A few months ago, the Egypt-based Africa Association was dissolved, and its historic building in Cairo’s affluent division of Zamalek was seized. This building was a storied address of African liberators of the Africa Association, an association that was established by African students living in 1955 and enjoyed the patronage of the pan-Africanist Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser.
For decades, this house stood as a monument to the Afro-Asian and Pan-African solidarity that defies today’s glib classification of Africa as Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa—the Africa below or above the Sahara or the Black Africa versus Arab Africa. Sadly, its doors are now permanently closed.
Writing on X, K Diallo, a Pan-Africanist, lamented that the closure of the “once a vital hub for anti-colonial activism and a home to much of the Pan-African movements during the 1950s and 1960s…marks the loss of an important chapter in Egypt’s history.”
This is the history of Cairo as the Mecca of the Third World revolutionaries and of the exploits of the “furious young men,” such as Felix Mouime of Cameroon, John Kalekezi of Uganda, Joshua Nkomo of Zimbabwe, and other unsung heroes of Africa’s liberation, such as William Odhiambo Okello of Kenya.
Happily, Francis Okomo Okello’s autobiography, Concert of Life, offers one a keyhole view of the politics of these activists, especially the politics of his elder brother, William Odhiambo Okello, Wera Ambitho, and Abdulla Karungo Kinyariro’s contribution to Africa’s liberation.
Three-in-one life story
Okello’s memoir is at once a neatly woven three-in-one life story of his own life, his elder brother William Odhiambo, and the greater Chief Anam Osunga’s family history.
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As child of Dimo Routhdom, a lineage of chiefs who traces their origins to Bahr-al Ghazal region of the South-Sudan, he tells the story of foundational education at the turn of Africa’s independence in 1960s, higher education at the East Africa’s first school of law at the University of Dar es Salaam, and the struggles of his cohort of Kenyan lawyers who challenged the residual racism of some of the gatekeepers of Kenya’s legal profession in law firms or at the Kenya School of Law, who also were contemptuous of academically trained lawyers or graduates of any of the East Africa’s schools of law, and were particularly wary of the graduates of the University of Dare es Salaam, because of their socialist-taint or radicalism.
In Okello’s telling, the Dimo Routhdom is an institution that is more wronged than wrong. Wronged by some historians of the 1970s, who tended to see African colonial-era chiefs as either opportunists or tyrants.
Okello provides an up-close look at the workings of this institution as he saw it during his father, Chief Jairo Anam’s rule, in a society defined by a strong ethics of hard work, honesty, mutual responsibility, and accountability.
Mining some of the scholarly telling of the Dimo Routhdom for history writing gaps and asocial reading of the role of chiefs in the colonial-era as people caught between the devil of the British colonial administration’s push for tyrannical rule and the deep blue lake of Nam-Lolwe’s ethics of leadership, Okello indicts some of the early historians’ accounts of the Dimo Routhdom.
He carefully weighs the colonial archival evidence of records of his father’s tenure against the charges levelled against him by various historians of Dimo Routhdom. His telling of the strivings and tribulations of the Dimo chiefs points to a lack of thorough collection and careful evaluation of archival evidence in some early texts on the history of Dimo Ruothdom.
Holding the family together
Okello also tells the story of his brother, William Odhiambo, who held the family together, following the death of his father, Jairo Anam and also made a significant contribution to Kenya’s struggle for independence.
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Together with Wera Ambitho, William Odhiambo were nicknamed “the two mad men of Cairo” by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the revolutionary Egyptian leader, in admiration for their passion and daring exploits in the struggle for the liberation.
Teamed up with Abdulla Karungo Kinyariro, in Cairo, the troika set up the Kenya Office in Cairo, in the African Association building and became the Kenya National African Union’s self-appointed external officers in the struggle for Kenya’s independence.
Through this office, the Cairo troika “armed with pens, radio-waves and unyielding ideals,” they rendered what Jaramogi Oginga Odinga hailed as “vital diplomatic front” and “consulate” services to liberation movements and students across Africa.
The troika, scouted for scholarships around the Eastern bloc, placed hundreds of African students who were deprived of university education by the colonial governments in Africa in universities in cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, East Berlin, Sofia, and Prague.
They offered the Kenyan nationalist movement of the 1960s excellent consulate services, and other newly independent African states opportunities to bridge the gap between the colonial government’s woeful under-investment in African education, especially in the sciences and technology, and the post-independence pressing needs for such professionals.
Hissing sounds of shortwave radio
Okello’s telling of their story relives the days of when the tuning of a transistor radio brought a crackling and hissing sounds of shortwave radio as one surfed the airwaves for the Radio Cairo Kiswahili broadcast dial, and voila, the voices of Odhiambo, Ambitho, and Kanyaririo, magically wafted in and out the speakers of transistor radios, from afar, heralding the coming of Uhuru.
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Then, in Yimbo, as it was elsewhere, the transistor radio, known locally as Nyakalondo, the spirit-medium, emitted the voice of an unseen human being like a spirit from another world.
Nyakalondo was the most trusted and treasured communal medium of information, and the Cairo troika rode the crest of the shortwave radio frequencies, defying Eastern Africa hills and valleys and colonial censorship, reaching village assemblies of listeners in dusty trading centres.
Successful professional career
Okello has had a remarkably successful professional career that straddles industries, banking, corporate law, media, hotel and tourism and public service, with an interdisciplinary restlessness of many a graduate of the University of Dar es Salaam law school of the early 1970s.
He candidly discusses some of the challenges facing these industries such as the inadequacy of law and rules as the primary means of regulating the banking sector, the relationship between the media and East Africa’s government as something akin to Schopenhauer’s porcupines on a cold night dilemma: a prickly relationship that requires a well calibrated distance, if only to survive the night’s chill, without being too close for each other’s comfort: not too close to government to offer hold government to account, but not too distant to have mutually beneficial relation.
He also offers insights into how implement a socially and ecologically wholesome and economically viable big infrastructure projects such as the Bujagali hydro-power plant and Sea-com broadband system.
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Concert of Life is easily one of the most engaging of the recently published autobiographies in Kenya. It brims over with duty, probity and propriety. It should spark a useful conversation, even debate, on the writing of the history of the colonial-era chiefs, banking crises, media management, and corporate leadership, by re-telling the story of the Dimo Routhdom, the Kenya banking crisis of the 1990s, the stories of media management, contract drafting, and boardroom leadership in Africa.
It also raises several questions: did some of the historians of colonial-era chiefs strike the right balance between imaginative and adequate assessment of the archives when writing the histories of colonial-era chiefs?
Or did they deliberately falsify and suppress archival records, which would have contradicted or complicated the neat divisions of opportunist or tyrant histories they wrote?
How can the legacy media survive the fast-paced technological changes of our time? And, what does Francis Okello’s remarkable career and achievements as a corporate leader tell us about leadership: when setting sail as a corporation, who should captain the ship? Is it a hedgehog or a fox?
Akoko Akech is a Kenyan political commentator who writes commentary on topical political issues. He’s available at aackoko@gmail.com. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
