UHURU BADO KIDOGO:

UHURU BADO KIDOGO:

AFRICA’S CONDITION OF “NOT YET UHURU”;

THE BALANCE SHEET

by

Ali A. Mazrui

This lecture was given at the invitation of the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Foundation and delivered in Nairobi, Kenya, on Friday, July 15, 2005.



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Political dynasties are families who have exerted disproportionate influence on the politics of their societies. If they are very successful they may produce more than one Head of State or Head of Government. But at the very minimum political dynasties have produced political leaders in varied ranks of the political process.

In the United States, the Bush family has rapidly become a political dynasty. That dynasty has so far produced two presidents – George Herbert Bush and George William Bush. It is probable that there will be a third President Bush – President Jeb Bush following his career as Governor of the State of Florida.

The Kennedy family has also been a political dynasty. One brother (JFK) became president; another (Robert) became Senator and then Attorney General, and the third (Edward) has been Senator and would probably have become president but for the tragedy at Chappaquiddick.

The Odingas in Kenya have also become a dynastic family. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga rose as high as Kenya’s Vice-President, and exercised almost equal power as Minister of Home Affairs. But his dream of becoming President of Kenya remained forever elusive – partly because of artificial impediments put in his way by rival political forces.

It has been the politicization of Raila Odinga which has turned the Odinga family into a political dynasty. Raila has become a second Odinga force in Kenya politics.

By a twist of destiny, the Kenyattas have also been evolving a political dynasty. Uhuru Kenyatta attempted to become President of Kenya like his father, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta. But Uhuru Kenyattta has instead become a defacto leader of the opposition. Whether Raila becomes Prime Minister of Kenya, or even a future President, remains to be seen. Uhuru Kenyatta is also young enough to ascend, in like manner, to the pinnacle of power in the future.

Asia has experienced a phenomenon which might be characterized as female succession to male martyrdom. A male leader is assassinated in a country like Sri Lanka (previously Ceylon) and a female relative emerges as a political force to take his place. Mr. Bandaranaike rose to become future Prime Minister.

In Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was executed as Prime Minister. Over time his daughter Benazir Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan twice.

In Bangladeshi history, Sheikh Mujib Rahman and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq were killed. Rahman’s daughter and Zia’s widow rose to exercise ultimate political leadership in Bangladesh.

In Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri eventually succeeded her father, the late Sukarno, as Indonesia’s Head of State.

Africa is revealing a pattern of “male succession to male heroism” rather than “female succession to male martyrdom”. This African tendency has included developments in the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC]. Assassinated President Laurent Kabila has been succeeded by his son, Major General Joseph Kabila.

In the Republic of Togo, the long presidency of His Excellency Gnassingbe Eyadema was succeeded [by fair means or foul] by the Presidency of Abass Bonfoh.

Both the DRC and Togo have been cases of interfamilial succession by military means. The rise of Raila Odinga and Uhuru Kenyatta to national prominence in Kenya have been through the forces of democratization rather than through military intervention.



Two assassinations in Kenya in the 1960s had significant consequences for Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. One was the assassination of Pio Gama Pinto, a Kenyan born Asian, who had three political passions – serving Africa, serving socialism and helping Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. When Pinto was killed in 1965, Oginga lost a gifted political organizer, as well as a friend. But Pinto did not produce a heroic successor after his martyrdom.

The second assassination of the 1960s, which shook Oginga Odinga’s career, was the murder of Tom Mboya in 1969. Mboya was Odinga’s ethnic compatriot and political rival. His death unleashed riots and demonstrations among the Luo and led to Oginga Odinga’s detention and the banning of his political party. But the Mboya assassination did not lead to a Mboya political successor either, whereas Oginga’s natural death did result in at least one high profile political Odinga after him.

Oginga Odinga’s obstacle towards the Presidency was persistently ethnic. There was a concerted effort to prevent a Luo from becoming President. John F. Kennedy’s preliminary obstacle in his way towards the Presidency was religious. The United States had never had a Roman Catholic president. John F. Kennedy faced the challenge of whether, when the chips were down, he would be more a follower of the Vatican than of American democratic values. He had to convince the American public that he was more American than Catholic.

Both Oginga Odinga and Raila Odinga have tried their utmost to convince Kenyans that, when the chips were down, the Odingas were Kenyans first and Luo second.

But, has the Kenya electorate regarded the Odingas in the reverse order – as Luos first and Kenyans second? When Oginga Odinga argued that uhuru had not yet been achieved, and offered to lead Kenyans towards social justice, he looked to see who was following him. It was not underprivileged Kenyans regardless of ethnic background. It was fellow Luo, regardless of income or social class.

As far as the Kenya electorate was concerned, the messenger was more politically relevant than the message. The message was a call for greater social justice, but the messenger was judged by his ethnicity. That was one major reason why uhuru was in a state of “bado kidogo”. Oginga Odinga’s concept of “not yet uhuru” signified a Freedom Gap. The gap was caused by the forces which inhibited internal democracy and curtailed external sovereignty.

Towards Closing the Uhuru Gap

There were seven strategies for narrowing the Freedom Gap and realizing full uhuru. Within each of these strategies across time Oginga Odinga played a historic role.

The most vital for the people is the strategy of democratization. Oginga Odinga was elected to the Kenya colonial legislature in the year and month when the Gold Coast in West Africa became independent – March 1957. But, unlike the Gold Coast (later Ghana), Kenya had an entrenched white settler presence. Oginga Odinga joined forces with Tom Mboya in the struggle against white settlers’ privileges and for the release of the imprisoned national leader, Jomo Kenyatta.

A more dramatic blow for democracy struck by Oginga Odinga occurred when he was invited to the residence of the Governor, Sir Patrick Renison, and offered the leadership of the first African government in colonial Kenya. This event occurred in Government House (now called State House) in Nairobi in 1960. The British Governor and the Kenyan nationalist were both standing when the offer was made. It seemed to be the chance of a lifetime. It turned out to be Oginga Odinga’s last opportunity to become premier of Kenya on the eve of independence. Oginga Odinga is reported to have responded as follows to the Governor:

If I accept your offer, I will be seen as a traitor to my people.

The British cannot elect me leader to my people …Kenyatta

is around, just here at Lodwar. Release him and allow him

to lead us; he is already our choice.[1]





Sir Patrick Renison was temporarily stunned. He then summoned the driver to take Mr. Oginga Odinga back to his native quarters in Nairobi.

We now know that Oginga Odinga struck a blow against external selection of African leaders. He had sacrificed what turned out to be his last opportunity to lead Kenya. His incumbency could have transformed the ethnic configurations of postcolonial Kenya. If Oginga Odinga has accepted the Governor’s offer, the Jaramogi could have presided over the release of Jomo Kenyatta, and Kenyatta might have become Odinga’s Vice President instead of the other way round.

