It was a cramped office, stacked with boxes, its occupant in the process of moving into a new building. On a grey and windy Dutch afternoon in Breukelen, I sat across from a respected professional acquaintance who had just read my book and I was waiting for her verdict. She called it a roller coaster of emotions and having never been on a roller coaster, I couldn’t quite land the metaphor. What did it actually mean?

We were also meeting to plan an upcoming workshop on grief literacy in the workplace at Nyenrode Business University. Somewhere along the way, the conversation drifted towards unseen losses, the ones people rarely think to grieve.

Grief scholar Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief, those losses that the world doesn’t recognise as worth mourning. There is a long list of those. A forbidden love, a miscarriage that was never broadcast, friendships that just withered and died. The kind of grief that never gets permission to be acknowledged, often for fear of ridicule.

We both agreed that career loss and the unseen grief that trails it rarely get named in the workplace. Then, in the roll call of unseen griefs, she mentioned, almost in passing, “even the loss of a pet” and I found myself holding my tongue. I wanted to say something. My gut reaction would have been, not quite, but instead, I examined my thoughts.

I have to admit, for the longest time, I thought Westerners had an unhealthy obsession with their pets, especially dogs, to the point of elevating them to humanoid level with all attendant honours. I remembered a Tanzanian stand up comedian I came across recently on social media, Captain Khalid, who did this relatable skit about the cultural differences between how dogs are treated in African and European households. There was a different kind of emotional connection with the pets and that is not to say dogs were not loved. It is just that dogs were dogs. As Khalid joked, if your dog died, you got another that looked like it and gave it the same name.

Then I remembered the first time I sat with a European friend grieving over the death of a dog. It was a dog I knew and one that I had even walked once and by all accounts a decent, lovable creature. Yet, when the owner who had lived with the dog for close to a decade announced its demise and fell into a state of grief, I couldn’t make sense of the emotional attachment and just wrote it off as a cultural affliction, something white folk do. I had nothing to offer her other than my detached silence.

I have visited cemeteries in the Netherlands that had headstones of dogs buried alongside their owners, like companions in life that resist separation even upon death. I remember seeing a headstone that was so life-like, from a distance it looked like a dog standing guard over the remains of a fallen master.

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One of my favourite magazines, Colors Magazine, ran a whole issue (#19) in the late 90s on Animals that covered the emergence of a premium pet funeral industry and dedicated pet cemeteries. Back then, it read like the excesses of Western materialism, a sad case of rich white folk with too much money and not enough sense. I had no cultural reference for a pet funeral industry coming from a cultural background where burying humans was the single most emotionally exerting logistical burden that could confront a family and a financial undertaking that required a coordinated communal effort.

With that cultural reality, there was no way to make sense of pet bereavement services, which had a “rest in peace” package for dogs costing thousands of Euros. The thought of a satin-lined mahogany casket, professional embalming, pet chaplains performing personalised eulogies tailored to a dog’s life was laughable. I am not exaggerating when I say deceased dogs are groomed and laid out in viewing rooms. It was the kind of thing you would expect in a parody skit about global absurdity and inequality from an African satirist. It made great material for juxtaposition, where one set of animals is lavished with human compassion, yet in the background, the systemic cruelty and intensive confinement of factory farming for meat production continues unabated.

Looking back, I see that grief is not just an emotion but a kind of mental reordering of reality when something we value is lost. Ritual is how that inner loss finds an outward shape. Where love has dwelled, there will be mourning. I have met many people who talk of how their dogs pulled them out of the pits of depression.

The elders back home would say, we start as fools and become wise through experience. Walk far and you will see. My sojourn in the West has forced me to reflect on the shades of grief and to accept that I hold no cultural monopoly on what would be considered appropriate grief.

Every culture enforces its own unwritten rules on who deserves our tears. In the Netherlands, a dying dog may be surrounded by ceremony that would rival any human end-of-life care service. In my culture, it is still believed that a dog anticipates its end and walks away to be alone.

My upbringing drew a line between people and dogs as separate species. The workplace draws a line between people and careers. I had come to that packed office to make a case for grief that goes unseen, and nearly refused to see another’s. As Captain Khalid joked, when a dog dies, we find another that reminds us of the one we lost and give the new dog an old name to keep the fondest memories alive. Another culture carves the loss into stone.

In the end, how we grieve is affected by the cultural lens through which we value what we lost. I think of Ollie now, my friend’s dog who died many years ago. I still remember his name. Perhaps that was just my own quiet way of grieving him.

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Krishna Williams was fifteen when he discovered he was going to be a dad. The truth is that he ran. The older he got, the harder it became to deny that he was doing to his daughter exactly what his father had done to him.

That’s the logline of his upcoming semi-autobiographical short film. The script is written, but it hasn’t gone into production. It began as a reflection on his father’s absence from his life before he realized that it was more about his daughter and his absence from her life.

I came across his work through a mutual friend, and my curiosity drew me to his Instagram page, Friends of 15.

As I scrolled through his posts, his words struck. I remember words casually thrown around in my youth.

You bastard!

Krishna writes:

“…I remember the word bastard was so triggering for me.”

Bloody bastard! had everyday usage when I was growing up and to think it would mean anything other than an annoying fellow. I had no inkling about the stigma of growing up with that label.

“In my mind, it meant: You’ve got no dad.”

He wasn’t dead. He just wasn’t around.

“I was living with the pain of my father’s absence every day.”

You think, what did your mother have to say about it? Hey mama, the Temptations song asks, what happened to Papa and Mama just hung her head, and said, Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone, son.

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What do you know at fifteen other than what you are exposed to. There are just things that life doesn’t prepare you for like becoming a father at fifteen and having no father to turn to. Where I grew up, there was only one advice around town, run for the hills. Run, run. Nobody ever talked about what exactly you were running away from.

“I realized that, by being absent from her life, I was passing that pain on to her.”

This passing down of pain, generation to generation, like a baton. The father wound, the brutal separation and the consequences of that absence, that entrap one to repeat the familiar. But responsibility. That is never outrun.

“My father was in jail for most of my childhood.

I remember, the second time I met my dad, he was in jail

His absence was a consistent presence for me.”

Shame is a big thing at fifteen. When you look for cues of approval from those meant to guide and nurture you and all you receive back is disappointment and abandonment. Then you long for a father who cannot be present. His absence, however, won’t leave you alone. It hogs the present and squats in your being. And so you keep running until you realize you are running into a past waiting to receive you with cold arms.

“Years later, after my daughter was born, that pain came back up.”

Did they ever tell you when to stop running or what to do when the pain catches up and stays? That, for the most part, you have to figure out through first hand experience.

“What do you think it takes to show up before you are ready?”

It must take everything. What do you do then when your resources are limited? When the weight of shame is not only yours to bear? You weren’t thinking about the consequences and now Mama shares the burden, the neighbourhood you grew up in, points at you as a cautionary tale, and the daughter whose life you had chosen to run away from, carries it too, as she is destined to end up in the same schoolyard, triggered by the word “bastard”.

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Krishna remembers the first gift he ever received from his father.

“What did those red Adidas trainers mean to me? I remember feeling special. They were like hope. A reflection of how important I was to my dad.”

Now, he looks back at a picture, seated on a sofa at fifteen, taken not long before he learned he was going to become a father. He remembers he thought he knew what life was about and felt safe, even though his dad was in jail, without being able to explain why.

That detail stayed with me. A fifteen-year old boy, a father in prison, about to become a father himself, and yet he remembers feeling safe. I wondered if it was the comfort of uncertainty, letting go of the need to know how life would turn out. What’s left after that surrender is the faith to catch up with what life has presented. And in that change of direction comes reckoning. The way you were parented affects the way you show up as a parent.

So a choice has to be made. Show up late, but show up anyway.

“Some of us became dads before we’d finished growing up ourselves. Some of us stayed. Some of us ran. Some of us found our way back.”

That’s the redemption song we don’t hear too often. The songs of those who found their way back. Who’d carried shame and found their way out of it. Those who chose presence over absence in order to break a pattern. To retrieve something that was lost and rebuild on new ground.

For more on the short film, follow the Friends of 15 page on Instagram.

If you like this read, kindly consider a restack.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

Last October, two weeks before Baba died, I was returning to Nairobi after a two-year hiatus. The last time I was home was during the first year memorial of my sister, Nyangi, who was now the prominent character in my book.

Home had changed in many ways, yet it had not, in a kind of same old but different way. The vibe was familiar, the actors younger, the pace faster. Roads once familiar were now dwarfed by high rise towers sprouting around the city like wild mushrooms. The expressway from the airport straddling the city dominated the cityscape, a marker of a city in a hurry to grow up.

