad that the political class used the stage to immediately begin carving up the power vacuum, reasserting old rivalries and desperately laying claim as the rightful custodians of Baba’s legacy.
I knew the spectacle would soon be over and that the real mourning would begin after the cameras moved on and the flags went back up. First comes the shock of the loss, followed by the frenzy of the funeral and once the deceased is buried under concrete, the second wave of grief kicks in after the adrenaline rush and numbness wears off.
Only then, can one grasp the magnitude of the loss as the weeks and months unfold. The listlessness and disorientation that follows you everywhere, and the triggers erupt-that primal fear of becoming an orphan, unprotected, unseen, and exposed. The true grief work, the task we so love to avoid, can only begin then.
I knew this grief so well. It’s the kind that bangs on your door demanding entry, and when you claim that there are no chairs for you to sit in this house, it answers back coldly. “ I brought my own stool.” This was the silence of absence, the helplessness that dominates the thoughts of life after. For us, Baba was that parental figure whose death had never been factored into our reality. The signs could be right in front of you but for a loss of this magnitude, you are never ready.
Chalgi ngero, thoo wuod Odinga, Chalgi ngero.
The night before he was buried, I had my curated Baba playlist on repeat. Coster Ojwang, Musa Juma, Lady Maureen, Emma Jalamo, Prince Indah. I found myself clinging to the refrains, which served as an endless dirge. I needed the music to bear me through the darkness, finding my solace in the song, in the words I couldn’t, wouldn’t stop singing, resisting all attempts to return to normalcy.
How could they understand? We weren’t mourning a politician. This one had transcended that label. They knew him as the right Honourable Raila Amollo Odinga, the party leader, Agwambo the enigma, Tinga the force, Jakom the General, Baba the patriarch. But he was also Amollo, the human. The epitome of ordinary extraordinariness.
The one who embodied our essence, kitwa, our nature. He was the caricature of many dedicated to service, yet he was the special one because he had been tried and tested like no other. He always rose again from the ashes like a phoenix, with that cheeky smile and sparkle in his eye. Amollo was a man whose humanity mirrored our highest hopes and deepest struggles, one who took his personal pain and forged it into purpose.
Amollo taught us how to hold pain and transform sorrow into strength. He was our grief alchemist who turned suffering into blessings.
I met Amollo in close proximity twice and both times were rather late in my life. The first time was at the United Kenya Club foyer in Nairobi. I stopped him on the way to the bathroom to share news of my cousin Adhiambo’s passing, knowing his acquaintance with her mother, my Aunty Raduodi. He paused, shared his condolences and asked me to pass his sympathies. Just two men, talking briefly, sharing loss.
I stumbled into him the second time in my own village while visiting my cousin Bill Okwirry during Christmas. There was Amollo, amidst friends and family, listening to loud music, laughter and whisky. It was an image of stunning normalcy for a man who, just months before, had suffered a humiliating election defeat after his fifth attempt at the presidency.
I met Amollo, at many other funerals and it was on those stages that I realised that he was also a historian and griot. At my late uncle Okeyo’s funeral, he arrived halfway through the ceremony, momentarily disrupting the proceedings. When he was given the mic, he regaled everyone with a history lesson, posing questions that reminded us of our shared ancestry.
“Who are these people called Abasuba? Where did they come from?
This was a uniquely human feature about Amollo; he was a constant reminder that we are all family. Indeed, it was hard to find a relative in old Nyanza who wasn’t one degree of separation from an acquaintance of the Odingas.
The true warrior dies on the battlefield. Death found Baba on the go. Even at eighty, he had refused to slow down. Now he rests, the storm has passed and we can finally begin to assess the loss only after a central defining figure exits the stage.
This reckoning will take time, certainly years, before we come to real terms that Baba is not coming back. You cannot know what you have lost until you have walked through the aftermath because life goes on, and living, we must live. That is when the real, inner pain is revealed, the kind that lingers despite the course of time because that love has nowhere to go.
His physical presence has left us; the Mbii, his inner force is now subject only to archive and memory. For his presence, our eyes search again.
Where do we find another, like him?
Lowo otero Amolo maa nyocha wa hero!
Baba was our crucible holding together our searing contradictions: the purity of a singular political dream against the murk of political pragmatism and he was able to hold those contradictions without shattering.
So now we can only grieve working our way through the stages of shock and denial. The pain and guilt may follow as the reflections deepen in his absence. Then depression might come knocking as people come to terms with how dependent they were on an individual. It has only just begun. The state funeral was a ritual necessary to manage the aftershock.