If Odinga’s first blow in favor of democracy was to reject external selection of African leaders, Odinga’s second blow in favour of democracy was to challenge the doctrine of one-party monopoly of power.

The Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) had merged to form a one-party system. Oginga had prospered under KANU first as Vice-President of the party, then as Minister for Home Affairs (1963-64) and then as Vice President of Kenya and Minister without portfolio (1965-66).

Yet he broke away from KANU and formed a left-of-centre Kenya People’s Union. He gave Kenya a two-party system based on an ideological divide (left versus right) rather than the original two party system based on an ethnic divide (KANU under big tribe leadership and KADU under small tribe alliance).

But in 1969 Kenya People’s Union (KPU) was outlawed and Oginga Odinga was detained for a while. He rejoined KANU upon his release in 1971, but the Kenyatta regime prevented him from running for political office. After Kenyatta died in 1978, the succeeding regime under Daniel arap Moi continued to prevent Jaramogi Oginga Odinga from challenging the power monopoly of the KANU establishment.

In 1992, I held a press conference in Nairobi at which I called upon President Daniel arap Moi to step down from power. I argued that President Moi had outlasted his welcome in the political process. Never until then had a Kenyan citizen openly called for the resignation of an incumbent president at a press conference within Kenya itself.

My remarks caused an uproar in the country. What I was not expecting was a request from Jaramogi Oginga Odinga to meet with me at my hotel, the Intercontinental in Nairobi. From my point of view, there was a serious risk that our meeting would be regarded as an apparent political alliance. Nevertheless, I decided to meet with Jaramogi publicly at the Intercontinental for coffee. It was a moment of solidarity rather than the forging of an alliance. Jaramogi and I both agreed that President Moi had been in power too long. What we did not realize in 1992 was that Moi was going to remain in power for another ten years.

However, something positive occurred in the course of Daniel arap Moi’s final decade as Head of State. At long last, the country re-opened itself for multiparty poitics – a system which Oginga Odinga had attempted to initiate when he created a left-wing party called the Kenya People’s Union in the mid-1960s. He later fought for multipartyism through the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD).

Ironically, Oginga Odinga was a great fan of Kwame Nkrumah’s, the man who virtually invented the African one-party state. Nkrumah had argued late in the 1950s that Ghana was too dangerously divided to risk a multiparty system. Julius K. Nyerere argued a few years later that Tanzania was too solidly united to afford the luxury of a multiparty system. Jaramogi Oginga Odinga admired both Nkrumah and Nyerere. In fact, after Nkrumah’s death in 1972, Odinga described Nyerere as “the Nkrumah of today”.[2]

Yet both Presidents were architects of the African one-party state – an experiment which widened the Freedom Gap in postcolonial Africa. At a pro-democracy meeting held in Nairobi in 1993, I argued that Kwame Nkrumah had dealt a blow against the open society in Ghana, partly by inventing the one-party state and partly by attempting to destroy the independence of the judiciary in Ghana. My old paradoxical conclusion was that Kwame Nkrumah was a great African, but not a great Ghanaian.

To my surprise, Oginga Odinga reacted very strongly to my criticism of Kwame Nkrumah. He even suggested that I had been unduly influenced by foreign critics of African heroes. The passion of Jaramogi’s reaction was particularly surprising since this was a meeting to celebrate the emergence of legal opposition parties in the final decade of the twentieth century.

In the 1960s Odinga had rebelled against the one-party state and formed his own opposition party (the KPU). In the early 1990s Odinga was heading another opposition movement (FORD) against KANU and against Moi’s leadership. Yet Oginga Odinga leapt to the defense of his old hero, Kwame Nkrumah, in spite of his being the inventor of the African one-party state. Odinga was passionate in his reaction to my criticism of Nkrumah.

By the time the twenty-first century opened, Raila Odinga – Jaramogi’s son – had emerged as an opposition leader, sometimes consolidating his own party, and sometimes operating within a ruling coalition. The debate had shifted from the old issue of whether the country could afford a second political party to the new issue of whether the country should have a Prime Minister with independent powers. Would the Uhuru Gap be narrowed if there were better checks and balances? Could an independent Prime Minister help provide some balance to the powers of the Presidency? The democratization process is still unfolding in postcolonial Kenya – even when two steps forward are followed by one step backward.

Towards Indigenizing Freedom

The second major strategy for narrowing the Uhuru-Gap is the process of indigenization. This involves tapping indigenous values, traditional technologies, native cultures and languages, and ancient paradigms.

Kenya’s struggle for uhuru was well above average in utilizing indigenous culture as part of the military engagement. That was what the Mau Mau war was all about. The liberation fighters in the forests had their own elaborate oaths of allegiance, taken by naked men, in ceremonies which involved human menstrual blood and the skin of a sacrificed goat.

Christianity has ceremonies which require the symbolic eating of the flesh of Jesus and the symbolic drinking of the blood of Jesus. Some Mau Mau ceremonies included literal tasting of menstrual blood as a link to motherhood rather than to the deity.

The old Dar es Salaam school of African historiography in the 1960s distinguished between primary African resistance to colonization and secondary African resistance. The primary resistance was supposed to have occurred in the initial years of colonization when the Europeans were coming in and the Africans were trying to stop them. The Maji Maji war in Tanganyika against the Germans early in the twentieth century was a case of primary resistance.

On the other hand, the anticolonial struggle by the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) against British rule in 1950s was secondary resistance. The nationalists were themselves Westernized or semi-Westernized, and were using some of the cultural values of the British to fight the British. Slogans like “self-determination” and “democracy” were being thrown at bewildered British colonial officials left, left and center.

Dar es Salaam historians like Terence Ranger had interpreted the concepts of “primary resistance’ and “secondary resistance” chronologically. The primary phase occurred earlier in African history (like the Maji Maji war in 1905-1907), while the secondary phase involved Westernized Africans later in history.

What the Mau Mau fighters illustrated was a different sense of “primary resistance”. In the case of Mau Mau, the term primary was cultural rather chronological. In the 1950s in Tanzania, TANU was fighting the British in a non-violent secondary resistance chronologically. During the same period Mau Mau was fighting the British in a primary resistance culturally. In this cultural sense, the term “primary” refers to the use of indigenous paradigms, native symbols of warriorhood and even indigenous weapons like the spear and the panga.