I used to wonder whether I would change. Would I be like the other diaspora Kenyans I had seen who lost all sense of belonging after just a few miserable winters abroad, and began to look down on their own? Stepping away seemed to have had the opposite effect on me.

This notion of belonging was immediately tested as I faced my former public self. When I announced that I had published a book and would be going on a book tour, the reception was warm. I was reminded of how big Mantalk was, the weekly national column in the Daily Nation that I laboured over for a decade that has now become part of the country’s cultural landscape, a reference point to a bygone era, for many stuck in nostalgia. I was no longer the Mantalk guy. I had traveled far both within and without. I had grown up but to many of my readers, I was still that guy, who showed up every Saturday, a mysterious figure, who ruffled feathers. The man some female readers used to love to hate.

I had been part of several life journeys unwittingly. And like all fans of urban culture, I was a mascot for those bygone times. Yet here I was, older perhaps wiser, certainly a lot humbler. I had just poured my soul into a book that detailed my own journey away from the glam and fame of the national spotlight and delved into trying not only to make sense of my unresolved grief but also the grief of a nation. The shift in persona was stark: From a young man who used to critique modern rules of chivalry to one sharing lessons on how to navigate the profound loss that follows the death of a loved one.

To reach these moments of connection, I first had to navigate the city itself. My first stop the night after my arrival was the Prestige Bookshop and Nairobi traffic, well, what has changed, the roads remained clogged and nothing quite captures Nairobi’s class dynamics as the expressway, raised above, smooth and scenic, with arresting views of flashy high rise buildings obscuring the reality of chaos that rules just underneath it, bottleneck traffic, matatu madness and boda bodas that now make matatus appear quite tame. It became a metaphor in hindsight of how we process grief, stoic and contained on the surface but underneath the facade, a bubbling volcano waiting to erupt.

I remember Prestige bookshop from another time, when the city centre was a little more serene and Mama Ngina street still had a taste of the bourgie back when 20th Century Plaza, the Hilton hotel and the International Life House were iconic landmarks in the city centre. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor was launching her second novel The DragonFly Sea in the small book shop. The shelves had been pushed to the side to create space for the fans and I was the MC of the day, here to celebrate one of Kenya’s finest novelists. I looked at the bookshop now, wondering how we had pulled it off, for there seemed to be hardly any room to swing a cat.

When the people started to come through, I knew this was going to be special. Odd that despite 28 years of a public writing life, I had never signed an autograph. I remained struck that people would endure Nairobi traffic to meet over a book and demanding my bad handwriting on their personal copies.

I didn’t know what to expect as a new world and role began to unfold for me. Lost connections revived. People I had gone to school with, names I hadn’t seen or heard from in years. Friends, family, acquaintances, total strangers, with entwined pasts and reminders of a time once spent in communion and between the firm handshakes and tight embraces, it took me a minute to realise what was happening.

I was being honoured and celebrated. When I went to Ukombozi library, to donate a copy of my book, I met Ogutu, who told me how the story of my father’s funeral process was also his story. At the United Kenya Club, I met Clifford Derrick who had just buried his mother and the book triggered his own spontaneous reflections of his moment of loss. At Nuria bookstore on Moi avenue, I found my old schoolmate Omenge Nyamato who was still grieving the recent loss of his mother and he confessed my book would be a guide through grief that he was no longer interested in suppressing. I spoke to a man called Rollex, who pointed out that it was the death anniversary of his father and he wanted a particular chapter signed in dedication to his memory.

The collective sharing continued in Kisumu when I arrived at the Text Book Centre at the United Mall. I met Sharon who told me that she had just gone through a season of loss, family members who had seemingly died in pairs, as if calling out to each other from the other side and it did not make sense until she found a page in Strength and Sorrow that precisely spoke to her unique grief. The next day in Kisumu I met a smart young man called Akal from Lolwe bookshop who filled a room with eager listeners, joining me in a conversation about death and funerary practices.

What had death taught us and what was it, continuing to teach us?

All the people I met, had either recently gone through loss, were trying to make sense of a death from the past or had come to the realisation of the inevitability of our mortality and were seeking the language to understand it. I realised that I was not just selling a book. I had opened the space for something deeper, through mere presence and perhaps holding a mirror to parts of themselves that they could not see or had forgotten existed.

In the various book stops I made, the meet and greets turned into spontaneous grief circles and I found myself, counseling strangers who found resonance in my reflections on loss. Together, we could broach pains that they were afraid to touch for fear of what would erupt.

I was here to hold space for people dealing with complicated and conflicted losses, the unresolved, the forgotten and sharing pathways for people looking back to fetch what had been lost. I was no longer that spirited young man who was grappling with the challenges of modern masculinity. Life had reconstructed me and now I had returned almost in the mode of a death doula.

Then, just as I concluded the book tour, this shared human inevitability was amplified on a national stage.

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The second chapter of Strength and Sorrow, titled, “Baba’s Gone” is dedicated to my own father.

The first line reads…

When Baba died, I became numb.

He had died of a heart attack….

Then, a national father figure, the one, the country fondly called Baba, the former Prime Minister of the Republic of Kenya and perhaps its most consequential leader, Raila Amolo Odinga, had died.

The same sinking feeling returned. I was numb.

As the phone calls started to come through, I recognized the emotion immediately.

It was…Shock!

My cousin described it precisely.

“I don’t know how I am feeling”.

I remember only ten days prior, sitting at the back of a boda and just as I arrived at the city centre near the University way, adjacent to the Uhuru highway, I encountered a most unusual sight. A flight of bats had covered the sky above. I thought about this moment for a long time afterwards.

It seemed ominous. A bat is a creature that flies like a bird, active at night so its flight during the day is an anomaly. I immediately thought there must be some symbolic resonance to this sight. In esoteric traditions, the bat is a symbol of death and rebirth.

When I received the shocking news of the death of the Baba of the nation, Raila Odinga, I thought of those bats again and of the connections to the story of my father.

When Baba died, I became numb.

He died of a heart attack at eighty years of age. He collapsed in a modest clinic in Kerala India, one morning after his routine walk. They said his bodyguard and personal doctor tried to revive him with CPR and that his last-born daughter was there to hold him as he took his last breath. At my age, I had witnessed the passing of many national figures, but I’d never imagined that this one would feel so personal.

Baba had spent five decades as a political engineer, engineering a new vision for a better Kenya. He rose to the apex in his political career as the symbol of democratic reform and even though he was never elected president, he was the beloved people’s president. An elder statesman and a master bridge builder.

He first came to my attention as a political prisoner in the 80s, spending a total of 8 years in harsh detention conditions and surviving it to move out of his father’s shadow and build an illustrious career in political defiance, before becoming the ultimate pragmatist who always pulled the country from the brink with recurring political handshakes. His life was never quiet despite his advanced age and he continued to build, mentor and raise the political consciousness of the nation.

He was the man everyone thought to call when the nation itself was burning.

Over the years, I had learnt how to see him as a man and not just as a political figure. He embodied the hopes of my generation and he was the last of our second liberation heroes who remained relevant straight to our adulthood. Baba, was a constant of our political reality and for my parents generation who revered him, he stood like a lighthouse.

Baba was a complex character, and I didn’t always understand his political motivations. He broke my heart many times, but I never stopped admiring his ability to stay relevant and his impeccable sense of occasion. Baba embodied all our political disillusionment and hurts, our historical wounds of exclusion, the ethnic prejudice, and the elusive yearning for a just future.

Now, the biggest tree in the homestead had fallen, and the people were discombobulated.

When the news of Baba’s death arrived, I worried about how the country would react. He had died abroad, and the announcement came that Baba had to be buried in 72 hours. I had never felt such a seismic shift in the political atmosphere and my world was spinning, all I could see was darkness.

I knew my tears for Baba would come, and I braced for the tension of the wake. This was no time to be stoic, for our symbol of stoicism had breathed his last.

I watched the hysteria take over as his body arrived from India. Mourners overran the airport; unruly grief was on display, which degenerated into chaotic scenes at Kasarani Stadium, where the body was taken for a public viewing. I watched in dismay at the government’s irrational response of tear gassing and firing shots to contain overwhelmed mourners. It was heavy to bear.

The trigger-happy security forces, the ethnic profiling, the lack of empathy, and the denigration of the ordinary citizen’s grief.

I remember watching the next day as his body lay in state in Parliament, as the country’s political class got a chance to pay their last respects. I watched their faces, caught the performance, the bewilderment, the genuine grief that bared itself. He lay there, draped in an orange sash and black suit, an odd sight for a man remembered for his boundless energy. The ordinary people who truly loved him held nothing back when his remains were wheeled to Nyayo stadium in Nairobi and later to Mamboleo Grounds in Kisumu. I thought about the millions watching it on livestream around the country and the world. We were all escorting Baba, united in our grief.