But we also celebrate because his spirit has finally been liberated from the limits of an earthly existence and all that he represented has been unleashed. This is a generational gift and his story will carry the nation through new seasons of trials. Like Winnie Mandela, he multiplied and we have to grow up and embody what he stood for.
There is no saviour coming. The desire is for another Baba but that same strength now belongs to the collective, who must find the power for their own becoming. Baba’s life’s work is incomplete: his legacy is a call to a generation to complete the work he started.
I return to my playlist, to Coster Ojwang tribute to Raila, who teaches us how to mourn and celebrate stomping the ground, and singing unrestrained,
Oh’ this earth, this earth,
Oh my people, let’s stomp the earth,
This earth is a wizard,
This earth that took away the Amollo that we loved,
Baba’s gone and he is not coming back.
The brave one has left us.
Mayoo wee! Amollo osenindo
Chalgi ngero, thoo wuod Odinga, Chalgi ngero.
by OP | Oct 16, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
When I started the book tour for my debut book Strength and Sorrow, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. I had put together a relentless schedule that involved visiting two cities, Nairobi and Kisumu, in between rushing home to see my mum in the village in Gem. A few friends had said nice things about the book, even got some critical reviews from noted Kenyan personalities but I still wasn’t sure. Kenyans are by nature polite in personal interactions and we can be economical with the truth where relationships are valued. Online, behind the veil of anonymity, Kenyans can be rabid and when they turn on the fury, the attacks can be relentless. With this new generation, there is no such thing as sacred cows.
I was nursing this trepidation as I squeezed onto the middle seat on my KLM flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi. I was seated between an Asian lady and an older white man from America who I discovered was making a trip to a charity home he supported in Nairobi. Half way through the flight, we eventually broke the ice and curiosity got the better of him when he saw my copy of Strength and Sorrow and asked what the book was about. I asked him to read the back jacket and that triggered a conversation about his unresolved grief that he had not realised he had been holding. He talked about a complicated relationship with a deceased father and still nursed regret over the passing of a child. It was a conversation he had never ventured and decided right there on the plane to buy a book. This spontaneous confession was a harbinger of the tour that I did not see yet.
I was returning to Nairobi after a two year hiatus. The last time I was home was the first year memorial of my sister, Nyangi, who was now the prominent character in my book. It is something to return home after some time away. Home had changed in many ways, yet it had not, in a kind of same old but different way. The vibe was familiar, the actors younger, the pace faster. Roads once familiar were now dwarfed by high rise towers cropping around the city like wild mushrooms. The expressway from the airport straddling the city dominated the cityscape, a marker of a city in a hurry to grow up. I once wrote a piece, titled, Me, I love Nairobi and in it I recalled how I always carried a piece of Nairobi with me and the distinction was formed then. A city isn’t merely infrastructure, sights and scenes. A city’s soul is its people.
I used to wonder whether I would change. Would I be like the other diasporasians I had seen who suddenly lost all sense of nuance after just a few miserable winters abroad, began to look down on their own? Stepping away seemed to have had the opposite effect on me and it took this book to really show me what it means to belong.
This notion of belonging was immediately tested as I faced my former public self. When I announced that I had published a book and would be going on a book tour, the reception was warm. I was reminded of how big Mantalk was, the weekly national column in the Daily Nation that I laboured over for a decade that has now become part of the country’s cultural landscape, a reference point to a bygone era, for many stuck in nostalgia. I was no longer the Mantalk guy. I had traveled far both within and without. I had grown up but to many of my readers, I was still that guy, who showed up every Saturday, a mysterious figure, who ruffled feathers. The man some female readers used to love to hate.
I had been part of several life journeys unwittingly, something people grew up with. And like all fans of urban culture, I was a mascot for those bygone times. Yet here I was, older perhaps wiser, certainly a lot more humbler. I had just poured my soul into a book that detailed my own journey away from the glam and fame of the national spotlight and delved into trying not only to make sense of my unresolved grief but also the grief of a nation. The shift in persona was stark: From a young man who used to critique modern rules of chivalry to one sharing lessons on how to navigate the profound loss that follows the death of a loved one.
To reach these moments of connection, I first had to navigate the city itself. My first stop the night after my arrival was the Prestige Bookshop and Nairobi traffic, well, what has changed, the roads remained clogged and nothing quite captures Nairobi’s class dynamics as the expressway, raised above, smooth and scenic, with arresting views of flashy high rise buildings obscuring the reality of chaos that rules just underneath it, bottle neck traffic, matatu madness and bodas that now make matatus appear quite tame. It became a metaphor in hindsight of how we process grief, stoic and contained on the surface but underneath the facade, a bubbling volcano waiting to erupt.