Of all the liberation movements of Africa in the twentieth century, Mau Mau was the most indigenously inspired, indigenously authentic, and even indigenously led by leaders like Dedan Kimathi. Mau Mau also constituted the writing on the wall for the British Empire in Africa. Mau Mau speeded up the liberation not just of Kenya but also of Tanganyika, Uganda, Zanzibar, Somaliland, Zambia and Malawi. The British interpreted Mau Mau as a compelling sign that it was time to close the entire chapter of colonialism in Eastern Africa.

But, simultaneously with Mau Mau, Kenya’s struggle for independence did also include secondary resistance by nationalists like Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga. Yet much more than Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga was sensitive to the need for indigenous symbolism.

During India’s struggle for independence, the British had to get used to Mahatma Gandhi’s modest attire – the dhoti. Winston Churchill called Gandhi “the naked fakir”, but Gandhi persevered in the symbolism of what he wore. In the words of Shakespeare’s Polonius, “For the apparel proclaims the man.” [Hamlet, Act I, Scene III].

Oginga Odinga’s apparel proclaimed him when in 1958 he entered the Legislative Council in Nairobi wearing African attire, complete with sandals (akala). And for much of the rest of his political life, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, wore an African cap of beads.

The strategy of indigenization in Kenya also required a choice of language policy. On this issue Oginga Odinga was less historically relevant than Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta’s command of the Swahili language was almost the equivalent of a native speaker. Kenyatta’s Swahili oratory was much more impressive than the Jaramogi’s.

Partly because the first President of Kenya was comfortable with the Swahili language, he was an important champion of Kiswahili as a national medium of communication. For a brief period Kenyatta even compelled the Kenyan Parliament to adopt Kiswahili as the main language of parliamentary debate. All of a sudden the great English language orators of yesterday became mediocre speakers of Kiswahili today – while the modest English speakers of yesterday rapidly rose to towering Swahili eloquence the day after.

In Kenyatta’s final years of life he gave Kiswahili a parliamentary opportunity while his own life lasted. There were indeed contradictions in the policy. Speeches in Parliament were made in Kiswahili, but much of the Hansard was still in English. The language of politics in Kenya was more than ever Kiswahili, but the language of the Kenyan constitution was still defiantly English. Budgets were presented in Parliament in the English language, but debated in the House in Kiswahili.

Perhaps President Daniel arap Moi’s compromise after Kenyatta’s death in 1978 made the best sense in the circumstances of Kenya. The Kenyan legislature would be deemed to be bilingual – allowing members to speak in either English or Kiswahili, while addressing the rest of the country more in Kiswahili than in English.

While in linguistic terms Jomo Kenyatta was a figure of more cultural authenticity than Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, in family terms Kenya’s Luo leaders were better rooted in indigenous traditions. While Jomo was partly cultivated by the Christian missionaries, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga was especially cultivated by Luo elders.

There was also the tradition of levirate in Luo culture. When a husband dies, a Luo widow was not cremated live as in Hindu tradition. The Luo widow was re-married to a relative of her late husband, either a brother or a cousin. The children of the deceased husband became the children of the new husband.

Oginga Odinga’s mother became a widow quite young. She was then remarried to a cousin. The second husband was called Odinga. It is a name which has now been immortalized in Kenya’s history.

When Tom Mboya was assassinated in 1969, his widow, Pamela, was re-married to Tom Mboya’s brother. The ancient Old Testament tradition of the Levirate was alive and well in indigenous Luo culture.

As we have mentioned earlier, one of Oginga Odinga’s heroes was Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. Nkrumah’s father also died when he was very young. His mother was inherited, or re-married to one of his father’s siblings. Nkrumah’s second father was a product of the Levirate tradition in African indigenous culture.

The culture of Hinduism had argued that the widow of a deceased man reconciled herself to her loss by being burnt with her husband. African culture had a different argument. The widow of a deceased man reconciled herself to her loss by being married to a relative of her deceased husband.

Perhaps even more long lasting as a strategy of indigenization is the gradual re-traditionalization of Africa’s educational concepts and curricula. Western-style schools have been the disproportionate instruments of the education of African children in the postcolonial era. How indigenously African is the curriculum? How indigenized is the study of history, literature, philosophy and general education? The entire African educational system is crying out for a truly indigenizing cultural and pedagogic revolution.

Towards Africanizing the African State

The third major strategy of closing the Uhuru-Gap is the strategy of domestication. This involves making foreign institutions in Africa more relevant to Africa’s needs or more compatible with African cultures and traditions. Such foreign institutions sometimes need to be domesticated in the sense in which a wild beast might be subjected to domestication.

The most important foreign institution in colonial Africa has been the actual state itself – with all the paraphernalia of flags, national anthems, regular embassies abroad, a special Foreign Ministry at home, and relative compliance with international law. The modern state also has a standing army, and sometimes a navy and an air force.

Before European colonization there were city states like Zanzibar and Kano and old-style empire states in Africa such as the Songhay, Mali and Ghana empires – and also the Ethiopian imperial state for hundreds of years. Egypt has also been a state of some kind across thousands of years. Intermediate traditional states included Bunyoro-Kitara and Buganda.

What were missing were modern-style nation-states with modern concepts of sovereignty and national integration. In any case, much of the rest of Africa was stateless. Some African societies were even examples of ordered anarchy – such as the pre-colonial Somali people.

European colonization has bequeathed to Africa over fifty states with artificial borders and with systems of government which were alien to African traditions and culture. How was Africa to “domesticate” this wild beast called the modern state?

One element in the strategy of state-domestication was to try and get a Constitution which was as rooted as possible in African traditions of governance and African political values. In the initial struggle between the Kenya African National Union (KANU) and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), it was in fact the minority party, KADU, which held the most promise to be close to African traditions and values. KADU originated as a federation of the Kalenjin Political Alliance, the Maasai United Front, the Kenya African People’s Party, the Coast African Political Union, and the Somali National Association.

KADU wanted a constitution which was based on a federal recognition of ethnic diversity in the country. KANU’s stand was a quest for national homogeneity and more centralized government. KANU was also gradually leaning towards a quest for the one-party state.

The KANU agenda seemed more compatible with modern concepts of the state, but somewhat distant from African traditions of decentralized governance. The KANU agenda was not trying to recapture the pre-colonial Kenyan legacy of weak governments and strong traditions. Unlike West Africa and Ethiopia, Kenya never had empire-states. Yet, KANU was aiming for the level of centralized government in Kenya which was almost internally imperial.

Oginga Odinga, in the early 1960s, belonged to the KANU frame of reference. He regarded the KADU agenda as “tribalist” and the KANU programme as “nationalist”. The Kenya constitution which finally emerged for the early phase of independence was the majimbo constitution – which did aspire to turn Kenya into a federation of cultures. Oginga Odinga complained that the document was convoluting, too long and potentially divisive. But the majimbo constitution was closer to respecting indigenous traditions of governance than were the republican changes which were made by KANU in 1964-1965, and the subsequent centralizing tightening of 1982.