The country was steeped in pensive mourning in the days leading to his final interment in Bondo. That spirit combusted the moment the body arrived in Kisumu, where Baba was met with the deafening wailing of multitudes, crying out for a glimpse of Raila, Agwambo, Jakom, Tinga, Wo Nyalego, Wuod Mary.

It was in Kisumu, after the moving sigweya, the funeral dirge by the Luo elder Ajiki Koth Yamo, that my tears for Baba finally arrived, rolling freely down my cheeks. I knew then I wasn’t weeping alone; the elder’s sonorous chant was the nation’s permission to grieve.

I remembered the date of the state funeral was set for Sunday, four days after his death. The burial date would be on the 19th day of October, in Kang’o ka Jaramogi, in his ancestral homeland in Bondo where he would be laid next to his father’s mausoleum.

Funerals are also history classes, sites of memory where forgotten branches of the national family tree are traced. In the shadow of the coffin, the country revisits the archives of its pain and is forced to confront the unfinished lessons of its struggle and reform. Many were given a proper introduction to Baba’s extended national family and political networks that consisted of multiple generations, all claiming an intimate association.

I found it mildly amusing but mostly sad that the political class used the stage to immediately begin carving up the power vacuum, reasserting old rivalries and desperately laying claim as the rightful custodians of Baba’s legacy.

I knew the spectacle would soon be over and that the real mourning would begin after the cameras moved on and the flags went back up. First comes the shock of the loss, followed by the frenzy of the funeral, and once the deceased is buried under concrete, the second wave of grief kicks in after the adrenaline rush and numbness wears off.

Only then can one grasp the magnitude of the loss as the weeks, months, and years unfold. The listlessness and disorientation follow you everywhere, and the triggers erupt. The true grief work, the task we so love to avoid, can only begin then.

I knew this grief so well. It’s the kind that bangs on your door demanding entry, and when you claim that there are no chairs for it to sit in this house, it answers back coldly. “I brought my own stool.”

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This was the silence of absence, the helplessness that dominates the thoughts of life after. For us, Baba was that parental figure whose death had never been factored into our reality. The signs could be right in front of you, but for a loss of this magnitude, you are never ready.

Chalgi ngero, thoo wuod Odinga, Chalgi ngero

The night before he was buried, I had my curated Baba playlist on repeat. Coster Ojwang, Musa Juma, Lady Maureen, Emma Jalamo, Prince Indah. I found myself clinging to the refrains, which served as an endless dirge. I needed the music to bear me through the darkness, finding my solace in the song, in the words I couldn’t, wouldn’t stop singing, resisting all attempts to return to normalcy.

How could they understand? We weren’t mourning a politician. This man had transcended that label. They knew him as the Right Honorable Raila Amolo Odinga, the party leader, Agwambo the Enigma, Tinga the Force, Jakom the General, Baba the Patriarch. But he was also Amolo, a human with all his fragilities.

The one who embodied our essence, kitwa, our nature. He was the epitome of sacrifice, yet he was the special one because he had been tried and tested like no other. He always rose again from the ashes like a phoenix, with that cheeky smile and sparkle in his eye. Amolo was a man whose humanity mirrored our highest hopes and deepest struggles, one who took his personal pain and forged it into purpose. He was our grief alchemist who turned suffering into a source of strength.

I met Amolo in close proximity twice, and both times were rather late in my life. The first time was at the United Kenya Club foyer in Nairobi. I stopped him on his way to the bathroom to share news of my cousin Adhiambo’s passing, knowing his acquaintance with her mother, my Aunty Raduodi. Raila had an incredible grasp of Luo genealogy and all you needed was to mention a name, and he could trace your ancestry. He paused, remembered a moment from the past, and asked me to pass his sympathies. Just two men, talking briefly, sharing loss.

I stumbled into him the second time in my own village while visiting my cousin Bill Okwirry during Christmas. There was Amolo, amidst friends and family, listening to loud music, sharing laughter and whisky. It was an image of stunning normalcy for a man who, just months before, had suffered a humiliating election defeat after his fifth attempt at the presidency.

I met Amolo as Baba, at many other funerals and it was on those stages that I realised that he was also a historian and griot. At my late uncle Okeyo’s funeral, he arrived halfway through the ceremony, momentarily disrupting the proceedings. When he was given the mic, he regaled everyone with a history lesson, posing questions that reminded us of our shared ancestry.

“Who are these people called the Abasuba? Where did they come from?

This was a uniquely fatherly trait; he was a constant reminder that we are all family.

The true warrior dies on the battlefield. Death found Baba on the go. Even at eighty, he had refused to slow down. Now he rests, the storm has passed and we continue to assess the loss.

This reckoning takes time, certainly years. You cannot know what you have lost until you have walked through the aftermath because that is when the real, inner pain is revealed, the kind that lingers despite the course of time because that love has nowhere to go.

His physical presence has left us; the Mbii, his inner force is now subject only to archive and memory. For his presence, our eyes search again.

Where do we find another, like him?

Lowo otero Amolo maa nyocha wa hero!

Baba was our crucible holding together our searing contradictions: the purity of a singular political dream against the murk of political pragmatism and he was able to hold those contradictions without shattering.

In a recent paper, written by Bishop Francis Omondi, of the Anglican Diocese of Garissa, I found the language to express what I was struggling to explain. Omondi’s paper is on the legitimacy of Baba’s leadership and he opens it with a question that had shadowed Raila all his life: how did a man who never became president remain one of the most influential political figures in Kenya?

Omondi’s answer is insightful. He writes that Raila’s authority “emerged from sacrifice. Not from the exercise of power. But from resistance to the abuse of power”.

Presidents come and go and power won at the ballot box rises and falls with each election, but power born of sacrifice finds its place in the collective memory of a people. Baba may have lost elections but he never lost the people.

Omondi traces this legitimacy to three sources. The first is resistance in detention, and the price that Raila paid in his own body for opposing dictatorship. Then came reform, captured by the long fight for a new constitution and devolution, a gift that many have forgotten was bitterly fought for. And lastly, perhaps the most controversial, came the consensus, what we remember as handshakes, coalitions and reconciliations that pulled the country back from the brink of disaster. Those handshakes broke many hearts, mine included but Omondi reads them as part of a longer quest for inclusion and stability in a country too often at war with itself.

So one year on, we continue to grieve. His absence still weighs heavily. Depression might come knocking for some, as they come to terms with how dependent they were on the charisma of a single individual.

But we also celebrate because his spirit has finally been liberated from the limits of an earthly existence and all that he represented has been unleashed. This is a generational gift and his story will carry the nation through new seasons of trials. Like Winnie Mandela, he multiplied and we have to grow up and embody what he stood for.

There is no saviour coming. The desire is for another Baba but that same strength now belongs to the collective, who must find the power for their own becoming. Baba’s life’s work is incomplete: his legacy is a call to a generation to complete the work he started.

I return to my playlist, to Coster Ojwang’s tribute to Raila.

Baba’s gone and he is not coming back.

The brave one has left us.

Mayoo wee! Amolo osenindo

Chalgi ngero, thoo wuod Odinga, Chalgi ngero.

References:

1. Ojwang, Coster (2025) Raila Odinga,

2. Omondi, Francis (2026). Resistance, Reform, and Consensus: Raila Odinga’s Leadership and the Evolution of Political Legitimacy in Kenya. figshare. Journal contribution. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.34335738

3. Baba’s Gone: Part 1 https://oyunga.substack.com/p/babas-gone

4. Baba’s Gone: Part 2. The Missing Chapter https://oyunga.substack.com/p/babas-gone-the-missing-chapter

If you like this read, kindly consider a restack.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

My enduring story is Tekayo, a folk tale written by Grace Ogot. It is part of a collection of twelve stories in Ogot’s Land Without Thunder and Other Stories. It was first published in 1968 by East African Publishing House.

Ogot probably meant this as a moral tale against greed but I reflect on it through a grief lens.

The story is set in a countryside village in Luo - Nyanza a long time ago. Tekayo, the principal character, is an old herdsman. He is also a polygamous man and the head of a big family living in the same compound. His first wife is named Lakech. The other wives are only described by their age and the different huts they occupy. Ogot provides the name of his first born son, Aganda, a second, Opija and a third who remains unnamed then we are told about many grandchildren and one is named, Apii, the daughter of Aganda.

Ogot introduces Tekayo as a functional elder playing his role in the family unit. He takes care of the cows diligently. Every day he takes the cows out to graze and to drink and returns in the evening, to sit round the fire, counselling his sons and telling stories of war and the clans to the children. He is well regarded by his wives and the children are safe around him.