I remembered Prestige bookshop from another time, when the city centre was a little more serene and Mama Ngina street still had a taste of the bourgie back when 20th Century Plaza, the Hilton hotel and the International Life House were iconic features in the city centre. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was launching her second novel DragonFly Sea in the small book shop. The shelves had been pushed to the side to create space for the fans and I was the MC of the day, here to celebrate one of Kenya’s finest novelists. I looked at the bookshop now, wondering how we had pulled it off, for there seemed to be hardly any room to swing a cat.
When the people started to come through, I knew this was going to be special. Odd that despite 28 years of a public writing life, I had never signed an autograph. I remained struck that people would endure Nairobi traffic to meet over a book and demand of my bad handwriting inscribed on their personal copies.
In a profession, where we prefer to stay away from the limelight, the simplicity of a meet and greet is a humbling experience. I didn’t know what to expect and then, as a new world and role began to unfold for me. Lost connections revived. People I had gone to school with, names I had seen or heard from in years. Friends, family, acquaintances, total strangers, with entwined pasts and reminders of a time once spent in communion and between the firm handshakes and tight embraces, it took me a minute to realise what was happening.
I was being honoured and celebrated. When I went to Ukombozi library, to donate a copy of my book, I was warmly welcomed by Kimani Waweru, the resident librarian. This special archive had since changed location to a nondescript building on Moktar Daddah street, up a narrow stairway to the second floor and it held one the best collection of Pan African liberation text, rare books, many out of print. Even in this secluded location, people still came. I met Ogutu, who told me how the story of my father’s funeral process was also his story. I met Brian Malenya who I had played rugby against in the army side Ulinzi and he resonated with my tribute to the rugby phenomenon Benjamin Ayimba, and Eli the son of my late biking buddy and mechanic Joe Mwangi who was now a grown young man, a face that reminded of me of a friend I still grieved.
At the United Kenya Club, I met a stranger named Clifford Derrick who had just buried his mother and the book triggered his own spontaneous reflections of his moment of loss. At Nuria bookstore on Moi avenue, hosted by the gracious Abdullahi Bule, streams of people came through. There was my old schoolmate Omenge Nyamato who also had published a book titled Praxis, Power and Passion documenting his medical journey through Africa. He was still grieving the recent loss of his mother and he confessed my book would be a guide through grief that he was no longer interested in suppressing. I met the co-author of the Big Conservation Lie, Mordecai Ogada, a critical read that challenges the entrenched colonial legacy of conservation in Kenya. We exchanged signed copies. I spoke to a man called Rollex, who pointed out that it was the death anniversary of his father and he wanted a particular chapter signed in dedication to his memory.
The collective sharing continued in Kisumu when I arrived at the Text Book Centre at the United Mall. I met Sharon who told me that she had just gone through a season of loss, family members who had seemingly died in pairs, as if calling out to each other from the other side and it did not make sense until she found a page in Strength and Sorrow that precisely spoke to her unique grief. She showed me the pages underlined on her personal copy. There was another reader sent by a husband with the explicit dedication to a father, recently passed. The next day in Kisumu I met a smart young man called Akal from Lolwe bookshop who filled a room with eager listeners, joining me in a conversation about death and funerary practices. What had death taught us, what was it continuing to teach us.
All the people I met, had either recently gone through loss, were trying to make sense of a death from the past or had come to the realisation of the inevitability of our mortality and were seeking the language to understand it. I realised that I was not just selling a book. I had opened the space for something deeper, through mere presence and perhaps holding a mirror to parts of themselves that they could not see or had forgotten existed.
In the various bookstops I made, through the branches of Text Book Centre, Half Priced books, Bookstop Yaya and the cute little colourful bookshop in Ngara called Sema Nami, the meet and greets turned into spontaneous grief circles and I found myself, counseling strangers who found resonance in my reflections on loss. Together, we could broach pains that they were afraid to touch for fear of what would erupt.
In every shared story, I relived the anguish of confusion that comes after sudden loss of a loved one. I was here to hold space for people dealing with complicated and conflicted losses, the unresolved, the forgotten and sharing pathways for people looking back to fetch what had been lost. I was no longer that spirited young man who was grappling with the challenges of modern masculinity. Life had reconstructed me and now I had returned almost in the mode of a death doula.
Strength and Sorrow is my gift to my country, to my people. It is evidence of our shared humanity in the face of this human inevitability.