If domestication of the state was one of the requirements for closing the Uhuru Gap, the abandonment of the spirit of majimbo was a blow against the Africanization of the state. Oginga Odinga came to realize in subsequent years that marginalizing the Kalenjin, the Coastal people, the Maasai, and the Somali could one day lead on to the marginalization of the Luo by a Kikuya-dominated government. And when the Kalenjin got the upper hand from 1978 to the end of the twentieth century, even the preponderant Kikuyu tasted what it was like to be marginalized.

The majority of post colonial states in Africa convinced themselves that they were ready-made nation-states, and they opted for unitary systems of government. But Unitarism was often incompatible with Africa’s own indigenous legacies of weak governments and strong traditions. Apart from Nigeria, the word “federation” as an internal constitutional system became a dirty word in most African countries. And yet the unitary state has been a disaster in one African country after another – partly because unitarism was a break from pre-colonial African styles of governance.

And even Nigeria as a federation has failed partly because it has combined formal federalism with militarized unitarism throughout most of its postcolonial history.

Oginga Odinga interpreted Luo culture as a paradigm which “did not have a central government with somebody at the top of it who would be accountable to the whole community.”[3]

And, yet, Oginga Odinga opposed the decentralizing concept majimbo. Kenya’s original federalist constitution envisaged a two-chamber legislature; six constituent regions whose powers were derived from the constitution and not from the central government; the six regions were to have their own legislatures, “state-governments” and jurisdiction over land issues and the police. Particularly impressive for an African constitution were the procedures for changing the Constitution. The procedures, though less stringent than those of the United States, required 75 per cent parliamentary majority and, in some matters, 90 per cent before the Constitution could be amended.

Oginga Odinga complained that these were checks without balances. “The new constitution would start Kenya’s government off under severe handicaps.”[4]

Oginga Odinga lived to appreciate the need to make constitutional amendments difficult rather than easy. In his interviews with the late Professor H. Odera Oruka, in the 1990s, Oginga Odinga complained as follows:

Some leaders are fearful and untruthful in their dealings with the

people. They initiate policies and go on to implement them without

bothering to consult the people. The Kenya of the First Republic

provides examples of this…Take also the example of the decision to

make Kenya a one-party state [in law] in 1982. It was announced

one morning in Parliament that within two or three days, Kenya

was to be a one-party state.[5]



In the course of his post-colonial career Oginga Odinga moved from a distrust of checks and balances to a greater appreciation of their value. This faith in checks and balances has been carried further by his son, Raila Odinga. In the Raila paradigm, the checks and balances are needed not just between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, but also within the executive branch itself. Raila Oginga and his supporters have pushed for an office of Prime Minister independent of the Presidency, and yet in coordination with the Head of State. Oginga Odinga had once complained about majimbo as “checks without balances”. Raila Odinga seeks the establishment of a Prime Minister more as a balance with the Presidency than as a check against the Presidency. Traditional African philosophy is more comfortable with the concept of parallel balancing of the power of the chief than countering or checking it.

The new proposed Boma constitution of Kenya echoes aspects of the legacy of majimbo of forty years earlier. Greater recognition of regional autonomy and of ethnic diversity are part of the process of re-Africanizing the African state. They also help in narrowing the Uhuru-Gap in the post-colonial era.

Diversification: Domestic, International and Cross-Cultural

The fourth strategy of narrowing that liberty gap is the strategy of diversification. Among areas which have needed to be diversified have been crops grown in Africa, trading partners, foreign aid donors, a better balance between agriculture and mineral resources, and diversifying Africa’s external role models. It was certainly not adequate to look at only Western civilization for paradigms of change and progress.

Oginga Odinga led the way in post-colonial Kenya by daring to look beyond Western Europe and the United States for donors, potential trading partners, and paradigms of development. In the heat of the Cold War, Oginga Odinga was the most daring of all Kenyans to explore what the Communist World had to offer to help Africa. Liberation fighters in Southern Africa looked increasingly to communist countries in both Europe and Asia for arms and military training. Oginga Odinga believed that the Communist world could also lend a hand in economic development and social transformation. In that spirit of learning from others, Oginga Odinga came to say the following in retrospect in the 1990s:

I traveled to [the then] Soviet Union, to China, and several

Eastern European countries… Having been schooled in the

capitalist-dominated world, it was natural to feel that….

I should visit other sections…I was an inquisitive visitor,

but I did not become their religions disciple –I did not become

communist.[6]



A number of times in the 1950s and 1960s Oginga cultivated and befriended a number of communist countries. And, just as liberation fighters in Southern Africa received weapons and training from Communist countries, Oginga Odinga and his movement received economic and financial support from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China. Tom Mboya, on the other hand, received support from Western Europe and the United States. Kenya was experiencing the diversification of benefactors in the Cold War era.

In 1960, Tom Mboya succeeded in providing an American air lift to enable Kenyan students to study in the United States. Oginga Odinga managed to balance that with scholarships for Kenyan students to study in the Eastern bloc. Raila Odinga studied in communist East Germany. Such international balancing helped to narrow the Uhuru-Gap.

Tom Mboya had cultivated links between the trade unions of Kenya and those of Western world. Oginga successfully helped to establish the Lumumba Institute on Thika Road to train activists and leftist youth wingers. Kenyatta himself opened the institute on Jamhuri Day in December 1964. While Western resources subsidized Western-style organizations in Kenya, Oginga Odinga negotiated different forms of foreign assistance from different socialist countries. Cinema vans were received from Czechoslovakia, lecturers came from the Soviet Union, books and blankets from Yugoslavia, financial support from the German Democratic Republic [East Germany] and from the People’s Republic of China. [7]

Oginga Odinga insisted that he was a socialist and not a communist. Just because he had friendly relations with Communist countries did not make him a communist. Later on, he gave the following illustration:

Take the example of former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Nixon was the first U.S. President to visit Mao Tsetung’s China; that was in the early 1970s. Nixon broke through the ideological iron curtain between communist China and the U.S.A…. They ate together with Mao Tsetung and Chou En Lai…. Did President Nixon and Henry Kissinger become communists? …. What I did by visiting China and the Soviet Union was no more than Nixon did.[8]



In apparently backing the Soviet Union, Oginga Odinga had backed a loser. The Soviet Union had collapsed by the time Oginga died in 1994. On the other hand, by backing the People’s Republic of China, Oginga Odinga was backing a future winner. We know today that China is on its way towards becoming the next superpower.

