Was The Flame of Freedom intended to (re)brand Raila Odinga as the intellectual custodian of our nation’s pro-democracy struggles? A key theme in the book is, “the government’s long vendetta against the Odingas”. PHOTO/FILE
Was The Flame of Freedom intended to (re)brand Raila Odinga as the intellectual custodian of our nation’s pro-democracy struggles?
The photographs he selects, the stories he tells, the way he tells them and the stories that he does not tell, seem to establish Raila as the authority on the making of Kenya.
Raila’s story gives clear justification for the constitutional changes that this country finally made.
It is a must read for those who never experienced — and those who would so carelessly forget — the terror of a dictatorship where sycophancy, fear and silence reigned supreme.
A key theme in the book is, “the government’s long vendetta against the Odingas”.
But for all the evidence that Raila mounts to prove this point, he simultaneously supplies enough information to refute the truth of his tumeonewa refrain. A few examples suffice.
GREAT OPPORTUNITIES
With his father out in the political cold, Raila was employed at the University of Nairobi, a government institution headed by Dr Josephat Karanja.
Raila’s consulting firm, Franz Schinies and Partners, got a contract to “install a liquid petroleum gas tank at [Jomo] Kenyatta’s farm in Gatundu”.
Raila and Franz registered Standard Processing Equipment Construction and Erection (Spectre), got a loan and premises from the Kenya Industrial Estates, a wholly owned government body.
After his first detention Raila negotiated funding from Industrial Development Bank, another government institution.
Through Kenya Railways and the Ministry of Works, the government facilitated the testing of Spectre’s gas cylinders, leveraging their acceptance by international oil companies.
Raila says the idea of setting up a local standards body was his, driven by the challenge of getting Spectre’s LPG cylinders certified in the UK.
The Jomo government embraced the idea, appointed Raila to the position of Group Standards Manager in the newly formed Kenya Bureau of Standards.
He rose to be Deputy Director in 1978, a job he held until 1982 when the Moi government detained him over his role in the coup.
Raila served as secretary and later vice-chairman of the Nairobi Branch of Kenya Amateur Athletics Association (p.334) and he travelled abroad many times with national teams, representing Kenya.
In the Jomo years, when Jaramogi had problems servicing a foreign currency loan from TAW Leasing International for the purchase of 12 buses for his Lolwe Road Services, he obtained a shilling-based loan to pay off TAW from National Bank of Kenya then headed by Stanley Githunguri.
Dr Oburu Odinga was employed in the Ministry of Planning in the Jomo era. By 1994, he had risen to be the Provincial Planning Officer in Western.
The acquisition of the Kisumu Molasses Plant gave Raila 283 acres in Kisumu town for a well-below market rate of Sh13,100 per acre.
Maybe the Kenyatta and the Moi governments facilitated the commercial ventures of the Odingas to keep them from aspiring for high political office.
Still, the reality of all these opportunities negates the argument of government waging an all-out vendetta.
LAND QUESTION
The position of the Odingas on the land question is logically inconsistent.
In the 1950s, Jaramogi donated land for the building of Nyamira Primary and Nyamira Girls schools in Bondo.
Though Raila is vague about the exact purchase dates and the distinctions between the properties, he nonetheless mentions several tracts of land owned by Jaramogi aside from his Bondo home—150 acres at Opoda Farm, 550 acres in Tinderet purchased through an Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) loan after independence, 700 acres at Soba River Farm and an undisclosed acreage at Great Oroba River Farm in Muhoroni.
And then there is the sketchy matter of the Lumumba Institute in Ruaraka. Jaramogi and Jomo were joint trustees.
Bildad Kaggia, Achieng’ Oneko, Pio Gama Pinto and others were board members. Funded by Russia, the institute functioned for just one year before closing in 1965, a victim of Jomo’s pro-west politics.
How did the property end up in the Odinga portfolio? Raila just says, “we still had the premises…which we rented out, though the returns were paltry”.
Raila emphasises that Jaramogi left Kanu to form KPU because he was “increasingly critical of the widespread land-grabbing that characterised the first independent Kenya government’s activities”.
But Raila’s knowledge on the land question is dogged by fundamental factual errors.
He says, “[w]ell connected families acquired land in the early 1960s through the Settlement Transfer Fund Scheme, a brainchild of Kenyatta and his cronies soon after Independence”.
No such fund existed. The Land Development and Settlement Board was established in January 1961, a precursor of the Settlement Fund Trustees (SFT) launched on June 1, 1963.
Alfred Nyairo has repeatedly demonstrated that discussions over the sale of the White Highlands commenced while Kenyatta was still restricted in Maralal.