Then, just as I concluded the book tour, this shared human inevitability was amplified on a national stage.
The second chapter of Strength and Sorrow is titled, Baba’s Gone is dedicated to my own father.
The first line reads…
When Baba died, I became numb.
He had died of a heart attack….
Now, a national father figure, the one, the country fondly called Baba, the former Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya and perhaps its most consequential leader, the enigmatic Raila Amolo Odinga, has died.
The same sinking feeling returned. I was numb.
Now, the biggest tree in the homestead had fallen and the family was in disarray.
As the phone calls started to come through, I recognised the emotion immediately.
It was…Shock!
My cousin described it precisely.
“I don’t know how I am feeling”.
I remember only ten days ago, sitting at the back of a boda and just as we arrived at the city centre near the University way, adjacent to the Uhuru highway, we encountered a most unusual sight. A flight of bats had covered the sky above. The flight of bats by day in a modern city is far more than a biological event. I thought about this moment for a long time afterwards.
It seemed ominous. A bat is a creature that flies like a bird, active at night so its flight during the day is an anomaly. I immediately thought, there must be some symbolic resonance to this sight. In esoteric traditions, the bat is a symbol of death and rebirth.
When I received the shocking news of the death of the Baba of the nation, Raila Odinga, I thought of those bats again. The people had not been prepared for what was clearly the end of an era and the jumbled response to the news of his passing, spoke to the repressed anxieties bubbling underneath that we will be forced to confront as a people and as a nation in the coming weeks, months and years.
Baba is gone and our nation’s politics is about to be plunged into painful but necessary collective transformation. I pray that the passing of this legendary figure we called Baba, will usher us into a new understanding of grief and not just leave us raw and fearful of its searing pain.
But now, allow us to lament.
Woyi, gimi chamo e mari, ( Young man, want you eat is yours to keep)
To gimo dong, ( What remains)
To kik i geneee! ( Do not depend on it)
*******
Tho obamba, atwo ( Death has laid me out to dry)
Tho obamba, atwoo! ( Death has laid me out to dry)
Tho omoya, aliya, ( Death has laid me out to dry, like dried meat)
Tho omoya, atwo, (Death has laid me out to dry)
Tho obamba aliya, Wuod Joka Ogola, (Death has laid me out to dry, like dried meat, son of the Ogolas)
Woud Joka Ogolaaaa! ( Son of the Ogolas)
Omoya, atwoo, (Death has laid me out to dry)
Tho omoya, atwo! (Death has laid me out to dry)
********
Nyiri kwodho wa, go osogo olila,
Nyiri kwodho wa, go osogo olila’
Ting aaa, Ting aaa!
Ting aaa, Ting aaa!
by OP | Sep 24, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
He preferred the sports club at this hour. The early birds had drifted off, leaving the padded track, for the regulars, the retirees. Today, his walking partner, the General, wasn’t around, so he would have to make do without a pacer.
He picked up his pace, zipping up his dark blue Adidas tracksuit. The air was cool and the sky overcast. It reminded him of the monotonous greyness of his college days in the Netherlands. He felt energetic and he looked forward to a brisk ten laps. His breathing rhythm steadied, a slight lean in his gait, his eyes focused on the padded surface.
A younger man jogs past him. The pace, a bit fast for a steady jog and sure enough, as he deduced, the young man slows down to a trot, alternating between jogging and walking. The older man takes it all in. He is overexerting and this face is not familiar. The young man has a good running cadence and a rugby physique but no stamina and as soon as he returns to walking, a heaviness is apparent about him. They do not acknowledge each other at first.
Two laps in and the young man stops running for good. He has a laboured walking style as he tries to stay ahead of the older man. The effort shows in the swing of his arms. The old man calculates that he could pass him by the next lap and half, and true to his estimation, by the time they loop past the terrace, the older man is gaining on the younger man. He diagnoses the limitation. It’s in his stride. Too short and too much upper body movement. Bad technique. The younger man stops at one of the cement benches around the padded track and starts to tie his shoelace to allow the old man to pass him. He gets what’s happening. Face saving.
The young man is behind him now, his presence apparent because his breathing came in ragged hitches. The older man is now all warmed up and hitting a stride that is in contrast to the younger man’s discord. The young man finally levels up but needs to labour hard if he has intentions of overtaking this father figure and creating distance. Instead, he turns towards the older man, nods respectfully and then offers a greeting, “Good morning, my senior”.
The greeting softens the older man who offers back a warm response.
“Good morning, young man”.
Well brought up, respectful. He decides to engage. It is only the two of them on the track. He is not averse to company.