One fine morning, he sets off as usual and on the way spots a low flying eagle holding a piece of fresh meat between its claws. He aims and throws a stick, hits the eagle and it drops a large piece of liver. Tekayo nearly throws it away and then has a second thought. What was the point of robbing an eagle of its meal, if you didn’t want it? The piece of meat looks supple and he lights a log fire and roasts it and then wolfs it down. The meat is so delicious, it awakens a deep craving for another taste of it. From that point on, Tekayo is beset by thoughts of the piece of liver. It consumes him in day dreams and at night he lies tossing about thinking about how to find that taste again.

He begins a quest to cure his craving and it leads him to the edge of the “Ghost Jungle”, a place where no one ventures because it was the abode of the wild animals. The owner of that delicious piece of liver had to be living there, he reasoned, as he walked into the forest and felt a sudden dread. The silence of the wilderness was eerie. But he did not turn back. As he set his eyes to launch his spear at an impala, he came face to face with a leopard also on the hunt for the same animal. The leopard roared at him but Tekayo looked away and the leopard, seeing no challenge, ran off after its prey.

He still didn’t turn back. He kept hunting and killed a baby wildebeest. The liver left his tongue stinging. The craving continued and with each new day, he ventured deeper into the “Ghost Jungle” looking for the owner of that delicious piece of liver. He killed many animals and every evening he returned disappointed that he still had not found it. He broke the taboo and started hunting forbidden animals. Leopards, lions, hyenas and still none of these kills yielded the taste he sought.

His wives were the first to notice the change. He seemed to have lost his appetite for food and for company. His sons also picked it up. He kept silent around the fire and talked to no one. They went to appeal to their mother. Go speak to the old man. He is not himself lately. He respects you. Check on him.

Lakech went and asked, “Man, what ails you?”

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Tekayo wanted to share his tormenting secret with his first wife but the shame of his transgressions held his tongue. He was the head of a family, yet he had lost his way and only longed after the satiation of his craving. He held back from telling. Lakech died without knowing the depths of his shame.

After her death, Tekayo sat at the grave of his wife, mornings and evenings for a long time and Ogot writes,

“...and his grief for her, appeased his hunger for the unknown animal’s liver. He wept, but peacefully, as if his craving for the liver was buried with his wife”.

The season of grief changed Tekayo and he stopped going for hunts and he sat at home and began to look after the grandchildren when the adults went to work away in the fields.

The destruction of Tekayo begins during this period of calm after the burial and mourning season for Lakech. His day dreams return and the craving erupts again. From then on, he loses his humanity and begins to hunt his own kind. The family is thrown into a season of unresolved grief. Grandchildren disappear without a trace, leaving no body to bury and no resolution. The response to this rupture in a family is grief that doesn’t resolve and a life lived in fear. The sons grapple with the misfortune that has befallen the family and set watch, for they reason, father is old, he alone cannot be responsible for the security of the children. After many months of monitoring and on the verge of giving up, they catch the mysterious force wreaking havoc in their lives, and it is their father.

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Aganda then takes hold of the old greasy drum and beats it until it throbs out their sorrow and distress to the rest of the village. People respond to the call of the drum and rush to Tekayo’s homestead, assuming death had taken the old man. Aganda stands before them and recounts the misfortune that had befallen them. He speaks of the disappeared children who were never buried and the plan they set to resolve the mystery of the death that stalked their children and after much patience, caught the culprit.

The villagers bayed for Tekayo’s blood but the elders restored calm and reminded them of the custom. Stoning is to take place away from the village, in broad daylight and everyone must participate by throwing a stone to help drive away the wicked spirit in this man. The morning after, they came for him and found Tekayo had taken his own life.

The story of Tekayo offers a mirror for grief. Tekayo was driven insane by his insatiable craving and he carried the grief of a man who had lost his soul and did not know how to tell it. Lakech was the only person he thought could hold his shame but he lacked the courage to confess. The mourning that follows Lakech’s death begins with regret for what he never told her and then seems to bring resolution and peace but only for a moment. The shame is never spoken and it only remains suppressed, waiting to erupt. When the mourning season ended, what was buried with her arose again and destroyed him.

The reverence of the elder status, the authority of age and the bonds of kinship obscured the true nature of the villain. Tekayo was an elder who had gone astray, breaking one taboo after another without sanction. By the time the village caught up with him, he had caused irreparable damage to their lives.

What remained after his death was unresolved grief handed down a generation. The grief of a son who could not mourn his father and never got to bury his daughter. And of a village, carrying its weight and holding a memory they would have to erase for the sake of the newly born.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

Odhis was back in Nairobi from The Hague for a short trip. It was Brayo’s idea to rally the old gang since we didn’t know when we would see Odhis again. We hadn’t been together since Marto’s fortieth birthday, which Odhis had also flown in for. That was just before the Covid pandemic. The Wine bar was nothing like we remembered. Then it was just a name and the only wine they served was Cellar Cask out of a box with grapes on it, but the new owners had spruced it up and it reeked elegance. It now looked like an actual cellar, with its rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with wines from all over the world: names that only Odhis could pronounce or recognise. The original bar counter in the corner was the only thing that survived the remodelling and we sat around a square table in front of it, not drinking wine, but instead having real drinks as Brayo put it.

Marto had come into serious money late last year. We knew because Brayo had shared a news link in the group just last week. Marto was a brilliant techie and he sold an app he had developed and made off like a bandit. Brayo called it stupid money. You couldn’t tell, but I spotted a detail when his left cuff pulled back as he rested his hand on the table exposing a square slab of polished steel hugging his wrist bone. It looked classy. Odhis saw it too and said “Wueeh!” and then named the brand: Cartier Santos.

Marto played it cool and pulled his hand away from the table. He sat with his back to the entrance taking the roasting from Odhis and Brayo. I had known Marto the longest. We were roommates in college and shared the same disposition. We met Odhis and Brayo after we joined the Toastsmasters club in the early days of career development and we have remained tight since. Marto had always been the silent one in the group, a nerd of few words.

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His phone went off at about ten that night and he looked at the screen for a moment before he answered. We all knew that look. The wife was calling.

“The Wine bar”, he said,“Just the boys, catching up”. Then he screwed his face: “No, not a good idea”. Then he ran his hand over his hair. “Seriously, babes”. He listened. “Sawa, I will send a pin”.

He put the phone face down and I asked him, “What now?”

“Diana is coming,” he said.

“That’s alright”, said Odhis. “Haven’t seen Dee in years.”

Odhis said it was his last night in Nairobi and Marto mumbled something that I couldn’t catch.

Brayo was the first to see her and he said “Ghai FaFa!” under his breath before we had figured out what he was looking at and when Odhis and I turned to look, we also gasped. The statuesque woman standing at the double door entrance scanning the room, holding a phone in her hand, vaguely resembled a woman we had once known as Diana. I noticed Marto did not turn back to look. The woman had Diana’s unmistakable height and eyes but that was about it.

She came over and kissed Marto on his cheek from the side and he barely turned his head in her direction. We all stood up like sergeants in front of a Brigadier awaiting orders. Then she went around the table hugging us, as Marto remained seated.

Then we were all talking to her. Brayo could not stop shaking his head. Even Odhis’ accent changed, his language suddenly became posh. I found myself several times staring at her chest and she caught me once and said straight to my face, “It’s okay Karis, you can look”. I was a hare caught in headlights. Marto chuckled. Odhis and Brayo howled. This was a woman we called “Double Dee” because she used to be gifted upfront and had always been a chubby bubbly woman. She now had a chiselled torso, narrow waist, sprawling hips and her bustline was taut.

Brayo was braver than I was. He said it, with his chest. “You look ravishing” and Diana replied “I know” without blinking. Odhis was beside himself.

“What happened here? This is not the Dee I knew, not that I am complaining”.

She laughed like her old self and said,“Turkey!” I didn’t get it, at first until Odhis added, “That was money well spent” and the penny dropped. Marto went to the bar to get a cocktail for her and Brayo, who had strategically sat to catch the action happening in the car park through the window, turned his chair so that he could face her directly.

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I watched Marto when he returned. He had an amused expression on his face every time one of us complimented Diana’s amazing transformation. He was just nodding, sipping on his drink. I nudged him with my elbow and told him, “Bro” and he just turned and responded with that same amused look,

“Dude! don’t ask”.

Brayo couldn’t contain himself. The Diana that I remembered used to brush away compliments but this brand new version was lapping it up. That seemed to encourage Odhis who got her talking gleefully about the details of her procedure. I saw Marto push back his cuff and caress the strap of his watch.

The conversation around the table had taken us back to the old times. Marto’s house used to be our congregation spot and Diana was always the host with the most.

“Remember the night you refused to open the gate for us?” Brayo recalled

“You boys were drunk and I was angry and very heavy with child and I didn’t want to commit a homicide”, she shot back and everyone laughed.

We had known Diana for over twenty years, because Marto was the first in our crew to get hitched and we were the groomsmen. Odhis was the best man. We were there when the first child arrived and I remembered a puffy cheeked Diana pissed off because Marto wouldn’t change a diaper in front of his boys.

“You boys don’t know, the half of it,” Diana said. She told us about how Marto had been screwed by his partners and booted out of the company he founded. “We went through hell. I got a shitty office job while your boy stayed home with the kids, and we rebuilt everything we had lost”.

We all turned to look at Marto, because he had kept this from us. He just stared back and shrugged his shoulders, “Life!” he said. Diana went on to tell us about his comeback, and how, after he sold his app, he wanted to thank her with something extravagant, “What do you want for your fortieth?” and she said, “ A new bod!” Even I couldn’t stop myself from laughing hard. The only person who didn’t was Marto. I turned to find with the same amused look as Odhis raised his glass and led us in a toast to celebrate their success.

After this, she switched topics, her hand on Odhis’ shoulder, asking about his kids and life in Europe.

Some time after this Marto said he had an early start. It was a pathetic attempt and we all dismissed him. It was Odhis last night and Diana hadn’t seen him since Covid and we continued chatting, filling in the gaps of the lost years. Twenty minutes later, in a firm tone, Marto said they had to leave. “It’s past 1 o’clock”. Diana shot him a side look and they exchanged something with their eyes that was unreadable. Marto got up and his intent was clear, so Odhis diplomatically summarised the night thanking Diana for making the night the highlight of his visit. I followed his cue and Brayo, not hiding his disappointment, cursed Marto for depriving us of his wife’s company and then told her “Stay like this” and we all knew what he meant.

The goodbyes lingered and then we all watched them walk out, Marto leading with the car keys in his hand and Diana right behind him. We stared like school boys through the main entrance and then shifted to Brayo’s view from the window, to the parking lot, and watched as Marto held the car door for his wife to enter before walking to his side and sitting for a moment before they drove into the night.

After that we were quiet for a bit. Brayo confessed, “I can’t get over how fine she looks” and Odhis said something about what money could buy. Brayo asked the waiter for the bill and he said Marto had already paid it. “Stupid money” Brayo said and we ordered another round and continued to talk about Diana.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

Chaining my bike to a lamp post is the most Dutch thing that I do. I wouldn’t panic if I forgot to lock my front door or left my parked car windows down in the city, but they steal bicycles here for sport. I twirl the chain round the pole through the front wheel, ensuring that I have the frame tied in as well. It was the first piece of advice I got when I started cycling, and I got it from several sources. Chain the bike to something immovable. In the likely event of theft, the insurance company just needs proof that you tried: two locks. The back tire lock and the extra-heavy chain, the kind we use to secure metal gates in Industrial area in Nairobi. It is supposed to be a deterrent, but every next hour, there is someone in Amsterdam going, “Where is my fiets?”

Chanda arrived as I finished and, as an afterthought, suggested that we chain our bikes together. He had the kind of bike that looked like it had been fished out of a canal. An old rusty bike with no hand brakes that couldn’t have cost much. I guessed twenty euros. He shook his head. “Close, thirty-five euros”. He’d already had two bicycles stolen, so he wasn’t as attached as I was to mine. We both unfastened our saddlebags and walked towards the restaurant to find Thaijs looking dapper in a navy sports jacket and khaki pants, seated on the terrace on the street, guarding two empty seats. The restaurant was squashed between a boutique hotel and a coffeeshop known as the Bulldog.

Amsterdam is a different city in the summer. The heat surprises you, and it warms everyone up. People laze in the long light, and the city resigns itself to a kind of laid-backness that moves at the pace of the boat traffic jamming the canals. Amsterdamers had just survived the heat wave that earned a code red status, but on this day, we were back to civilized temperatures. The Rembrandtplein was packed with tourists perched around in every possible sitting place, milling about the square like those plump pigeons I am used to seeing all over the Dam.

The centrepiece rising above the square was a towering statue of the famous Dutch painter, Rembrandt van Rijn, holding a steady gaze over the square with his arms folded. Of the great Dutch masters, Rembrandt became an easy favourite when I discovered he broke with the protocol of the age and famously painted “Two African Men (1661)”, an intimate portrait of his black neighbours in their full humanity.

Across from the square, over the cobblestones and tram tracks ringing the perimeter, were tall buildings with 19th century Dutch facades, their dark brick exteriors standing in contrast to vibrant restaurant awnings, terrace umbrellas and bright signage of the pubs and cafes below at the street level. All the seating spaces were occupied, and Chanda made a remark about the invasion of tourists in the canal district, to which Thaijs responded, “White trash”.

Chanda and I shot him a glance expecting a follow-up, but Thaijs had turned his attention back to his phone. He lived in the city, near Amsterdam’s Central station, so he probably had his fair share of rambunctious English weekend tourists who descended like locusts, seeking cheap thrills.

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The coffeeshop next door was buzzing, and despite the glass screen, the smoke was drifting over our table. Nobody commented on the second-hand smoke, the notorious whiff of Amsterdam. At this rate, I announced, by the time our food was ready, we would be nicely stoned and peckish, and Thaijs said he was peckish already.

Thaijs was wearing his Kenyan flag wristband, and Chanda made a comment about it, and Thaijs replied proudly, “Me I love Kenya”. Thaijs had lived in Nairobi for a stretch and had only returned to the Netherlands recently and was struggling to adjust. I asked him if his favourite playlist on Spotify was still “Matatu vibes” and he just smiled. Thaijs had been pretty much Africanised, and he could go on long pessimistic tirades on the coldness of Dutch life that Chanda always shut down.

Chanda was a Zambian, and he had lived here for over thirty years. He had a child with a Dutch woman but they had since separated. The two of them spent the first half hour roasting each other in Dutch and English. It was funny watching them code-switch, and I accused Thaijs of “appropriation”. Thaijs defended himself and accused Chanda of becoming too Dutch because he had scheduled this meeting five weeks prior.

Then Chanda switched gears and asked about Thaijs’ mother. Thaijs’ mood turned sombre, and his face grew long. I noticed Chanda leaning in, his arms folded and one hand stroking his chin as Thaijs shared an update. I had not been in the loop at all. His mother had been diagnosed with dementia six months ago, and her condition had deteriorated rapidly. “Have you made a decision?” Chanda prodded. Thaijs told us that she was not going to be institutionalized and they would be getting a caregiver.

“It is getting really bad. She can’t recall a thing. She keeps repeating the same story, ten times in an hour”. Chanda’s voice had become much softer, and after he had listened to Thaijs explain the radical life adjustment around a mother losing her sense of agency, he asked what I thought was an appropriate question: “How are you holding up, what are you doing for your sanity?”

Before he could answer, a tall waitress, in a fitted pink T-shirt and skinny jeans, told us our food was ready, and we retreated indoors to eat. After we had settled to eat our steaks, Thaijs picked up the conversation and told us that he had started swimming every morning and it was helping, but the hardest adjustment was seeing his mother become helpless. Then Chanda, as if building solidarity, spoke about his own mother’s diabetic condition. It had also gotten worse, and they had run into a snag because the mother did not want to return to Europe for treatment. She hated it. “She called Amsterdam a prison with nice large windows” and Thaijs thought it was an apt description. Chanda was in a bit of a dilemma. The cost of treatment in Lusaka was starting to strain the family. There was no social life for a woman with a vibrant circle like his mother. All through the exchange, I had not said a thing. I was somewhat embarrassed that I was finding out about this now and lacked the language to offer comfort. Why hadn’t they both thought to tell me, especially Chanda, who I was much closer to?

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It was Thaijs who roped me into the conversation, suddenly noticing that I had gone uncharacteristically quiet. I really wanted to say something uplifting but I couldn’t find the words so I just said, “Guys, I had no idea” and then, desperate to relieve my awkwardness, blurted, “Let me know if you need anything.”

I had been thinking about my own mother all through their exchange. We had spoken the previous night, and she was complaining about one of my aunties, who she thought had become too haughty. “Her kids come home, and they can’t even come and visit and she doesn’t say anything?” I thought about my mother’s regular frustrations in contrast to the medical situations these two men were handling. My mother is nearly a decade older than their mothers, and though she complained about her bad knees and walked with a cane, she was pretty much functional and autonomous. She worried about protocol at social events and entitled relatives abusing kinship ties. There were no health concerns in our conversations, and she was a woman constantly on the move, fixing stuff around the house and maintaining an active social calendar. I was relieved when Chanda started speaking about wolves in Veluwe national park troubling sheep farmers, to which Thaijs had a mouthful to add about Dutch attitudes towards wild prey and the sanitisation of nature.

