I remember the night Raila Odinga was about to win the Kenyan presidency.
It was December 2007, a few days after Christmas, and I was sitting in my house in Nairobi watching the election results stream in on TV.
Raila — most people referred to him by his first name — was decisively leading. He was about to do the impossible: unseat an incumbent president, which is difficult anywhere, and usher in a peaceful transfer of power on a continent where there were precious few examples of that ever happening. Raila had built a multiethnic coalition and, as we could all see from his enormous rallies and the votes coming in, genuine popularity. I went to sleep that night excited to see how this would play out.
But when I woke up, his lead had vanished. Election officials simply changed the vote tabulations. Observers, including me, were shocked by the brazen rigging. Chaos erupted. Kenyans felt wronged. Only after more than 1,000 were killed in post-election violence did international mediators hammer out a compromise that kept Raila from becoming president but that made him prime minister, which turned out to be a lame position.
Raila Odinga died this week at 80. Huge crowds have already gathered to view his body at a stadium in Kenya. The police responded by firing shots into the air.
He was one of Kenya’s most colorful and influential political figures, and in the coming days, he will be lionized as a champion of democracy. But the negative space around that title is important.
As a leader, he confronted a tribalism, exacerbated by colonialism, that characterized African politics and extended deep into the present, long after many African countries developed their economies and became modern nation-states.
Raila’s life and career were hemmed in by the brutal logic of winner-take-all, my-ethnic-group-versus-yours, a discrimination against a person’s origins that might have looked less obvious than flat-out racism but was just as insidious.
Raila was a Luo. And many people to this day believe that’s what cost him the election.
The Luos are one of Kenya’s biggest ethnic groups but they’ve never held the presidency. They have a long, rich story, born along the shores of Lake Victoria, and historically have been well educated, producing some of Kenya’s top writers, artists and public intellectuals.
Kenya’s most famous actor, Lupita Nyong’o, is a Luo. So was Tom Mboya, an eloquent labor leader assassinated in the 1960s. Around that time another promising Luo appeared with a name you might recognize: Barack Obama Sr. The American president’s father was one of the best educated Kenyan economists at Kenya’s independence in 1963. Harvard trained, he was sidelined, too, and descended into alcoholism, eventually dying alone in a car crash.
The Luos were othered by central Kenya’s powerful ethnic groups, even teased for not being circumcised and therefore not being real men.
“The Luo were constantly boxed out of political power,” Susanne Mueller, a researcher at Boston University’s African Studies Center, told me.
Raila banged his head against exclusion his entire career. He was jailed and badly beaten in the 1980s. He resisted Kenya’s dictatorship in the 1990s.
By the time I arrived in East Africa as a correspondent in the mid 2000s, he was practicing a style of politics much of Africa had never seen. He brought his entourage to Nairobi’s biggest slums and popped out of the sunroof of gleaming cars to speak to crowds. I watched him descend in a helicopter to a dusty field packed with Maasai men, some dressed in traditional red shukas. There was no place too marginalized for him to visit. As for his clothes, Raila always dressed well — colorful, well-cut suits; big hats; expensive shoes. But behind the flamboyance was something steely.
He was the reliable counterweight to the tendency in African politics to drift into authoritarianism. He challenged executive overreach and spoke up for minorities. He was often the lone voice of dissent, or at least the loudest. The politics of one of Africa’s most prominent countries, its destiny even, wouldn’t have been the same without him.
He kept this up probably too long. When I last interviewed him, about 10 years ago, he looked tired and his speech was mumbled. He could have been grooming the next batch of opposition leaders. He had reached what some called mwisho ya barabara, or the end of the road in Kiswahili.
And it wasn’t like he himself hadn’t benefited from ethnic politics. As the unquestioned kingpin of the Luo, he had established a family fortune and a lock on Luo leadership until the day he died.
But I and many others will always carry a little extra sympathy for him. It goes back to that night in 2007. He had played by the rules and put his faith in the fairness of the system. And the bulk of the evidence showed he had won the votes.
But a Luo president was too much for Kenya to handle at that moment. And so Raila will forever remain a symbol of not just a dream deferred but a dream betrayed.
Jeffrey Gettleman is an international correspondent based in London covering global events. He has worked for The Times for more than 20 years.
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