Nyairo adds, “the first African allottees were settled at the ex-Luckhurst farm at Dundori on 27th March 1961. By Madaraka Day in 1963, 356,255 acres had been purchased on which 6,668 African farmers and their families had been settled”.
Jaramogi was in Mombasa in 1981 when he called Jomo a “land-grabber”. Though he apologised later, that comment angered Moi so much that Jaramogi was shut out of that year’s Bondo by-election, the 1983 and 1988 General Elections.
So what makes one a land-grabber? Is it the extent of the acreage, the manner of purchase, location outside your “ancestral” home, the source of the funding, the time of purchase (pre-versus post-independence) or a varied mixture of all these factors?
The Flame of Freedom gives many insights into Raila’s character.
CHILD OF PRIVILEDGE
At his birth in 1945, Jaramogi was Principal of Maseno Veterinary School, a thrifty businessman running a trading company and distributing East African Industries products all over Nyanza.
Later, Jaramogi ran a printing press, a construction company and a bus company. Raila had a choice of homes between Kisumu Town and the rural Bondo.
At 17, he was sent to high school in Germany taking a flight to Cairo from Dar es Salaam at a time when few Africans had seen a car, let alone in an aeroplane!
So Raila was never a child of material want, nor one lacking in privilege. His capacity for protest, though selfless, is nonetheless curious.
He narrates a stunning example of this reflexive defiance.
On a visit to Romania in 1968, Raila landed in Bucharest without a visa. Immigration officers allowed him to leave the airport terminal building so that he could go to a bank, cash his traveller’s cheques and return to buy a visa using US dollars.
POINTLESS LAWLESSNESS
“I walked out of the airport, now an illegal immigrant, saw people getting on a bus and joined them for an uneventful journey to town”.
Why violate the trust of an immigration officer?
Raila shows no care for the Kenyan student leaders who had gone to meet him at the airport and could not locate him.
This example of pointless lawlessness ties into another disturbing aspect of character.
In detention, Raila encountered many cruel warders and was subjected to vile brutality.
But there were also kind-hearted warders, who facilitated his communication with fellow detainees like George Anyona and with his wife, Ida.
When a smuggled letter from Ida was found, Deputy Police Commissioner Philip Kilonzo was furious to the extent of having Ida arrested and locked up.
The search for the facilitating warder landed on an innocent man, one who had never been kind to Raila. He was promptly “removed”.
Raila does not see the injustice of a man being punished for a “crime” he never committed. Instead he gloats, “I felt that ‘divine justice’ had intervened to help rid me of one of the unsympathetic askaris”.
This warped sense of justice carries over to Raila’s later defence of Mungiki.
Though Raila boldly stood up for them in 2008 offering to mediate between their leader Maina Njenga and the coalition government, he had previously displayed absolutely no compassion for the conditions of Mungiki’s making.
In February 2008 when Kofi Annan expressed his horror at the goings-on in the Rift Valley, which he visited, Raila coldly responded, “Clashes are not new. It is not the first time. We have seen them since 1991, and in 1997 and 2002”.
Anyone who would fight for the right of Mungiki to be and to assemble should first fight to eradicate the conditions of cyclical violence and forced eviction that radicalise disillusioned youth!
Raila is emphatic in stating, “I am not a tribalist”.
But the structure and style of his narrative makes it hard to believe that he does not single out Kikuyus and blame them for all of his suffering.
BLATANT MISINFORMATION
His chronology of post-election violence is deliberately blurred and elliptical, avoiding dates so that he never has to use the term “retaliatory violence”.
He gives blatant misinformation about the events in Kisumu where he claims there was no “inter-community fight”, yet Kisii and Kikuyu properties were openly torched.
Raila distorts events in Eldoret, especially the Kiambaa church inferno, for which he refuses to state the ethnic identity of the victims — yet he keeps talking of “our boys” and “our people” in reference to killings in Nairobi and Kisumu.
He understates the death toll and makes no mention of his disastrous BBC interview aired on January 17, 2008 and carried verbatim in The Nairobi Star. That interview had a catalogue of factual errors and appeared to defend the church fire.
Victims of the worst of post-poll violence, regardless of how they had voted, will be comforted to learn from Raila’s story that when lives and property were being traded as collateral to gain high political office for some, there were some wise voices who cautioned the warring factions against the anger that was welling up against politicians.
Former Mozambique president Joachim Chissano said: “Those who have lost loved ones have a spirit of hatred towards those they think are guilty of causing their suffering”.