I dipped in and out of their exchange but my mind remained on my mother. I knew she was fine, which is exactly why I had taken her well-being for granted. She was certainly not immune to the maladies of ageing. Yet she was the one constantly checking in on her busy son in Europe.

By the time we settled the bill, the city lights had come up around us. We settled our bills and walked out, bidding Thaijs goodbye. He seemed lighter after sharing his worries. His bike was parked further along the square. I repeated my offer, “Please let me know how I can help,” and he nodded in appreciation. Chanda and I walked towards our bikes, noticing that the terraces were still occupied and had gotten noisier. I unchained both bikes. Chanda complimented mine and asked, “I hope it is insured”. I nodded and he followed that up with,

“Completely forgot to ask about your old lady, how is she?”

“She is fine”.

“Pass my love”.

I nodded stiffly and we bumped fists, and then I watched him merge into the bike traffic into the heart of the canal district.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

When Mrs Apunda died, the whole village wondered who would take care of this 45 year old orphan.

Her son, Teddy, was deported, the spring Trump returned to office for a second time. He had been living with his mother in the village since then. This was a funeral everyone wanted to attend, out of curiosity. The women finally got access to a house, whose gate was always locked and the men, out of respect for Apunda’s husband, who even though long dead, was still fondly remembered. Alfredi Apunda was the reason the main road that put the village on the map was tarmacked. Even though he wasn’t a politician, his legacy was transforming a hamlet into a village that could now be googled.

He owned the first posho mill, he built a bar and then added a modern shopping centre, a cattle dip, the pastor’s house and a library in the primary school. His generosity was so legendary, they nicknamed him Alfredi ‘supermarket”. His wife, Mrs Apunda, was unlike him. She was respected but not loved and that respect was tied to the fact that despite her aloofness, Alfredi’s home had not collapsed. Mrs Apunda moved to the village after the death of Alfredi, her much beloved husband who tragically died in a car accident on the same road he had helped pave. No one thought she would last because she was an educated woman who hailed from Jamaica.

Mrs Apunda was reserved and private. Quite unlike anything previously seen. In the beginning, the village expected her to step into Alfredi’s big shoes, like other widows tended to do, but she refused to succumb to the pressure. For many years the villagers accused her of disrespecting tradition and selfishness when the gates to the previously open home remained shut and the generosity the village had become accustomed to ran dry.

Her problem, the villagers admitted eventually, was that she didn’t know how to lie. They had never met anyone so direct. If she didn’t like you or your ways, she did not hide it from you. It is the reason she quit the church, after a confrontation with the provost, who she told, to his face that too much religion is dangerous. She never made any contributions to church, not even the annual Christmas collection and all those years of gossip about her meanness had not shaken her stand.

She lived alone like a white woman, with her cats and dogs. She always had dogs and cats that were well fed. She didn’t keep any cows, sheep, goats or chickens. In time, people left her alone, in her fortress, the only storey house in the village, surrounded by a thick and well manicured cypress fence and a big black metal gate that was always locked.

Some people thought that she wasn’t alright in the head because how could an old woman spend a whole month in her home, never leaving, or craving company. She hardly attended any funerals or church events. Yet, those who remember the old times, say, Mrs Apunda wasn’t always like this. When Alfredi returned from Jamaica with a black woman as his wife, many people wondered why he didn’t just marry a mzungu if it was a foreigner he wanted. She was the first Jamaican anyone in the village had met but she looked just like the next aunty and the only way you could tell she wasn’t from around is when she started speaking. In the beginning she was warm but everything changed after Alfredi died. Maybe it was grief but her season of isolation had been unusually long.

Twenty three years a widow and still, she refused to change.

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Therefore when her son, Teddy, the only son in a family of four, a carbon copy of Alfredi returned from America, the villagers assumed he would shake his mother out of her hermetic existence. He was the only one Alfredi’s children that the villagers actually knew because his three sisters hardly ever came to the village and when they did, they never left the compound. Teddy mirrored his father in only one respect. He got along with everyone but that’s where it stopped. All he did was drink and flirt with women. He occasionally drove his mother around but he wasn’t a man to be relied on for anything. Everyone wondered why a tall, handsome man from a well off family refused to marry but it became clear that it wasn’t something he was interested in, which was strange for a man who was at ease around women.

When Teddy returned, Mrs Apunda was so relieved, it was really the first time her loyal househelp Gordy had seen her emotional. Gordy claimed she cried and held on to her son for a long time, both of them in tears. That night, he heard her praying in gratitude in her room and the next day they left with Teddy for Kisumu. She returned with a framed portrait of Donald Trump and put it up in the living room. Imagine this, for she didn’t even have a picture of Baba, Raila Odinga, like everyone else.

Gordy told the villagers it was because she never wanted to forget how God used Trump for good. Teddy was lost in America for years and he did not even show up for his father’s funeral. He had been in a cheap motel in Houston coming down from a three-day bender as his father was getting buried. He remembered the ice machine in the hallway, the red carpet, the lost phone, the handcuffs and the plane ride. He did not remember being found.

Unlike other mothers in the village, she put no pressure on him. She didn’t seem bothered by Teddy’s lack of initiative. A delegation of elders had attempted to talk to her about getting Teddy a helper to secure the next generation but even their grey hairs and polished walking sticks could not get them past the locked gate. Mrs Apunda would hear none of it.

So Teddy was tolerated, the one everyone called Owadgo Obama, because he sounded like Barrack. The only son, who did nothing all day but showed up with his mother’s car and confused village girls with his big English. He said he was in the village to take care of his mother but it was clear as day that it was the other way around.

He was a son who was kept and Gordy said when he returned late on most nights, his mother looked at him the way she looked at her cats when they came back after a night away. Relief and then nothing after that. Gordy locked the gate behind him every evening and most nights they ate together. She lived her life and he lived his and there was never any tension between them, just a sanctioned indifference.

Teddy wasn’t hated because he had the happy disposition, and reminded those who remembered, of his father, inheriting none of his mother’s aloofness. He never offended anyone and greeted all cheerfully in his terrible Dholuo but he was not one to be relied upon. He was a man who kept a fair distance from responsibility. It was obvious he had a brain and he displayed the knowledge of someone who had chewed books, only that it was the kind of knowledge that benefitted no one, not even himself.

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Those who attended the funeral were surprised by how honestly those who had interacted with Mrs Apunda spoke about her. Even her own daughters admitted that Mrs Apunda had never been a kind person but that did not mean she wasn’t generous. She had done many good things but she didn’t care for credit. How could anyone deny her hand because somehow everything Alfredi had started had survived and thrived. She was, many realized, the first person any of them had met who simply refused to pretend. She simply did not care what anyone thought of her. That kind of bravery was unheard of.

There was a cloud of envy that hung over the funeral. This woman had lived life on her terms without apology and cared less for what anyone else thought. So the attention turned to Teddy who was a strange and pitiful sight. All through the ceremony, he sat in the verandah, rigid, his jovial disposition absent, flanked by his friends from Nairobi. His sisters, who all spoke English of the nose, tearfully recounted their mother’s love for the village, describing it as where she wanted her sun to set but Teddy didn’t speak. The only son, who lived with his mother, had nothing to say. He was like a guest in his own home. What a waste of Alfredi’s seed, many thought.

Who would take care of this 45 year old total orphan? And would he finally grow up now that he had nowhere to hide?

Then the next day, a strange thing happened, after all the guests had left. Everyone who passed by the home reported it: the gate had been left open since morning. Teddy sat exactly where he had sat through the whole funeral, in the same chair with its rigid back, his Nairobi friends gone now too. From a distance, he could be mistaken for a man waiting to receive guests. But when the boda boda riders slowed to greet him, as they typically did, he did not raise his hand back.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

So, today’s usual piece isn’t quite ready. I wanted to give it a bit more time instead of rushing it out just to hit a deadline.

In the meantime, maybe go back and revisit one of the older pieces, or sit with the quiet for a bit.

Instead of an essay today, I want to say this: thank you for showing up here, week after week. This space only means something because you keep coming back to it.

Thank you for your patience, and for being here.

Oyunga Pala.

On Tuesday September 1st, I became the unlikely winner of the celebrity master chef competition. I was the underdog, who embarrassed a cast of big name chefs. I made it, mama! That night, off the set with the producers, I decided to send my father a text message, “I hope you are proud of your son now”. He didn’t reply.