One real friend of the socialist world was called Double-O. That was Oginga Odinga. One fictional enemy of the socialist world was called Double 007. His name was Bond, James Bond. Double 007 belonged to the world of the imagination, while Double-O belonged to the real world of thought and action. Perhaps this is a distinct area of diversification: a combination of thought, action and the imagination.

No less illustrative of thought, action and the imagination is the world of religion. Like his hero, Kwame Nkrumah, Oginga Odinga was an ecumenicalist. Odinga regarded religion as both a basis of diversity and a foundation of human oneness. He said:

I do not differentiate between the various denominations. I see religion qua religion as being something that is needed to help people inculcate discipline in themselves. On the face of it, most religions preach the brotherhood of man to man.[9]



Kwame Nkrumah went further in his view of the role of religion in Africa. It was in his book, Consciencism, that Nkrumah most explicitly addressed the triple heritage of African culture, Islam and what he called “Euro-Christianity”. For Nkrumah, the biggest challenge for African philosophy was how to synthesize these three very different traditions of thought. Nkrumah’s concept of “consciencism” was the nearest approximation of my own concept of “the Triple Heritage” – a search for an African synthesis of three distinct civilizations. Nkrumah felt that Africa needed what he called

the theoretical basis for an ideology whose aim shall be to contain the African experience of Islamic and Euro-Christian presence, as well as the experience of African traditional society and, by gestation, employ them for the harmonious growth and development of that society…. Our society is not the old society, but a new society enlarged by Islamic and Euro-Christian influences.[10]



Nkrumah described this “consciencism” as a “philosophy and ideology for decolonization.” The synthesis of the three civilizations was a quest to narrow, if not fill, the Uhuru-Gap.

The implementation of such cultural synthesis would require major changes in Africa’s educational systems. Most African schools and universities started off as primarily Western style institutions. The postcolonial period has seen some progress in “domesticating” educational systems and syllabi by covering more African history, literature, philosophy and culture. But the teaching of African languages is still grossly neglected in most African countries.

And, if Africa is a continent of three civilizations (indigenous, Islamic and Western), when will African schools and universities pay enough attention to Islamic history, philosophy, literature, or the culture and politics of the Muslim world?

Africa needs a diversification of the syllabus and the curriculum, even beyond the Triple Heritage. The West, Islam and our own ancestors are not the only sources of wisdom. There is a lot that Africans can learn from the cultures and experiences of India, China, Japan, Indonesia, the Jewish world, as well as the African Diaspora abroad. The imperative of diversification ranges from diversifying crops and commodities to diversifying cultures and trading partners. The struggle continues.

Towards Interlocking Partnerships

The fifth strategy for narrowing the Uhuru-Gap is horizontal interpenetration. This involves cooperation or integration with countries of the same level of development. The first stage for Africa is Pan-Africanism – an African quest for solidarity with other African countries and with people of African descent scattered around the world.

Kenya was not yet independent when the Organization of African Unity [O.A.U.] was formed in Addis Ababa in May 1963. Mzee Jomo Kenyatta asked Oginga Odinga to represent Kenya at the meeting of the African Heads of State which initiated the O.A.U. It fell upon Oginga Odinga to introduce to the Addis Ababa meeting the joint statement of African countries still struggling for independence at that time. Oginga Odinga felt greatly honoured to speak not just for Kenya, but also for the rest of Africa that was still struggling to be free. For such countries, the feeling of “Not Yet Uhuru” was still very acute. Arising out of their statement to the Organization of African Unity, the Committee of Liberation was established to give support to the anticolonial struggle still raging, and to the struggle against apartheid and White minority rule in Southern Africa.

Pan-Africanism was not simply about the African continent. It was also about the Diaspora of African descent scattered around the world. Partly because Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah had studied abroad, they were much more in tune with the rest of the Black world than Oginga Odinga could claim to be. After all, both Kenyatta and Nkrumah had attended the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England, in 1945. It turned out to be a historic Pan-African event, attended not only by Kenyatta and Nkrumah, but also by such other historic Black figures as W.E.B. DuBois of the United States and George Padmore of the West Indies.

The different levels of Pan-Africanism included Trans-Saharan Solidarity. This involved the unity of both Black and Arab Africans. Oginga Odinga saluted as his heroes Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela and Gamal Abdel Nasser – arguably the towering triumvirate of Trans-Saharan Pan-Africanism.

But in his interviews with the late Odera Oruka, Oginga Odinga did not cite any single Diaspora African as one of his heroes. He did not mention as a hero Marcus Garvey of Jamaica, as Nkrumah had repeatedly done. Oginga did not cite Sylvester Williams, W.E.B. DuBois, or even Toussain Louverture of the Haitian revolution of 1804.

It is worth bearing in mind that the African Diaspora has a number of dimensions. The sovereign African Diaspora consists of those countries outside Africa whose populations are mainly of African descent, and who are currently sovereign independent countries. Such countries include Jamaica, Haiti, Barbados, and other Caribbean countries which are both sovereign and mainly Black.

The concept of mega-Diaspora applies to those Diaspora populations which are not a majority in their pluralistic sovereign countries, but whose numbers are massive. These mega-Diasporas include Black Brazil, which is rightly described as the largest Black country in the world after Nigeria. Depending upon one’s calculation, half the population of Brazil carries African blood.

Black America is also part of the mega-Diaspora. With a population of some 35 million, Black Americans are about twice the population of world Jewry.

The third concept is that of dual Diaspora. This encompasses countries populated by at least two distinct Diasporas. Guyana in South America is one such Dual Diaspora. Trinidad and Tobago in the West Indies is another. Each of these countries is populated both by people originally from India and by people originally from Africa – a Dual Diaspora, indeed.

It has been estimated that people of African ancestry who live outside Africa add up to the staggering number of 150 million people, scattered across the world, but particularly concentrated in the Western hemisphere. The converging relationship between Africa and its Diaspora adds up to what is now increasingly referred to as “Global Africa”.

But horizontal interpenetration as a strategy for narrowing the Uhuru-Gap goes beyond global Pan-Africanism. Africa’s relationship with other developing countries can contribute to mutual liberation. Afro-Asian solidarity movements and the Non-aligned movement have historically linked Africa with other developing societies. And Latin American countries like Cuba and Brazil have played significant roles in Africa’s postcolonial history.

Oginga Odinga did have some limited contact with Jawaharlal Nehru of India in the concluding years of British rule in Kenya. Oginga Odinga toured India in 1953 and met personally “the great Jawaharlal Nehru”, as Odinga himself described him. Subsequently, Nehru provided KANU with a leading Indian Constitutional lawyer (Mr. B. Malik) to help KANU formulate what it would like to see in the Constitution of a self-governing Kenya.[11]

Nehru died less than a year after Kenya’s independence. Oginga Odinga described Nehru as “the Chou En Lai of India.”[12] Oginga intended that to be a high compliment to Nehru. I am not sure if Nehru himself would have regarded it as complimentary!

While Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda had regarded Mahatma Gandhi as their supreme Indian hero, Oginga Odinga and Uganda’s Milton Obole were more fascinated by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister after her own independence in 1947.

Since Nehru’s death, ideological solidarity between India and Africa has declined, but other relationships have flowered. Scholars from India have taught at different African universities; Indian engineers are now in great demand; Africans sometimes choose to go to India for complicated surgery rather than going to Europe. Economic relations between India and Africa have also grown.

Although India is only one country, while Africa has more than fifty states, the population of India is one and a half times the population of the whole of Africa added together. What is more, India is on its way towards becoming the most populous country in the world – outstripping China in population in another twenty to thirty years. Oginga Odinga was justified to have taken both India and China seriously as far back as the 1950s. He sensed quite early that the Uhuru-Gap can best be narrowed in solidarity with others.



Towards Counterpenetrating the West

After horizontal inter-penetration, the sixth strategy of ultimate decolonization is the strategy of vertical counterpenetration. Under this heading, less developed countries seek to counterpenetrate the citadels of power in the industrialized world. A dramatic recent example is the rise of Barrack Obama in the United States. This descendant of Victoria Nyanza was elected to the Senate of the United States in the elections of 2004. His father was an ethnic compatriot of Oginga Odinga and a national compatriot of all Kenyans. Yet this Kenyan-American is only the third Black person to serve on the United States’ Senate in a hundred years, and only the fifth Black Senator of the United States in two hundred years. A relatively recent descendant of a Nyanza Kenyan has counterpenetrated the citadel of legislative power in America.

Other people of African descent who have counterpenetrated the American political system include Colin Powell, who served as the first Black Secretary of State, and Condeleeza Rice who has been the most powerful Black woman in the world since she joined the Administration of President George W. Bush in 2001.

Counterpenetration can also take an economic form. China’s attempt in 2005 to buy one of the major petroleum companies of the United States could become a case of counterpenetration by the Communist Chinese into the capitalist economy of the United States. American opponents of the Chinese bid have warned about security risks if the Chinese controlled some of the strategic energy resources of the United States. But, whether the Chinese succeed in this particular bid or not, they will make other attempts in the future to counterpenetrate American capitalism.

In the scientific and scholarly fields, counterpenetration includes the role of African professionals in Western Europe and the United States. During the colonial period, I personally was taught by several British teachers (male and female) in our secondary school in Mombasa in the 1940s. I did not know at that time that I would grow up to teach British students in England and American students on their own campuses for several decades after the colonial period. I was an African product of Western teachers before I subsequently became an African producer of Western graduates. My latter role was part of Africa’s intellectual counterpenetration of the Western world.

As a young man, Oginga Odinga went to much more distinguished secondary schools than I did. Oginga went to Maseno and Alliance High Schools – no less – while I went to the Arab School of Mombasa. In reality, my school was a school for Coastal Muslims, both Arab and African, but excluding Asian Muslims. The Arab School was no match for Alliance High School in quality.

But Oginga Odinga had less of a role in counterpenetrating the Western world, mainly because almost his entire education was in Africa with very limited residential exposure to the Western world.

The main academic bond which the Jaramogi had with me was through Makerere. We were both former Makerereans – he as a former student and I as a former teacher at Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda.

When I was a professor and Dean at Makerere, I had occasion to invite Tom Mboya to come to speak to Makerere audiences. I believe Oginga Odinga came to Makerere under other auspices at a different time. As a leading East African academic institution, Makerere produced many graduates who later counterpenetrated the Western world. Many of those had listened to Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga on campus. Among Makerere’s most distinguished Kenyan exports to the Western world is, of course, Ngugi wa Thion’go, one of Africa’s literary giants.

A more ominous form of counterpenetration is the military version. Before the final decades of the twentieth century Less Developed Countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America could be bombed or invaded by Northern powers with little military risk to the Northern countries.

The Mau Mau fighters in Kenya could harass white settlers in Kenya or attempt to confront British troops in the Abadaire forests. But what Mau Mau could not do was bomb London or Birmingham in England.

Middle Eastern nationalists have now invented military counterpenetration into the citadels of power in the Western world. On September 11, 2001, Middle Eastern nationalists destroyed the World Trade Center in New York as a symbol of American economic might, crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., as a symbol of American military might, and planned to crash into either the White House or the Congressional buildings as symbols of American political power. Such military counterpenetration was inconceivable in the 1950s. Kenya’s Mau Mau warriors could not penetrate London militarily; nor could Angolan fighters countepenetrate Lisbon with bombs.

Into this military crossfire of bombs and counter-bombs between the Northern hemisphere and the Southern, Africa is being relentlessly drawn. Oginga Odinga did not live long enough to witness the bombing of the United States’ Embassy in Nairobi in 1998 when over 200 Kenyans were killed by Middle Eastern terrorists alongside twelve Americans.

But Oginga Odinga was around much earlier when Cuba attempted to have countervailing missile power against the United States with the collaboration of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s experiment in countervailing power triggered off the almost deadly missile crisis between John F. Kennedy’s America and Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union in 1962.

Oginga Odinga was convinced that the real hero of the Cuban missile crisis was Nikita Khrushchev, rather than John F. Kennedy. Oginga had met Khrushchev and reached this conclusion:

…it is Khrushchev, rather than John Kennedy, who saved the world from a possible nuclear exchange during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Kennedy was ready to strike, but Khrushchev swallowed his pride and withdrew the Soviet missiles form Cuba. If he had remained as adamant as Kennedy, who would have saved the world?[13]



The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was an early attempt of countervailing power against the United States. Al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden several decades later was the next big threat to the United States. Al-Qaeda was a purer case of military counterpenetration by the Third World than the Cuban/Soviet missile crisis had been.

Unfortunately for Africa, the continent has now become a new kind of battlefield between Middle Eastern terrorism and American counterrorism. There is a potential for African recruits into Al-Qaeda from countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt, northern Nigeria, Somalia and perhaps even Kenya. The United States needs to engage Eastern and Southern Africa more constructively if it is to contain the risk of military counterpenetration by Africans into the citadels of American power.

The struggle for vertical counterpenetration in Africa ranges from the entry of Nigerians into corporate America to the new roles of immigrant Ethiopians in the culture, language and religion of America. Counterpenetration is the attempt by less privileged countries to influence or contain the power of the mighty within.

The struggle continues for the Southern hemisphere’s more constructive counterpenetration of the North. The power of production is needed rather than consumerism. The South needs to wield influence in the North – but more civilian power rather than military, more constructive influence rather than destructive. The struggle once again continues in the annals of the legacy of Oginga Odinga.



Globalization and the Uhuru-Gap

Africa in the twenty first century is likely to be one of the final battlegrounds of the forces of globalization – for better or for worse. This phenomenon, called GLOBALIZATION, has its winners and losers. In the initial phases, Africa has been among the losers as it has been increasingly marginalized. There are universities in the United States which have more computers than the computers available in an African country of twenty million people. This has been the great digital divide. The distinction between the Haves and Have-nots has now coincided with the distinction between Digitised and the “Dig-prived”. How can globalization narrow the Uhuru-Gap rather than widen it?

Let us begin with the challenge of a definition. What is globalization? It consists of processes that lead toward global interdependence and the increasing rapidity of exchange across vast distances. The word globalization is itself quite new, but the actual processes toward global interdependence and exchange started centuries ago.

Four forces have been major engines of globalization across time: religion, technology, economy, and empire. These have not necessarily acted separately, but often have reinforced each other. For example, the globalization of Christianity started with the conversion of Emperor Constantine I of Rome in 313. The religious conversion of an emperor started the process under which Christianity became the dominant religion not only of Europe but also of many other societies later ruled or settled by Europeans. The globalization of Islam began not with converting a ready-made empire, but with building an empire almost from scratch. The Umayyads and Abbasids put together bits of other people’s empires (e.g., former Byzantine Egypt and former Zoroastrian Persia) and created a whole new civilization. The forces of Christianity and Islam sometimes clashed. In Africa the two religions have competed for the soul of a continent.

Although Oginga Odinga was brought up a Christian, he distrusted European versions of Christianity, and did away with his Christian names. Oginga Odinga was not a Muslim either, but he observed the matrimonial Muslim maximum of four wives. He also fathered fifteen children, and adopted three additional ones.

Oginga Odinga recognized Christianity and Islam as global forces, but he preferred socialism as a secular global ethic.

Voyages of exploration were another major stage in the process of globalization. Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus opened up a whole new chapter in the history of globalization. Economy and empire were the major motives. There followed the migration of people. The Portuguese helped to build Fort Jesus in Mombasa. The migration of the Pilgrim Fathers to America was in part a response to religious and economic imperatives in Europe. Demographic globalization reached its height in the Americas with the influx of millions of people from other hemispheres. In time, the population of the United States became a microcosm of the population of the world, for it contained immigrants from almost every society on earth. The making of America was the making of a globalized society or universal nation. South Africa had Dutch settlers three centuries ago – a potential universal nation on the African continent was initiated in South Africa.

The Industrial Revolution in Europe represents another major chapter in the history of globalization. This marriage between technology and economics resulted in previously unknown levels of productivity. Europe’s prosperity whetted its appetite for new worlds to conquer. The Atlantic slave trade was accelerated, moving millions of Africans from one part of the world to another. Europe’s appetite also went imperial on a global scale, and one European people, the British, built the largest and most far-flung empire in human experience, most of which lasted until the end of World War II. Kenya got its boundaries and its name from British imperialism.

The two world wars were themselves manifestations of globalization. The twentieth century is the only one to witness globalized warfare: during 1914-18 and again during 1939-45. The Cold War (1948-89) was yet another manifestation of globalization, for it was a global power rivalry between two alliances: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact. While the two world wars were militarily more destructive, the Cold War was potentially the most dangerous – since it carried the risk of planetary annihilation in confrontations like the Cuban missile crisis. Oginga Odinga regarded Khruschev as the savior of the human race at the Cuban crisis.

Oginga Odinga also regarded World War II as one of the forces which led to the rapid disintegration of the British Empire after the war. He also believed that the nuclear age had made a world government a necessity. The Uhuru-Gap had been narrowed by World War II – only to be widened again by the nuclear age.

The final historical stage of globalization came when the Industrial Revolution was joined with the new Information Revolution. Interdependence and exchange became dramatically dependent upon the computer. The most powerful country by this time was the United States. Pax Americana mobilized three of globalization’s four engines: technology, economy, and empire. Although in the second half of the twentieth century this Pax Americana apparently did not seek to promote a particular religion, it did help to promote secularism and the ideology of the separation of church and state. On balance, the impact of Americanization probably has been harmful to religious values worldwide, whether intended or not. Americanized Hindu youth, Americanized Buddhist teenagers, or indeed Americanized Muslim youngsters in Mombasa are far less likely to be devout adherents of their faiths than their non-Americanized counterparts. The United States has been a secularizing force in Africa and elsewhere.

In the new millennium the forces of globalization are likely to continue, against the background of the meaning of the twentieth century in world history. As thetwenty-first century has unfolded, scholars have interpreted globalization in three distinct ways.

I: Forces which are transforming the global market and creating new economic interdependency across vast distances. Africa is affected, but not centrally.

II: Forces which are exploding into the information superhighway - expanding access to data and mobilizing the computer and the Internet into global service. This tendency is marginalizing Africa. The Uhuru-Gap is widening.

III: All forces which are turning the world into a global village - compressing distance, homogenizing culture, accelerating mobility, and reducing the relevance of political borders. Under this comprehensive definition, globalization is the gradual villagization of the world. These forces have been at work in Africa long before the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

As we have indicated, the twentieth century is the only century which had world wars - 1914 to 1918, and 1939 to 1945. This was the only century which created world diplomatic institutions - the League of Nations and the United Nations. Oginga believed that the United Nations needed drastic reforms.

This was the only century which created a World Bank - the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) with the International Development Association. Like most socialists, Oginga distrusted the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The twentieth century also issued a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948. This was the only century which established a global university - the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan. Some of these trends have affected Africa more deeply than others.

This was the only century which had a world health institution - the World Health Organization (WHO). The twentieth century also created a global mechanism to moderate trade relations - the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Seattle meeting of WTO at the end of the millennium illustrated the depth of feelings about the organization.

This was the only century which had a part-time self appointed global policeman - the United States of America. And, of course, this was the only century which developed a genuine world economy - or at least a close approximation to it. Oginga was all too aware that this world economy was capitalist to the core.

Nevertheless, all these were indicators of globalization. Although the term “globalization” is indeed new, the forces which have been, as we indicated, creating it have been going on for generations. It is only now that we have realized that the forces at work have had global repercussions and have been sometimes global in scale. The creation of the African Diaspora as a result of the African Slave trade turned out to be a manifestation of globalization.

