Book Review by Dr. Julian Fisher

It was only very recently that I was truly exposed to Raila Odinga’s effect on his supporters in Kenya. I was sat on a flight from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam reading Doctor Babafemi Badejo’s biography of Odinga. A fellow passenger leaned across and asked me why I was reading about this Kenyan politician and I replied that I was privileged to be reviewing the book at its launch. My travelling companion went on to say that Odinga was his political hero and went on to praise him at some length. In a shameful, and hopefully momentary, display of presumption I responded that it must mean he came from Odinga’s home area. Not at all, he replied. In fact, he was from Kibera, in Odinga’s Langata constituency. I was humbled as I reflected that this young man had illustrated to me a point that is so well expounded in Badejo’s work, that Odinga’s influence transcends, but is at the same time deeply rooted in, the tribal. This apparent contradiction, for me, is enough to justify Badejo’s choice of title “Raila Odinga: An Enigma in Kenyan Politics”. As I read this biography, I considered whether I should give my review of it a title of its own. In the end, I decided that it would be impertinent to do so, since a mere title could not adequately capture the breadth and scale of the work. The closest I could come was the tentative idea of “One Man, His Family, His Tribe and His Nation”. This was my inadequate attempt to summarise Badejo’s achievement, which is to have produced as much a work of anthropology – an investigation into the nature and uniqueness of a particular tribe and its place in a wider community context – as it is a work of personal and family biography and a history of a nation’s emergence from its Colonial period. The author more modestly claims that this book is “two biographies in one”, of “politics in Kenya and Raila’s role in them”. I think, and I’m sure many will agree, that he has achieved, intentionally or not, rather more than that. And he has done so in an engagingly concise manner. It is the duty of a reviewer to précis the contents of his subject. In the case of this work, this is not an easy duty to perform, since the book is so multi-faceted. Badejo sets out adventurously with a description of the new world order following the Second World War, its implications for Colonialism in general and for Kenya’s emergence into Uhuru in particular. In this context, he places the efforts of Raila Odinga’s father Oginga, a device that allows him to weave the biography of a family and its most famous offspring into the developing fabric of Kenya as an independent nation. Of particular note is Badejo’s lucid explanation of Odinga senior’s attempts at the “de-colonisation of the Kenyan mind” through, for example, his determination to bestow on his children names with meaning to the Luo tribe rather than the Christian names imposed by the Colonial order. Thus is Raila Odinga established – through his family - as an embodiment not only of his tribal but also his national history. Perhaps from this, the reader might better begin to understand my toying with the title “One Man, His Family, His Tribe and His Nation”. There follows a fascinating and accessible account of The Luo in Kenya, some of their more important rites and beliefs and a comparison with the beliefs of other tribes in the country. Without trivialising the wider aspects of difference between the Luo and other Kenyan tribes, Badejo succinctly lays out the problem that the lack of male circumcision in Luo rites of passage has caused Luo politicians, including Raila Odinga, as they have sought to raise their game from the tribal to the truly national. Thus is the context established for a readable and illuminating account of Raila Odinga’s childhood and early manhood, his education in Germany and his intellectual and cultural inheritance from his family and his tribe. At this stage, Badejo takes a brief foray into the issue of the politicisation of ethnicity in Kenya, and offers tantalising glimpses of a fascinating historicist enquiry, including reference to the role of Colonialists in using ethnicity as a means of divide and rule. Sadly, but understandably, Badejo quickly sets this enquiry aside as outside the scope of his current work. As someone who himself hails from a nation in which ethnicity plays a defining role in national politics, I suspect (or hope) that there may be another book on this subject waiting to be written by Dr Badejo. Alongside the introduction of the Raila Odinga’s wife Ida and an account of the arrival of Odinga’s own children, Badejo expertly and thoroughly lays out the facts of Kenya’s political development under its founding father Kenyatta and his successor President Moi. He provides an illuminating account of the debate and pressures that led Kenya from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy and a comprehensive review of the attempted coup in 1982. The events leading to Odinga’s imprisonment and exile are sympathetically but dispassionately analysed. The humanity of this work is best revealed by the touching account of the effect of Raila Odinga’s incarceration on the immediate members of his family. The horrors of the torture chambers at Nyayo House are laid bare, and make for a fascinating insight into method in themselves. But never does Badejo allow the reader to ignore the direct human impact of events and methods in general terms on the people of Kenya and in particular terms on Raila Odinga himself. For me, the sections dealing with Odinga’s periods of detention and his eventual exile are the pivotal point of this work. It felt strange for me thereafter to read a political history with events leading up to the present day, some of which I witnessed as a British diplomat in Kenya, including Odinga’s decision to merge the NDP with KANU, and some of which I witnessed from afar such as the battle over the proposed new constitution. In blunt honesty, I must say that I failed, until reading this book, to understand the motivations for some of Odinga’s political moves – moves which for the author were the prompt to use the word “enigma” to describe Odinga. With the aid of this incisively analytical book I am now better able to place these moves in context and understand their broader historical thrust. Badejo’s signal accomplishment is to approach these recent events with the mind not only of a political theorist and commentator but also as a historian, thereby lending the work tremendous academic integrity. At a visceral level, this was illustrated to me by the fact that, as I read the later chapters of this book, I often forgot that they were dealing with events that took place a matter of only weeks or months ago. For all that, the account never loses it vitality. Throughout the political narrative, Badejo builds the picture of Odinga the man, detailing his development into a national politician, looking at his philanthropic instincts and examining his involvement in business, as well as chronicling his specific political role. He concludes with a fascinating compendium of insights from contributors on the question of “Who Is Raila?”. It is not for me to answer this question. Neither is it for me to describe how Raila Odinga made the transition from tribal to national politician, to examine in detail the events and mechanics of the political decisions he made, or to attempt to explain how he came to have the effect on some people that I described in my introduction. Dr Badejo’s work has already gone a long way to doing all this – it is only for me to commend it. If I have one complaint it is that the narrative of this book stops abruptly. But this is of necessity, because it deals with a subject who is living and active in his country’s continuing political development. The decision at which point to stop, in these circumstances, can only be taken arbitrarily. As for now, Kenya stands on the verge of another General Election, one that could have far-reaching ramifications. Whatever else this book illustrates, it makes clear that Odinga will inevitably have a significant role to play in these events. What it cannot do, of course, and what Badejo wisely chooses not to try to do, is to predict the future. In a peculiar way, the conclusion of this book lies in a future to which we will all be witnesses. It is a future that will be better understood by anyone who has read Badejo’s excellent, analytical, yet essentially human work. Dr. Julian Fisher Julian Fisher is a graduate of Oxford University in the UK, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics.