Baptism of Noah Jahera

Oyunga’s tough ask for Kenyan oaks to bend like reeds

MR Man Talk, Oyunga Pala has moulted, he would even want to think of it in religious ways like the Sufi, having died and returned; and with that journey he has acquired the great wisdom of journeying through the underworld.

In his book ‘Strength and Sorrow’ Oyunga Pala is all nuggets, we learn about death and living, as he lets us into his private space and draws us into the public sphere where he examines us in great detail as a people.

If strength and Sorrow is a great book, its timing is lined up like the belt of Orion, explaining mourning for the Luo community at the demise of Aluo, Raila Amolo Odinga, one of the community’s most prodigious national heroes. It is a great irony that Mr Odinga’s death has drawn great interest in Luo culture, much as the enigma himself was not too beholden to the old customs. He willed to be buried within clock hours and has always expressed his disapproval for the commercialization of funerals in western Kenya.

I used to share his ideas but have come to learn the place of custom among our people in processing grief. My vote would be with the elders who believe that a body does not belong to families but to a clan, with customs that are codes for ancient knowledge on how we journey through worlds.

But Oyunga Pala goes to great lengths to dissuade people of our disposition with his intimate tale of his sister Nyangi, Anyango Odhiambo the healer with ‘the red Chinese pills’. The account is moving and reveals our own truth to us in a way that Oyunga Pala later during his book tour attributes the book’s success. Authenticity that allows other people to process with and through you.

But even then, he goes to great lengths to explain his decision to fulfill his sister’s will to be cremated. He says he has had to relate this decision to relations on several occasions that when he tells it, you can see the turmoil he had to go through when making the decision. His search for precedence, the prevailing circumstances that almost conspire towards the Hindu crematorium and the memory of home it invokes as an assurance; even as he sought to ground his decision in theology to honour Christian tradition by finding a priest.

This book is a powerful book, in its raw sincerity in which Oyunga Pala reveals what he has become, an honest man, asking some of the most dishonest people on the planet to become true if not to anyone else, themselves.

While he had hoped that contributing to the WhatsApp fundraisers would save him from us saying the cold continent – Europe, has changed him, it has. Being in that lonely land has allowed a brilliant mind to quiet the anxiety of living in a colonial project and to process the trauma of the short, cruel, and unpredictable life he has left behind. He returns to offer us a mirror to see ourselves and share in his catharsis, if we can grasp it. As he puts it, he is asking oak trees to learn to bend like reeds, lest we are brought down by beetles the size of a fingernail, or rather the length of the syllables that name our tribal identities.

But can Kenyans really be honest?