How the Odinga family bore the cross of a community and nation

He took a few, slow unsteady steps on his groggy legs. With his shaky hands tightly holding onto his walking stick, he paused and turned round. He looked at me through his thick spectacles.

“When you see me walking slowly, it is because am trying to learn how to walk again. For many years, I was locked up in one corner of my house. I couldn’t even be allowed to go to the toilet in my own house without permission from the government,” he said

I shook my head, sadness building up in me as Jaramogi Oginga Odinga narrated the torture and tribulations he endured in prison and under house arrest. The emotional torment was unbearable. Jaramogi had to seek permission from the district commissioner to go for a long call in his own house.

There were administration policemen in the house and compound guarding him 24 hours a day.

Visitors to his home were rare and those who dared venture had to undergo strict scrutiny.

The year was 1992. We had just stepped out of the St. Stephens Anglican Church of Kenya in Kisumu town. Next to him was the outspoken Anglican Bishop John Henry Okullu and Standard reporter Amos Onyatta.

Jaramogi, Raila Odinga’s father, had survived horrendous physical, mental and emotional torment from the government of the day. He would infect his beloved but stubborn and restless son Raila with the ‘contagious ailment of politics’.       

Collective punishment

After the in 1969 massacre following a public altercation between President Jomo Kenyatta and his former Vice President Jaramogi in Kisumu, the Kenyatta and subsequent governments constructed a narrative depicting the Luo community as enemy of the State.

For years, they bore the cross of collective punishment meted upon their people who ardently supported their political stand.

A few weeks after the church encounter, Jaramogi invited Onyatta and I to lunch at his home in Bondo. We had become his frequent weekend guests. We would spend hours discussing politics and economic affairs. The old man would pick our brains while we laughed through his numerous tales.

On this afternoon, we enjoyed a sumptuous meal of smoked fish, osuga with brown ugali. Then Jaramogi offered us “ondelo”, roasted maize, his favourite biting. As we chewed the hard but sweet and salted corn, Raila entered the living room. Onyatta and I moved away from the sofa where we sat with Jaduong to allow father and son a moment.

Kenya was in the grip of election fever with Jaramogi running for the country’s presidency against incumbent Daniel arap Moi and Kenneth Matiba of Ford Asili. Political campaigns were hot and furious.

For a few minutes, Raila sat close to his father, his head bowed. But we were startled by a sudden verbal commotion. Then Raila shot up and while angrily throwing his hands in the air, walked away. After some moments, we quietly joined Jaramogi on the sofa. None of us spoke.

There was tremendous silence and thick tension. He slowly removed his glasses and began to wipe them before turning to me and said, “Jabanyore, always obey your parents and respect your elders and it shall be well with you”

“Thank you Sir, I will always remember that” I said

“I love my son Amollo very much. But he has a restless spirit. In his anger and impatience he sometimes ends up destroying the things he touches. I keep telling him not to throw stones in the dark because he can hit his own mother. At times I advise him that ‘before you enter the bush, you must throw in a stick, if you hear chakachaka, you know there is some wild animal.’

He motioned me to help him stand up. He excused himself and asked us to allow him time for siesta.

The following day Onyatta and I travelled to Muhoroni to cover a public rally addressed by Jaramogi. He was accompanied by Raila, Wamalwa Kijana, James Orengo, Mukhisa Kituyi among other opposition leaders.

When Jaramogi stood up to speak, he struck a conciliatory note calling for calm and peace during the campaigns.

But when Raila took to the podium, he was in a combative mood: “Even if my father has said we go slowly, we cannot tolerate this authoritarian and evil government,” the crowd cheered him wildly.

Emotions were high against the government in a region still mourning the brutal killing of Foreign Affairs minister Robert Ouko.

Onyatta and I never got a chance to interrogate either Raila or his father on their sofa-set moment. However, the encounter informed me a lot about the history the two shared.

Jaramogi was a businessman who was lured into politics by Jomo Kenyatta becoming the country’s first Vice President. The two fell out when Jaramogi started to question the direction the new government was taking. Their biggest disagreement was over land. Jaramogi told Jomo that communities in western Kenya, specifically the Luo and Luhya; treated land as communal property which couldn’t be subdivided.

Hostile crowd

In anger Jaramogi resigned as Vice President and formed his own political party; Kenya People’s Union (KPU). Matters boiled over on Saturday, October 25 1969.

Kenyatta and Jaramogi met at the Nyanza General Hospital, where the Russian Ambassador was to officially handover the health facility his country had helped build to the Kenya government. The Russians were close friends of Jaramogi.

