Kenya will miss Rasna Warah's clarity of expression and spine

Frelimo freedom fighters in Mozambique popularised the Portuguese expression “a luta continua.” The struggle continues. The passing on last week of Rasna Warah, a courageous and gifted original thinker, leaves you with a huge sense of loss.

You are captured in the trap of hopelessness. Yet, the struggles she engaged in for humankind must continue. Rasna’s passing robs the African public intellectual fraternity of a great thinker. She had a rare celerity of mind and clarity of expression. Her substance was heavy, the reading easy.  

For two decades, Rasna was a refreshing read, focused on the entire global community. Her insight into issues within the Kenyan and Eastern Africa context was simply unmatched. But she also went farther afield to address troublesome continental and global issues, in writings that now immortalise her. The lowest common factor in her work was the search for social justice. This, she embraced with graceful but powerful courage, and elegant candour and clarity. She wrote on war crimes and other forms of abuse of human rights at home and away. She addressed injustice and the pain and suffering of global citizens under the watch of corrupt and oppressive self-serving regimes, and often at their behest. She condemned a badly flawed international order, whose forums of collective responsibility to humankind were hijacked by powerful individuals and states. Others were simply weighed down by greed and corruption by those running them. Her passing on at this time teases us with a dominating sense of defeat and emptiness. It comes at a time when the ruling class in Kenya is spiritedly reversing the democratic gains made over the decades. Rasna left us at 63. She was virtually as old as her country Kenya. We who are privileged to live on this side of 60 rarely worry about things like death itself. Its inevitability is taken as a matter of course. It will come when it comes. Our concern, rather, is about the negation of public gains we have contributed towards in this life. 

And Rasna Warah contributed manifestly to Kenya’s democratic space, now under stark assault by those sworn to protect it. Her writings were capsules of a spirited search for a democratic, free and fair society, hinged in the principles of justice. These are now fiercely in the firing line of the Kenya Kwanza regime. If the electoral system has been the mother of democratic governance and the beacon of hope, Kenyans are today hearing that if ballot boxes do not have the right numbers for the Kenya Kwanza candidate in 2027, cowboys will stuff them.

These things are not whispered behind closed doors. They are abrasively rubbed into our faces by dissipated individuals. The President is their principal audience. These crass overnight billionaires speak to curry favour with him, and to intimidate his critics. They yell out obscenities to please the grandmaster, while offending common decency and family morality. When a votary of freedom sleeps at such a time, the sense of loss is profound. Yet, the best tribute to such a champion of human rights is to sustain the struggle against decadence. 

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