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!