Doris, the Jamaican lady, who is a regular company at this hour, has completed her customary two laps and was seated at her corner table on the terrace, sipping her morning coffee, scrolling on her phone, probably Facebook. A creature of habit that one.
The older one asks a simple question, “I have not seen you here before, are you a member?”
The younger man says he was a member but never ran on the track. He used to frequent the gym with his wife in the evenings and the old man asks, unable to mask the surprise, “With your wife?”
“Yes, we had a routine, two times a week.”
Still somewhat in disbelief, he repeats,
“You go to the gym with your wife?”
“I should say, used to…as we have gone separate ways”.
The older man gives a soft grunt in acknowledgment. There is a moment of palpable silence between them and the older man can sense the harbored pain of a story waiting to be told and his curiosity gets the better of him.
“Hmm…what happened?”
The young man began to speak and poured his heart out with a kind of honesty that at once surprised the older man. He told the story in fragments, quantifying the magnitude of loss, starting with what he would miss the most, his purpose as a family man and the most disappointing, the kids.
“How many?”
“Two? Boy and girl”.
He continues. They were too busy. Too much focus on their careers and giving the children a good life. He used to travel a lot for work. Wife got a promotion, senior management. Children raised by nannies and we grew apart. That is when he started the affair. He found comfort in the company of a professional colleague and it turned into a routine. They were very discreet. Things fell apart after his wife found out about the affair.
“How did she find out?” the old man prodded.
“A moment of stupidity. She had sent me…well… aahh!…discreet photos that I should have deleted and it was my daughter who found them while playing with my phone.”
The older man shot him a look that made the young man feel like a naive school boy.
He felt the need to qualify it, in between an awkward laugh. He had known the other woman longer than his wife, more friends than lovers, a friend with benefits and her place was like a safe house.
These were interesting terms. “Friend with benefits”, “Safe house”. These were childish terms for a dangerous game but that train of thought was interrupted by sight of the curve of Doris’s neck.
They had now come alongside the terrace. Doris had her back towards them, her dark and thick locks falling beyond her shoulders and framing her lean face. She had finished her coffee and the muesli bowl was empty. She was now drinking a smoothie. Deep green. The old man wondered about the order. She needs to start with the smoothie, then the cereal and finish with a coffee.
His mind returned to the young man who was now trying to rationalise his life choices.
“My wife could not understand that the other woman is what kept me going. She was someone who listened to me, let me talk and even after the affair broke out, we still continued to see each other. I needed her more than I realised. I had no one to talk to”,
The old man latched onto the contradiction,
“You said you had no one to talk to, but you just told me you had this woman who listened. Which is it?”
The question seemed to confuse the young man and he ignored it as he continued explaining how everything went south after that.
“We became mean to each other. It was unhealthy and eventually she said she wanted a divorce”.
It had been six months since he moved out of the family home, the house that he bought.
“She asked me to leave… and I left everything I had built”.
He expressed helplessness at his condition and was in clear grief about the loss of his home, family and reputation. He regretted the mistake even though he justified it as a silly mistake that he believed was blown out of proportion. He framed himself as a tragic figure, a victim of circumstance.
The Older Man didn’t offer sympathy.
“You left your own house? Why did you do this?”
The younger man tried to explain the emotional weight of the affair and how it broke any trust that was left in the marriage. The Old Man listened, then asked,
“I get that you were caught? But let me get this right, it was just sex. Did you have children with this other woman?”, and his voice became stern, “Were you beating your wife?”
The young man was taken aback by the confronting tone, and offered a spirited defense,
“ No, No, No…No!, I had my flaws, and I take full responsibility but I am not a violent man. Me, I just keep quiet and walk away”.
“Fair enough, Do you plan to marry this other woman?”
“ No, God no, No…Noo… that would be…I don’t even know what to say … .I can’t find the words…marry her!”.
“You get along, she has been steady and safe”.
“But that would make me look like a complete villain”.
“To whom ?”
“My wife, my kids, her family, our friends”
“So you love the other woman enough to remain loyal but only in secret?”
The young man became pensive. He hadn’t anticipated that the conversation would descend to uncomfortable and confronting territory but at the same time, he had an epiphany about the affair, as a desperate attempt to make up for what was lost in his marriage life.
“Okay, let me ask a different question. What else did you do wrong, apart from this affair? Do you pay school fees, house maintenance, did you do your duty?”
“Oh yes,” a certain confidence that was absent before emerged in his voice, “always, even with her promotion, I still took care of the fees and the house, things like the car”
“But you still left the house”.