A war of words erupted with Kenyatta and Jaramogi throwing expletives at each other. The crowd turned hostile and started hurling chairs and other objects at the presidential dais. Presidential guards opened fire at the crowd. By the time the sun was setting, the lakeside town had become a graveyard with hundreds of citizens killed. The Kisumu massacre occurred barely four months after the assassination of another prominent Luo leader, Tom Mboya.

KPU was banned and Jaramogi was imprisoned. This is where the Odinga family began its journey to the political Golgotha with the cross of an entire community on its shoulders.   

Raila had gone to study in the communist Eastern Europe. Upon his return to Kenya in 1970, his father was in detention. Jaramogi’s confinement took a heavy toll on the Odinga family. Their businesses were closed and poverty came knocking.

The Odinga name became a curse to those who carried it around the neck. Despite the Odinga children completing school, no one could employ them.

Raila, however, managed to get some work with the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Bureau of Standards. Jaramogi was eventually set free but remained under tight government surveillance. He managed to reach out to Jomo to be allowed to set up the East Africa Specter factory along the Nairobi-Mombasa road.

Former head of civil service Geoffrey Kariithi in his yet to be published memoir; Cool Under Fire, states that Kenyatta and Jaramogi remained best of friends. However, some of the Kenyatta handlers never allowed the two leaders to meet. The same Kiambu mafia, that frustrated and fought Jaramogi, viciously fought Kariithi because he hailed from Kirinyaga.

Auctioneers

The Odingas were beginning to enjoy some modicum of calmness when in 1975, Raila’s brother Frederick Odima Odinga committed suicide. Odima had been staying in Nairobi’s Woodley Estate at the home of politician Achieng Oneko. The family tribulations had pushed the 21-year-old man to the edge.

By the time of Jomo Kenyatta’s death in 1978, the Odingas had been swept clean, naked to their skeletal form by auctioneers. Jaramogi had to make peace with the new president Daniel arap Moi.

Just when Jaramogi was settling down in his new found political love affair, the 1982 coup attempt happened and Raila was implicated. Raila was imprisoned.

Insiders say it was Jaramogi’s personal pleas to Moi that spared Raila’s life. Most of his co-accused were quickly court martialed and executed.

Although Raila’s life was spared, he was detained and had to endure physical, mental and emotional torture. For years he suffered isolation, the worst form of torment any human being could endure.

Raila couldn’t even attend his mother’s funeral after she died in 1984. In fact he only learned about her demise from a prison warder two months after her death.

My recent prison experience made me understand Raila’s character. I would join fellow convicts in walking through the cells and corridors of Kamiti that Raila and other detainees had walked.

I understood Raila’s fearlessness, because once you survive prison, even death cannot scare you. I also understood his obsession with prisoners.

I understood why he would frequently travel to the Naivasha Maximum and Kamiti Maximum Prisons to visit the former Mungiki sect leader Maina Njenga and others. 

The Odingas were becoming inured to pain. Raila’s brother, Ngire Omwuoda Agola, who had been incarcerated over allegations of causing an accident also died.

Journalist Odhiambo Levin Opiyo says that Agola was a diabetic who required self-injection. The prison authorities frustrated his treatment and efforts to get medication. When his condition worsened, they rushed him to Kakamega hospital and chained him on the bed despite his frailty.

“Even though Omwuoda was freed by the court, which had found him not guilty of the offence, it was too late because diabetes had completely ravaged his health. He died young, in his 30s” writes Opiyo

The government machinery didn’t stop there. It targeted Raila’s wife Ida for punishment. She was persecuted for her husband’s perceived political sins. In 1988, she lost her teaching job and was evicted from the teacher’s quarters at the Kenya High school. She was dismissed on ‘public interest’

A story titled; Odinga’s wife loses her job, by Mutegi Njau, published in the Daily Nation of September 13 1988 captured her pain. The story said: “Mr. Odinga, son of former Vice President Oginga Odinga was detained barely seven months after he was released from detention.”

When Raila went missing, his wife filed a harbeas Corpus application in the High Court seeking the Commissioner of Police and the Director of Criminal Investigation department to produce her husband in court.

No home

Then on Friday, September 9 1988, she was slapped with a dismissal letter from her employer, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC). She was given until Monday, September 12 to vacate the school house and surrender all school properties.

While loading her belongings in two lorries, Ida told journalists: “I have served the Kenya Government faithfully for the last 15 years. What am I going to do now? I have never received any warning letter. What shall I do now?”

She said she had lost a husband, a job and a house: “What will my children do? They will come home after five only to find they have no home” read Mutegi’s story.

Technically, the government had not only tortured and caused incarceration of Jaramogi and his son, but caused the death of Raila’s two brothers. It then shamelessly persecuted Ida, a young mother.   

Raila was eventually set free but because he was still feeling cornered; he fled into exile and returned in 1991 after spending one year in Norway.