Baba's Gone. The Missing Chapter. Part 2

Amollo taught us how to hold pain and transform sorrow into strength. He was our grief alchemist who turned suffering into blessings.

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 as Baba, 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.