“I had to protect my sanity”.
“So where do you live now?”
“I found a small studio apartment…he paused….you know I take full responsibility for my part and I know I have really let down my kids”.
The old man could not understand the logic and offered an anecdote.
“When I was young and living in Europe, I had my adventures. The General and I had a saying: ‘A man must clear his pipes or risk prostate cancer.’ I have my memories, and I also have a forty-year marriage with grandchildren.”
As the old man let out a low chuckle at this memory, his eyes flickered back towards Doris, who was now standing. He could make out the contours of her full figure. She looked quite firm for her age. The General attributed it to a smoothie and yoga regimen.
He looked back at the young man and spotting the dawning confusion, offered his insight.
“You think you are grieving because you lost a wife, a house, your children. Children – you can repair the relationship. The bigger problem is understanding what you truly lost. You lost yourself a long time ago. Your worth is tied to the validation of these women, your wife, and the other woman. The man you were trying to be for them… where is he now? Who is the man that existed before the title of husband?”
A long silence stretched over the next lap. The Young Man’s grief shifted. It was no longer about material loss or shame.
He was beginning to grieve for the self he never was. It occured to the old man that this consideration had never been pondered. The divorce was not a tragedy; it was a symptom. The tragedy was the hollow man who was exposed when the structure fell away.
They looped past the terrace. Doris made eye contact this time. He had seen Doris around the club for about a year now. She was more of the General’s acquaintance. He felt a familiar stir, every time he spotted her – something about the way she looked at him. He knew that look, and what it awoke inside of him.
“Where is your other alf?” Doris shouted, her foreign accent pronounced and musical. She was talking about the General. The old man gestured as if to say, “ Still sleeping” and caught a smile flashing across her face.
The young man had not said a word since his last statement. It occurred to the old man that he was now on his last lap.
“Listen. This feeling of guilt is useless. You have to take care of yourself first before you can take care of your family. So find that man that existed before the wedding suit. He’s the one who has to build what’s next.”
The young man now looked visibly shell shocked and for the first time, he realised what his wife had meant when she called him a people pleaser.
The old man seeing his face, offered a consolation,
“ You are probably going to be okay but for now forget about these women. I listened to you keenly when you were talking. It is okay to grieve after what you lost but don’t get stuck there. That other man is dead. It is time to find the real one ”.
They were now across from the terrace and the old man’s attention had shifted. He was thinking about what Doris said. Was that an invitation? It must be. Usually, she would have left by the time they were on their 8th lap. She was still here.
The two men walked the last 50 metres in silence, maintaining a brisk pace and stopped when they arrived alongside the terrace. The young man was deeply thankful for the insights. The old man shook his hand firmly, his mind still dwelling on Doris’s smile and he was soon off, up the wide stairs towards Doris. The young man watched the old man’s leave, noticing a perk in his step. He stared at him until he shook hands warmly with Doris.
Suddenly he felt like jogging, starting off at a slow pace, the emptiness of the track mirroring the hollowness he now felt inside.
********
Strength & Sorrow has landed in Nairobi! You can now grab your copy at 5 bookstores across the city.
– Text Book Centre
– Yaya Bookstop
– Nuria Book Store
– Half Priced Books
-Prestige Book Shop
Or simply place an order on my website https://oyungapala.com/
I hope you gain something of value from this read. Asante.
by OP | Sep 17, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
To my brothers, who heard the suppressed cry,
The heavy, muffled cough in my voice,
When my world collapsed and turned all grey,
When the clock of my soul froze after an abrupt encounter with death.
Who arrived without summons, a compass in my daze,
Who sat in the wreckage and did not speak,
But helped me sift the ashes of my loss,
Seeking a single ember, fragile and unique.
Who stood guard as I beat my fists against the earth,
Angry at my own helpless, human condition.
Who held the torch in the fog that suffocated my next breath,
Without knowing where we needed to go, simply to illuminate.
Who gripped my hand when it trembled beyond control,
Who did not flee when the levee burst,
And witnessed the deluge, the ugly, wretched truth of my brokenness,
And had the courage to simply stay.
Who held space until I remembered,
In the heap of my disarray,
That this was a burden I did not have to carry alone,
And that it was enough to trust that I would be okay.
To the brothers who spoke their own hopelessness aloud,
And made my loss feel human, find value in mistakes,
Who showed me how to find the child I’d exiled,
In my frantic, desperate rush to be the man with a plan.
Who said, “ We are here. We start again.”
Who were the first to point to the ground,
At the green, defiant shoots emerging,
From the decay of all that I had thought I had lost.
