Radicals of EA: Raila comes in from the cold

President Kenyatta receives Rwanda President Paul Kagame when the latter arrived at the Kenya Ports Authority, Mombasa for the commissioning of Berth 19 August 28, 2013. PSCU

 

 

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

This Sunday, Raila Odinga: The Flame of Freedom, the autobiography of the former Kenyan prime minister co-authored with journalist Sarah Elderkin, will be
published in Nairobi.

Books by African politicians, or indeed politicians everywhere, tend to be largely the same: a lot of spin, rewriting of history, elevating their role in history, and diminishing that of rivals.
The title of Raila’s book, in particular, looked very suspicious.

What a surprise it turned out to be. The man actually does step back often enough, and tells a story than is greater than himself. There are streaks of vanity, yes, but the book is easily the best portrayal of how Cold War politics played out in East Africa.

It forces those who didn’t admire Tanzania’s founding president “Mwalimu” Julius Nyerere, to look at him with new regard. It also forces a re-evaluation of Raila’s father, Jaramogi Odinga — the quintessential African radical.

Though he does not make particular effort to do so, the picture of the East Africa of the 1960s that emerges is a borderless region that is impossible to imagine today. The ideological animosities between Tanzania and Kenya become clearer, and just how far to the right Kenya was in the Cold War period is a little shocking.

Raila, and it would seem several other young Kenyans who were headed to study in socialist Eastern Europe at that time, were routinely denied passports. No problem. They crossed into Tanzania.

In Raila’s case he was met by an aide to Oscar Kambona, the charismatic secretary-general of the ruling Tanganyika African National Union (Tanu, which became Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) after the Union with Zanzibar in 1964) who checked them into a hotel.

Later, his party went to Kambona’s office. And the next day, they went to meet Nyerere himself, and left with Tanganyika passports.

Jaramogi himself, considered a dangerous communist, couldn’t get a Kenyan passport. He travelled around the world on a passport given to him by another radical and pan-Africanist; Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah!

In Egypt, another African revolutionary, Gamal Abdel Nasser, was in power. Like many young Ugandan radicals whose stories have been told, Raila too travelled to Eastern Europe through Cairo, which used to serve as a kind of socialist clearing house.

He arrived there not knowing in which country he was going to study. He was only told in Egypt.

There are eye-poppers at every couple of pages. The result is that the stories about African radicals, and the loose internationalist movement on the continent then, become clearer.

Within Kenya too, the face of politics, and the multi-ethnicity of the players in the country’s progressive politics is striking. It is a delight to see glimpses of an Africa and East Africa that many romanticise about today.

Yet, one also feels uncomfortable. Kenya, clearly, is a more inclusive and less dogmatic society today. The current Tanzania looks like it is running away from the ideals portrayed in Flame of Freedom.

An East Africanista would ask, “How could we have lost it all?” That is the next book begging to be written. Of the people I know, I can think of two who could best write it: Tanzanian political scientist Paramagamba Kabudi and, yes, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.