Indeed. He doesn’t mention placards and slogans, but nothing was more damaging to Raila’s cause than the chants, “No Raila, No peace” and “No peace without justice”.
Whose justice? The one whose votes were stolen or the one with an arrow in his head presumably because votes were stolen?
Raila’s earlier account of the events preceding the 1992 election dwell on the ethnic clashes in Muhoroni and Tinderet, but never mention the purge of Kikuyus in Molo, Burnt Forest and Turbo.
Similarly, he makes no reference to the 2005 Referendum victory speech that triggered the “41 against 1” doctrine.
STRUCTURE AND STYLE
Aside from his systematic and sustained disavowal of Kikuyu suffering, Raila (sub)consciously employs a style that profiles any Kikuyu in a position of authority, for instance, “Finance’s Kikuyu editor Njehu Gatabaki”.
The same ethnic profiling is not used in references to Pius Nyamora or Philip Ochieng’ no matter how nefarious their editorial activities were.
Qualifying Asman Kamama and Samuel Pogisho as “ethnic Pokot” raises their profiles as worthy minorities but references to the Kikuyu stress their dangerous over-representation.
Interestingly, Raila never sees his own proclivity for congregating with Luos in ethnic terms—during his stint at UoN and in the organisation of the 1982 coup.
This book is structured in a way that spares Raila censure over his contentious choices. The acquisition of the Kisumu molasses factory and co-operation with Moi’s Kanu provide two apt examples.
The chapter on the acquisition of molasses is strategically sandwiched between the Ouko Inquiry and the 1992 General Election so that our shock and fears over the heinous murder of Ouko influence us to see the resuscitation of the molasses factory as a just cause.
Raila does not tell us that he acquired this factory as he took NDP to Kanu and Moi appointed him Minister for Energy.
BLURRED CHRONOLOGY
Raila employs a similar technique of blurred chronology to introduce co-operation.
He begins by tracing “Jaramogi’s ideas [which] were sound and well-intentioned”.
Before we can interrogate this statement, we are plunged into Jaramogi’s death and what is possibly the most endearing chapter in the book.
By the time Raila resumes the story of co-operation — which happened eight years after Jaramogi’s death –— we are still reeling from the profound sorrow and sympathy over the senior patriarch’s passing.
Raila’s sequence lends logic and coherence to political events that were probably never planned that way or that far back.
The (co-)author of this book, Sarah Elderkin, is incapable of writing a bad sentence. This makes for a compelling 959-page read. Typos are at a minimum — mostly of ethnic words like Shamakhokho and Kaguthi—and the editing has been thorough.
It is tempting to call this monumental work a gracious account, but Elderkin’s studied penchant for colourful invective makes such praise difficult.
Raila’s detractors come in for unflattering description—“the bellicose Michuki”; “Patrick Shaw, a grotesque giant of a man”, “gargantuan reserve officer”; “unpredictable [George] Githii”; “the combative Nassir”; “Idi Amin…the unpredictable and murderous buffoon”—among many others. The tone is often so condescending!
One looks for the engineering and football metaphors that will distinguish the telling as Raila’s. There are hardly any.
The story is dominated by Elderkin’s distinctly English—rather than Kenyan—idioms. For instance, the phrase “champing at the bit”.
But there is a more fundamental reason why Elderkin is an obtrusive biographer. Raila states at the opening that this “is a collection of memories, and memory is, of course, imperfect”.
But because he tries to capture the whole story of Kenya’s pro-democracy struggles, Raila is forced to narrate events that he could not have witnessed when he was detained on and off for close to a decade between 1982 and 1991.
MEMOIR OR AUTOBIOGRAPHY?
When does a work cease to be a memoir and become an autobiography?
A memoir allows you to operate at the level of feeling, narrating things as you remember them, perhaps about a single event or period and with no need to qualify a sentiment.
Raila does this many times, like when he relates the fall-out in Ford-Kenya by glibly saying “it remains my conviction that Wamalwa’s bodyguard and personal assistant were drafted in and also that 12 delegates …were switched”.
He borders on rumour and hearsay with the frequent “we were told”, “I had received information”.
Autobiography compels you to do the homework and give us the facts. To tell the story of Luo genealogy; of KPU’s emergence when he was studying in Germany and of events during his detention and exile years, Raila’s biographer does the research. She relies heavily on press accounts for the period 1982-1992.
Aside from these tensions between remembering and researching, this work raises an even bigger question on the politics of memory.
Memory is as much collective as it is individual. People in positions of authority—politicians, academics, and cultural workers including the media—shape and reinforce the ways in which society remembers.
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