The first to see the subtle change,
And smile at new growth, in a different, truer direction.
Who taught me that strength is not the absence of breaking,
But the courage to acknowledge the constancy of change.
To the brothers who reframed the journey of life,
Who said, “You don’t get over it. You learn to carry its weight.”
Now I stand, and I see you where I once stood,
Barely hanging on beneath the cruel weight.
So I say to you now, brother, be kind to yourself first.
The world sees pillars, but even stones are transformed when they break,
Through the trials, the fears, the regrets endured,
Know this: you are seen in your pain.
To you now, the brother, who stands, where I once stood,
Be kind to yourself.
Grief is not a race to be run but a map to the forgotten terrains of our souls.
PS:
A man once stopped me, his eyes hollow and deep,
Said, “Brother, I fear I have lost my soul.”
I simply said, “I know the way. I can help”.
“Let’s trace your steps together.”
“Tell me, when did you last feel whole?”
******
Strength & Sorrow has landed in Nairobi! You can now grab your copy at 5 bookstores across the city.
– Text Book Centre
– Yaya Bookstop
– Nuria Book Store
– Half Priced Books
-Prestige Book Shop
Or simply place an order on my website https://oyungapala.com/
by OP | Sep 10, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
My new book is out in book shops across Kenya, yet, I haven’t held a copy or touched a single page of it. My decision to print, Strength and Sorrow, in Nairobi was a deliberate choice to honor the people who helped me find my voice and as a gesture of gratitude, to place their access to my words before my own. As I wait for my copy to cross the world to my base in the Netherlands, I’ve reflected on why I wrote this book. The answer lies not in a single event, but in a lifetime of quiet preparation, and a deep-seated belief that writing, above all else, is a service to the public you serve. It has been a journey of 28 years to this point.
I learnt the art of public service from my father. My father was in my view fully realised as a man. He was a man who talked about the future and its possibilities and rarely did you hear him complain. When you come from a large family, different siblings will hold different versions of the man they call father. My three elder brothers talk of a harsh ‘fathe’. A man of few words who did not tolerate crap or sloppiness.
The difference between my eldest sibling and I was 13 years. By the time I was born, I guess fatherhood had mellowed the mzee and I had the privilege of a father who kept me in close company. I was a boy in training, an escort on his daily rounds. I would sit in the car while he talked with his friends, learning to spend a lot of time quietly and observing people willing time away. I realize now that this training was a preparation for a different life, one that would be defined by the quiet art of listening.
By age 12, I had learnt how to handle an oxen plough. It was quite an achievement for a city boy. To wake up at dawn and troop to the shamba to plough. My father never made me feel special. Work was simply work and everyone had to put in their fair share. I still enjoy farmwork but mostly because of the discipline it cultivates.
When my father suddenly died in 1989, it left me adrift. He was my guiding star. Death was one thing that I had never factored in the equation. It was at his funeral that I really came to appreciate what kind of man my father was from people who showed up to pay their last respects. It was all a daze. People and more people sharing the impact he had on their lives. Where did he get the time to help all these people and raise 6 children? He never talked about it.
After the passing of my father, in my mid teens, I got fascinated by the mysteries of life, in my grappling with the phenomenon of death. I had read the Bible regularly as a story, much like a novel but I soon began to ask questions about the historical foundations of the text. I often wondered how a holy book that had entered into our cultural space a mere 100 years ago had obliterated indigenous African spirituality.
Still confused by the nature of death, I found myself questioning life’s purpose. One day as I was walking down a main street in Eldoret town, I noticed a pharmacy run by Asians and decided to just try my luck. I ventured into the pharmacy and asked the lady at the counter where I could locate any literature on their belief system. She handed me a magazine, titled Osho Times and I devoured the copy that same day. It was a door to a new world of esoteric mysteries. The philosophy that a person could master their suffering and forge a meaningful life was a truth I had been seeking.
My early love for reading led me to my father’s small library, a bookshelf in our village sitting room that held a few gems. In it was Peter Abrahams “Mine Boy”, Charles Dickens “A Tale of Two Cities”, Aldous Huxley, “Doors of Perception”, Philip Ochieng “The Kenyatta’s Succession” and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary planted the seed for a mental decolonization.
I would never have fathomed how influential those books would become. But what I truly enjoyed reading were newspaper columns, which became my favourite sections in newspapers and magazines. I was fascinated with how serious topics could be delivered with humour and insight.