I forgot about the text in the flurry of media interviews until one of those food bloggers asked me what my parents thought of my win and I remembered the message I had sent to dad. He wasn’t going to reply. It is the one thing we shared. Stubbornness. Dad would resort to doing what he does best, emotional distancing but I could swear to it, he was feeling this one.

It was strange to think that I wished he would just express anger. At least it was a familiar reaction, something I knew how to deal with now that I was no longer afraid. But these days, we hardly talked and the few times we did, it was only because mama had insisted. She had always defended his nature and though he had mellowed with age and no longer raged like he did when we were young and terrified of his outbursts, he had now taken to these long episodes of muteness. It was his new hiding place.

I had used his anger and shaming towards me as fuel for my ambition and turned it into a successful career. He told me over and over that I was a disappointment and would amount to nothing. I would have loved to see his face now. His sissy of a son was all over the news. Mama said he was having a hard time receiving the messages of congratulations. Serves him right. Let him stew in shame, I told mama.

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I must have been eleven years of age, when it dawned on me that my father detested my presence. I first noticed it in his words and then his face. There was a way he looked at me everytime he found me in the kitchen. I can trace the exact point the humiliation began. He had asked me casually, as I laid the table, what I wanted to be when I grew up and I told him I wanted to be a cook. Not a chef. Just wanted to cook, like my mama. That day he ripped me apart in front of my two elder sisters and my mother and nobody came to my defense. From then on, the abuse, the teasing and the shaming never stopped.

I remember one time, I was serving his friends, guests he was meeting over some important business. One of the guests complimented my cooking, and my father made a joke out of it, “He cooks like he is ready for marriage” and he joined the laughter that followed.

It had always been like that with dad. My presence in the kitchen angered him. Yet, I couldn’t help it. I loved cooking and the kitchen was my happy place. My two elder sisters could cook but they were not into cooking at all. Mama loved to cook for the family and just about anyone who stepped through our door and I became just like her. I could make ugali for a household by age 7 and became practically my mama’s sous chef.

I loved the power of food. I saw how Mama wielded it and how much more respect my father earned because he had a wife who made the guests break into praise after the meal. Their eyes would squint as they attempted to find the words to describe mama’s cooking. She had an inborn flair, and she could turn a simple dish into something that people would describe as gourmet. It didn’t matter if it was just three people having a 10am breakfast, everything mama made was exquisite. Food was her language of love and when she made those vows, it must have been to cook for this man, till death do us part.

My dad was incompetent in the kitchen. He was from that generation of men who didn’t cook. He didn’t even know his way around the kitchen. All his life, women had cooked for him. His mother, his wife, his daughters and now his… son.

The only example I ever had of men who cooked were subordinates. That is what my father drummed in. That I was wasting my brains and refusing to man up. So I went to college like they wanted, spent four years studying actuarial science, got the degree, brought it home to them and then went off in pursuit of my dream. I didn’t have any money to get into a proper culinary school and decided to start from the bottom, literally washing dishes and scrubbing floors in any kitchen that would pay me mind, until I got a lucky break with the Sarova Group of Hotels and earned my place in their kitchen.

My mama says I was a love child. The gap between me and the sister I follow is eight years. By the time I was entering my teens, they had all left home and left me alone, with mama, to face dad’s wrath. Dad had always wanted a son and he thought my fascination with the kitchen was the normal temporary attachment to my mother’s world that adolescence would naturally break. Adolescence arrived and the yank didn’t happen. Instead I dug in.

When he realised that he had failed to pull out of my mother’s kitchen, he started belittling me, then the anger returned. I couldn’t wait to leave home, like my sisters. Whenever I asked mama about his anger towards me, she defended his position, saying it was just the way his generation was and that I was lucky to have a father who could challenge me and to see it as training for life. “Listen to your father. He has a lot of experience”. How wrong she was.

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When I started living on my own and observing some steady elderly couples that dined regularly at the restaurant, I began to realise how emotionally damaged and disconnected my parents were. Their relationship was toxic. My father stopped beating me after I got to high school but the psychological terrorism and shaming never ceased. From a distance, I saw my mother’s entrapment clearly and her way of dealing with his excesses was suppression. It is a hard thing to say about your mother but she was a classic victim of Stockholm syndrome. She rationalised his emotional abuse tendencies and when it was too much she always turned to cooking. I thought I could protect my mother and joined her in refuge in the kitchen trying to charm him with his favourite meals and when that failed, I cooked for anyone desperate for validation, especially from men.

It took me a long time to understand why my father was determined to break me, until one day, during a smoke break at work, I chanced on an interview on YouTube from the feminist scholar Bell Hooks, a short talk from her book, The Will To Change and suddenly, I could see clearly.

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

My resistance to this creed was the source of dad’s hate. He was reenacting an amputation that had happened to him. He had failed to recreate me in the image of his upbringing because he had only been allowed access to a narrow spectrum of feelings oscillating between anger and domination.

Five days had passed since the text message. I picked up the phone. The message still stood there, no extra ticks. I read my own sentence back, I hope you are proud of your son now and it was like the anger had lifted and in its place, I felt grief. I understood, finally, that I’d been waiting on a man who didn’t have the ingredients to answer. That feeling part of him, had been amputated, probably as an innocent eleven year old and I was dealing with a man ill equipped to feel.

I left the phone face down on my dining table and went to check on the chicken in the oven. My guests would be arriving anytime now.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

He would not get off the phone. I wondered why? This was not typical of Uncle T. I looked at the timestamp. We had been speaking for fifty minutes and he had been doing most of the talking.

First off, he called me late, past 10. His excuse which he tried to pass off as a joke was that he knew I was an owl and these were my witching hours.

“I knew you would still be up” he started with a chuckle and he reminded me of my early days in university, that season when I frequently squatted at his place, while he was still a bachelor. He would return from his partying and find me watching DVDs.

Twenty years had flown by quickly and in that time the gap between us had completely vanished. He spoke to me like an agemate. I was now a mother and his tone had even gotten more respectful.

“How is my grand daughter’s ear?” My daughter had just had an ear operation a week ago and I was surprised that he remembered because I didn’t recall telling him about it.

“She is good now, so glad we caught that in time”.

I had named my daughter after his mother, my grandmother and used her baptismal name. She was the first Felesia in two generations, a fact that seemed to make Uncle T very happy. Grandma died when he was still a child and he was raised by a foster mother. He had christened her “mama” and it was funny the first time he asked me, “Is my mama sleeping well?”

They had never met, not yet, though I sent him pictures practically every week and he had a whole series of funny memes that he used to express his pride and joy. Felesia had been born while he was recovering in hospital after suffering a stroke and somehow between Nairobi’s hectic schedules and mothering a new born, calendars had refused to align.

But this was the second time he was calling this week, just to chat.

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So I let him talk. He was jovial and I knew he wasn’t tipsy because he had been off alcohol since the stroke, six months ago. My aunt had traveled to the village and he stayed mostly at home, in Lang’ata, in the city with a caregiver, his movement limited for a man once about town.

I asked if he had any pictures of grandma as a young bride, with AI these days, we could enhance. That got him excited. He said he had one, somewhere in a photo album, the only one, of Dani taken with Babu just after they got married at the Ramogi Studios in Nairobi.

I liked stories of his Nairobi. He dropped names of places and people that had long ceased to exist. He had told me this story before but I didn’t stop him when he repeated it.

“I debated Taban Lo Liyong, the famous novelist from South Sudan, at Six-Eighty and Okot p’Bitek, The Okot! was so impressed he bought him rounds the whole night and started to teach him Achol”. That night, he said, three Luos, one from Kenya, the other from Uganda and another from South Sudan found kinship.

Those names still meant nothing to me even. I was never into his brand of African literature despite their literary legacies. He loved literature, African literature to be specific and now that he was mostly home bound, he had taken up reading again, which must explain why he had gotten so nostalgic about the good ol’days.

I excused myself briefly, when I had his ‘mother’ stirring in the cot and thinking he would hang up but he held the line and when I returned five minutes later, started an entirely new story about his student days in India. And he went off naming stars from the golden age of cricket. Sachin Tendulkar. Rahul Dravid. Souvrav Ganguly. Brian Lara. Curtly Ambrose. Maurice Odumbe. Steve Tikolo like they would mean anything to me. He always lost me when he started talking about sports because he was a bit of a historian and I felt he was really talking to himself, so I just listened without interrupting.

We spoke that night for another hour and it felt like a round up. From his adventures, sports, literature, family and about my daughter, and when he asked this strange question “Whose spirit had she inherited?” I didn’t know what to tell him. It was Felesia’s whimpering that finally got him off the phone and he told me,

“It is late now, mama needs you”. I promised to find him the following week to make concrete for the meeting and hang up, my ear warm from the call.

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Three days after this call, my cousin called in tears to break the news. Uncle T was gone.

