If you don’t believe in exalted principles that go beyond “tribalism” and “realpolitik” you cannot understand why Jaramogi Oginga Odinga orchestrated the freedom of Kenyatta and the chant of “no uhuru without Kenyatta”. That was a high point in Kenyan political history. It was the culmination of the long protracted nationalist struggle that began with Kenyatta in the 1930s and formation of the first “crypto-nationalist” movement of the “Kikuyu Central Association” and publication of the paper “Mwigwithania”.  Kenyatta later  left for England where he joined forces with the larger “anti-colonial” movement with such prominent leaders like George Padmore (West Indies), Kwame Nkumah (Gold Coast), Nehru (India), Sukarno (Indonesia). This was a world-wide anti-colinial movement. When Kenyatta came back to Kenya shortly after WWII, he joined forces with other nationalist leaders under the banner of Kenya African Union (KAU). Prominent among these were Achieng’ Oneko, Kungu Karumba, Paul Ngei and Fred Kubai. All of them including Kenyatta were sent to prison in Kapenguria!

It is this legacy that Jaramogi Oginga Odinga inherited with the Kenya African National Union (KANU), on the eve of Kenya’s independence. Many in the colonial administration in Kenya and the UK did not want Kenyatta to become the president since he had been billed as the leader of MAU MAU. That was thought to be a “risk” for British interests in Kenya. In fact the last outgoing British governor in the Kenya Colony and Protectorate described Kenyatta as a “leader of darkness and death”. By the same token, the nationalist movement in Kenya led by Jaramogi, regarded Kenyatta as pivotal in terms of a radical departure with politics of acquiescence and an accommodation. The British had their own line-up of leaders who they had groomed to take over. The latter included Tom Mboya, a darling of both the British and the Americans.

Unfortunately all these developments were upstaged by the larger global alignments generated by the post-World War II fever of the “Cold War”. This split the nationalist alignments in Kenya along the same lines: the “left” (Jaramogi Oginga Odinga), and the “right” (Tom Mboya). The labor movement in Kenya was also split between the Trade Union Congress (left) and the Kenya Federation of Labor (right). Kenyan labor movements were further aligned with the larger global labor movements of Word Trade Union Congress–left, (with TCU as an affiliate through the Ghanain body of the same name), and the International Confederation of Free Trade Union, “right” (with Mboya’s KFL as an affiliate).

To say that Jaramogi Oginga Odinga had himself to blame for not being the president of Kenya and chose instead to orchestrate the presidency of Kenyatta, is a profession of the lack of understanding of the exalted principles that motivated his actions. That also explains why we are still stuck in the mud in the quagmire of “tribalized politics” in Kenya! Ironically, it is the very same dungeons of “tribalized politics” whose contradictions will usher in a new era in Kenyan politics. We have here an illustration of the dialectical process of development at work!