Columnists have been a long standing favourite of my newspaper reading. Hilary Ngweno’s editorials in The Weekly Review were a masterclass in political analysis. I admired Philip Ochieng’s fidelity to language long before I could fully grasp the depth of his columns. I regularly read Kwendo Opanga and Mutahi Ngunyi who covered all the political power plays. The celebrated Wahome Mutahi’s satire would catch on later and I started to feel smart when I developed the ability to read between the lines in his columns.
The story of how I became a columnist is a series of happy accidents. I never wrote much outside of my academic assignments until one day a colleague asked me to submit a piece for the AIESEC group in university that published a newsletter. A few encouraging compliments would eventually set me off on my journey as a man of letters. To augment my survival at the University of Nairobi where I was on a bursary, I joined Nautilus gym as a fitness instructor. It was in this gym on Mombasa road in Nairobi that the true beginning came after a conversation with Billow Kerrow, who would become a prominent politician.
He liked my perspective and challenged me to write about fitness, and with a name and a vague address, I set off for the Nation newspaper office. My contact wasn’t there, but while wandering around the building, I found Mundia Muchiri, the editor of a new pull-out Saturday magazine. He took a chance on my typed pieces, and a month later, my name was in the country’s biggest paper. It was a small section that I shared with a Reddy Kilowatt advert. My word count was under 350 but I was now getting paid for my words.
I graduated to writing feature stories for the Saturday magazine when Mundia left to start the Eve magazine and Joy Mutero took over as editor. I always maintained a regular fitness column. The editor who really put me on the map was Rhoda Orengo. I had arrived to submit one of my regular fitness columns in the pre-email days when she challenged me to write something for the Mantalk column. I had an active college life and shenanigans were plenty. I picked up an incident and wrote about it. It got published and I was encouraged to write more. The column was held by three writers, Cylde Morvit (Allan Kopar RIP), Tony Mochama aka Smitta who would mature into a unique and prolific voice with an enviable stack of books to his name.
By about 2000, I had inherited the column and my journey commenced. I thought I could write but I knew nothing about the craft. I was squeezing writing into my day, constantly chasing deadlines. I could never make proper time for writing and did not treat it with the respect it deserved. I had bought into the narrative that you cannot really make a living as a writer and precious writing time was lost in pursuit of side gigs. But, I finally got it. It was a discipline. Writers write all the time because that is the only way you can truly grow.
One subject that I kept returning to in my columns was the subject of death, even then, I thought I was only writing public obituaries. My attraction to obituaries was more generational work. It was the death of Wahome Mutahi that triggered it. His Whispers column was the epitome of column writing. The gold standard. I wanted to write for the public memory but I wrote as a detached, objective observer. I was documenting the lives of others, celebrating them, honoring them and learning from their journeys. But this public act was a shield. The more I wrote about others, the more I was drawn to my unresolved grief and the memories of those I had lost. My public mission to remember others was in essence a private mission to suppress my own pain.
I grew up in a society that avoids discussing death, treating it as something to be endured, not understood. This cultural conditioning taught me to internalize my pain. Death was a “terror monster,” and my initial response to loss was to “suppress and carry on.”
It wasn’t until a motorcycle accident that would happen the same year that I hung up my spurs after 11 years of writing The ManTalk column that I arrived at a critical turning point. It shattered my detached observer role and forced me to confront my own mortality. I could no longer pretend to be a passive writer; I was now a participant, a person who had felt the stealthy approach of sudden death. This moment compelled me to look inward and use my writing not as an escape from my grief, but as a way to engage with it directly.
I had found a tool I could use to reflect on the losses in my own family, alongside stories from my countrymen that I had collected over the years. In listening to their experiences, I realized that my story was not unique. I felt deeply connected to people I’ve never met, and I could empathise with their sorrow. The act of gathering their stories became an act of self-discovery, allowing me to find the courage to relive and process my own forgotten grief.
This book is essentially a communal act of mourning, a collective ritual of remembrance. I return to my Kenyan public in humble service, after years of introspection. Writing about death and loss was not a choice; it was an inevitability. It was the only way for me to heal, and in doing so,I hope to create a space for others to find the strength to confront their own suppressed sorrows borne from loss. This book is not about giving answers, but about inviting my readers into a long overdue conversation, a public acknowledgment of our shared humanity in the face of death.
******
Strength & Sorrow has landed in Nairobi! You can now grab your copy at 5 bookstores across the city.
📍- Text Book Centre
📍- Yaya Bookstop
📍- Nuria Book Store
📍- Half Priced Books
📍-Prestige Book Shop
Or simply place an order on my website https://oyungapala.com/
I hope you gain something of value from this read. Asante.
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