But is a globalized Planet Earth really a global village? The world may be globalized, but what would make it villagized? There is something missing - the compassion of the village has yet to be globalized. Planet Earth will never really become a global village until the contraction of distance is accompanied by the expansion of empathy. This could be the ultimate closing of the Uhuru-Gap.

Education world-wide can have a role in that empathy-creation. The rich must learn to be more sensitive to the poor; the better endowed be more concerned about the less; the North must learn to be more just to the South. But for Africa there is no substitute for self-reliance as a long term struggle. These are vital stages towards closing the Uhuru-Gap.

Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage” (As You Like It). The new millennium asks: “Is all the world a village?” A stage is a conceit; a village is authenticity. Where does Africa fit in? Perhaps through greater attention to global concerns and through greater effort at kujitegemea (self-dependence). Julius Nyerere’s central slogan after the Arusha Declaration of 1967 was Ujamaa na Kujitegemea – Socialism and Self-Reliance.

Oginga Odinga was to the left of Julius Nyerere ideologically. Oginga believed that socialism would be a sham if Africa’s condition continued to be Uhuru Bado Kidogo (not yet Uhuru). Oginga’s struggle truly continues.

CONCLUSION

This lecture has been about Africa more than about Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. But Jaramogi’s life and works have helped us understand Africa better. Oginga Odinga was convinced that the task of decolonization was not yet complete. To use Oginga’s own words:

When we hang out the national flag for uhuru meetings

and rallies we don’t want the cries of wapi uhuru (where

is uhuru) to drown the cheers. Our independence struggle

was not meant to enrich a minority. It was to cast off the

yoke of colonialism and of poverty.[14]



In this lecture we have used the concept of Uhuru-Gap (Freedom Gap) to signify the distance yet to be covered before real uhuru can be achieved. Africa’s independence is a work in progress. We have identified seven strategies in the quest for greater freedom.

Oginga Odinga was a major actor within the strategy of democratization. He was crucial in the struggle for a multiparty democracy. But the problem of checks and balances is posing new challenges in the era of his son, Raila Odinga.

The strategy of domestication involves making a foreign institution more relevant for Africa. How can the African state be made truly African? At stake are issues which range from choice of the official language of a country to a culturally relevant Constitution.

The strategy of domestication overlaps with the strategy of indigenization. Both Oginga and Kenyatta were traditionalists. When Oginga entered Parliament in traditional African dress and sandals, he was helping to Africanize Parliament itself symbolically.

The strategy of diversification may include diversifying the economy or diversifying ideological options, or diversifying trading partners and aid donors. When Tom Mboya cultivated Western leaders and Oginga Oginda cultivated leaders of the Communist world, Kenya benefited from the diversity of friendships.

The strategy of horizontal interpenetration cultivates solidarity with societies of comparable levels of development. Oginga Odinga was less involved with Pan Africanism than either Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere or even Jomo Kenyatta in his younger days. But there is little doubt that if Oginga had been elected President of Kenya he would have been much more Pan Africanist than Kenyatta’s government was.

The strategy of vertical counterpenetration involves penetrating the citadels of power. When Africans become influential or powerful in Europe or America, that is counterpenetration. When a person of Kenyan Luo descent such as Barrack Obama becomes only the third Black U.S. Senator in more than a hundred years, that is spectacular counterpenetration.

The seventh strategy is that of globalization. Oginga Odinga was in many ways a globalist in the best sense of the term. He even dreamt of a world government in the future as the ultimate check on human militarism. But while Africa suffered from some of the economic consequences of globalization, Africa has benefited from a new global concern for the poor and the afflicted. When eight major cities of the world could hold concerts on live television to draw attention to the teeming millions of impoverished Africans, that was a new level of global awareness even if the practical results in poverty-alleviation are modest.

When Africans become Vice Presidents of the World Bank or when the continent produces two Secretaries-General of the United Nations back-to-back, that is a bonus of the new global awareness.

Less attractive is military counterpenetration. In the past less developed countries could be invaded or bombed by the great powers without the weak being able to hit at the powerful in their metropolitan cities. The Mau Mau could fight British troops on Kenyan soil but could not militarily attack the British in London or Manchester.

Oginga Odinga died before Al-Qaeda counterpenetrated the United States on September 11, 2001, and demolished the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon. Unlike Mau Mau fighters, Middle Eastern nationalists of today can now use terrorist methods to hit back at the most powerful cities in the world. The force of counterpenetration and the forces of globalization are generating both hope and despair in the new millennium. But Oginga Odinga remained the ultimate optimist.

If there is any reward to be gained by ending the Cold War,

it should be that which follow after a truly global structure

of democratic governance is put in place…But it must

realize that politics is about ideals; ideals that inspire

people to action; ideals that spell out what is possible

under difficult objective circumstances.[15]



Oginga Odinga tried his best to approximate his own ideals – often at the risk of his freedom if not his life. He was detained more than once. The Kenya electorate missed a great opportunity when they did not give him a chance to pursue his ideals from the pinnacle of power – the Presidency. But, as democrats, we must submit to the will of the people. So be it.

The blood of experience meanders on

In the vast expanse of the Valley of Time

The new is come and the old is gone.

And Time abides a changing clime.

ENDNOTES

[1] H. Odera Oruka (ed), Oginga Odinga: His Philosophy and Beliefs (Nairobi: Initiatives Publishers, 1992) p. 6



[2] H. Odera Oruka (ed.), op. cit., p. 56.



[3] For Oginga Odinga’s interpretation of the KANU-KADU equilibrium, see his book NOT YET UHURU, especially chapter 11 abd 12 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) pp. 193-231. See also H. Odera Oruka, op. cit., p. 96, about Luo governance.



[4] Not Yet Uhuru, op. cit., p. 230



[5] H. Odera Oruka (ed), Oginga Odinga: His Philosophy and Beliefs, op. cit., p. 101



[6] H. Odera Oruka (ed), op. cit., p. 87



[7] For an updated recent report about the rise and fall of the Lumumba Institute in Kenya see John Kamau’s article “How Kenya’s Best Kept Secret Became a Hotbed of Insurgents”, Sunday Standard (Nairobi) July 11, 2004



[8] H. Odera Oruka (editor), Oginga Odinga: His Philosophy and Beliefs, loc. cit., pp. 87-88.



[9]H. Odera Oruka (editor), op. cit., pp. 38-39.



[10]Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization (London: Heinemann, 1964), pp. 68-70.



[11]Title in Not Yet Uhuru, op. cit., pp. 128-29, 222.



[12]See Odera Oruka (editor), op. cit., p. 91.



[13]H. Odera Oruka, Ibid., p. 65.



[14] Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru op, cit. p. 310.



[15] H. Odera Oruka (ed) Oginga Odinga, op cit, pp. 138-139








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