I was shaking after the call and I let out a guttural scream that I cannot explain up to now where it came from. My husband, the poor man, didn’t know what to do with me. I was the strong one, now all broken and hysterical. That day, I kept going over the details of that last phone call. Did he know? All his words now seemed like coded messages that I had to decipher. That call was full of signposts. Was cricket a metaphor for living, endurance, patience, batting against the odds. He mentioned Taban Lo Liyong and the book that stirred the debate, Fixions. I had first read that book in his house in my post college years and only because he had insisted. Can’t even remember what it was about. Did I need to go back to it? His last words kept circulating in my head “mama needs you, mama needs you”.

He must have known his time was coming to an end and had called to say goodbye to his mother, or was this some kind of preparation to meet his mother on the other side. Why did he ask the question about spiritual inheritance? It was as if his spirit knew what his mind and body hadn’t comprehended.

I thought about how I had ignored his first call making a mental note to call him back and had forgotten until he called later that night. I remembered my impatience, the thoughts that had been running through my head on how to exit the conversation. The excuses I could have readily reached for that were genuine as a nursing mother. I am grateful that I didn’t do any of that foolishness. How would I have been able to live with myself? I just sat there, exhausted, just listening to him like a therapist. I was tired. Felesia had been restless the whole day but strangely through the call she only stirred once and went back to sleep.

When I told hubby about the details of Uncle T’s final call and expressed confusion, his reply was a bit too simple. “Maybe he called to say goodbye and tell his mother that he was coming home”. I wanted to argue because he had this habit of being dismissive and minimizing things but before I could, he said something that stopped the words about to emerge from my mouth, “You know, it is a good thing, you had the presence of mind to receive it”.

I played that sentence in my head for days. A good thing you had the presence of mind to receive it. He knew I was impatient and it had gotten worse ever since Felesia arrived, I was so easily triggered when I was exhausted. I wanted to believe it wasn’t his wisdom for I knew my hubby was ever skeptical when it came to anything spiritual. He didn’t talk like this and knowing this infuriated me further. I needed to make sense of these signs I had received.

I went back to our chat history. The pictures, the memes, the voice notes. He had consistently checked on me over six months since the birth of Felesia. How had I missed that detail? And I found a voice note, two months ago, in response to a video of Felesia laughing, “This one radiates. Mama through and through”.

I had not thought anything of this. I had filed it off as the kind of compliment you would expect from an lovable uncle but now, it hit different.

Did he know? Does the spirit override the mind and tell the body what to do? Is this how grief works, sprinkling signs so that we can make meaning of profound loss after the fact? Maybe hubby was right. There was nothing to be solved here.

So I stopped asking whether he knew but instead wondered whether I would have listened, had I known. And the truth is that not knowing is the only reason I stayed on that call for two hours without asking him to get to the point. The not-knowing is what allowed us to honour the moment with our presence.

“Mama needs you”. My baby needs me. His own mother wasn’t around long enough to watch him grow into an adult and bear her grandchildren.

He was telling me to be present. To be here. Now.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

On Sunday morning I received an early call. I’d woken up fifteen minutes earlier, about to begin my morning exercise ritual, my sacred hour, no phones until I am done. But when the phone lit up and I saw my niece’s name, someone I had not spoken to in a long while, I just knew. She was composed, telling me without much preamble that my cousin Pip had died in the night and I was among the first they’d thought to call. I live outside the country, yet it fell on me to break the news to the wider family in Kenya.

Philip Owuor, the one we called Pip, was my first cousin. Our parents were siblings who’d followed each other in birth order. He was over a decade older, but he’d always treated me as a peer. That morning, when I reached my brother, our family’s informal archivist, he sent through a series of photographs: Pip, present at every funeral our family had held across two decades. It is, I’m certain, everyone’s story in our extended family, and in the church community he shepherded. Pip was a silent anchor in our seasons of grief.

Pip was the person you instantly thought to call when one of your own had departed. He was a clergyman and a hospital chaplain, a priest who sat at the bedsides of the terminally ill, preparing them for the final journey, helping families make sense of loss. He was even-keeled, understated. He didn’t pontificate, didn’t reach for poignant verses, didn’t perform care as was commonplace among many from his profession.

It is the kind of loss that hits you hard because I know how much ground he covered, and how exposed the family now is without him. He died days before I was due to give a workshop presentation of the importance of grief literacy in the workplace. Of the many lessons his life offers, that’s the one that has stayed with me the most.

Grief literacy, a term coined in 2020 by researcher Lauren Breen and colleagues, is “the capacity to access, process, and use knowledge regarding the experience of loss”. It’s built from knowledge, skill, and values, and treated as a collective capacity rather than a personal one. It’s a response to the modern habit in the West of outsourcing grief to professionals, a nudge back toward communities that know how to care for their own.

Pip was the most grief-literate person I’ve known. Naturally, I only recognize that in hindsight. He’d refined a capacity I’d been trained in since childhood without realizing it. That ability not to fix or resolve, but to sit still in the discomfort of sorrow without trying to rush toward closure.

What I now appreciate, through my own losses and years chronicling grief, is that I’m a product of a grief-literate society. I learned how to grieve from Pip, and from the family that raised us both. So I would like to share twenty lessons drawn from writings on grief literacy.

1. On Presence — My Friend, The Bishop

Do: Show up and walk alongside them through the dark and lonely nights of grief. Don’t: Reach for grand pronouncements or borrowed verses. Your presence does not require eloquence.

2. On Bearing Witness — Why Did They Die

Do: Witness their tears as active participation in their pain. Don’t: Treat witnessing as passive observation. Its power lies in being seen.

3. On the Right to Rage — When Sorrow Refuses Silence

Do: Trust unruly grief as a rational response to an irrational death. Don’t: Dismiss loud, disordered grief as excessive or undignified.

4. On Naming It — This Sadness Does Not Belong to You

Do: Name the grief and its true owner because it lightens what it can’t yet lift. Don’t: Let sadness sit unnamed and unclaimed.

5. On How to Actually Show Up — Men and Miscarriage

Do: Sit in the discomfort with them. Don’t: Minimize the loss, offer motivational encouragement, change the topic, or fall back on platitudes about “God’s will” or “God’s plan.”

6. On Grief as Lifelong Companion — The Two Widows

Do: Learn to carry loss because it starts the moment you’re born and never fully stops. Don’t: Expect grief to neatly end after a period of mourning, or expect the memories of the dead to simply leave because they are out of sight.

7. On Remembrance — Where Are Their Graves

Do: Understand graves as a language of love and legacy. Don’t: Mistake or dismiss the need to mark a life as mere sentimentality.

8. On What “Dying Well” Really Means — The Order of Good Death

Do: Define “dying well” as something beyond the pomp of the funeral itself. Don’t: Mistake the size of the send-off as the measure of a life lived.

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9. On Communal Grief — Of Harambees, WhatsApp and Compassion Fatigue

Do: Recognize WhatsApp fundraising funeral groups as real communal death-care and an act of love, even with all their imperfections. Don’t: Let the efficiency of a funeral fundraiser numb you to the harder questions it tends to replace. Why did they die like this in the first place, not just how will we bury them?

10. On Public Grief — Kenya’s Bereaved Generation

Do: Let public grief exist without waiting for permission especially when the majority deny its existence. Don’t: Demand grief to be quiet or orderly before it counts as legitimate.

11. On Urgency — Archive The Elder While They Still Breathe

Do: Record your elders. Ask them the hard questions now. Don’t: Wait until their last moments because the answers outlast you both only if you ask in time.

12. On Becoming Shelter — The Crisis of Eldership

Do: Learn to shelter others unconditionally. Don’t: Wait for recognition or an ideal moment to start. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is now.

13. On Facing Mortality — Isolation Ward 5C

Do: Show up for people you care about, even when you can’t bring yourself to admit how scared you are. Don’t: Mistake protecting someone from your fear of mortality for not needing them beside you.

14. On the Mask Slipping — I’m Good...so, I thought.

Do: Let grief surface when it needs to. Don’t: Mistake “I’m good” for “I’m healed.”

15. On Transformation, Not Erasure — The Alchemy of Grief

Do: Learn how to transform raw loss into something that can be held, examined, and passed on. Don’t: Try to suppress or erase grief outright with distractions.

16. On Grieving What Isn’t a Body — The Unseen Grief of Career Death

Do: Allow yourself to genuinely grieve a career, or an identity, that has ended. Don’t: Ignore that loss just because there’s no body to bury.

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17. On Outsourcing the Self — The Resignation Letter

Do: Make it your responsibility to keep your happiness and sense of self. Don’t: Outsource or mortgage your happiness to a job title.

18. On Displacement as Loss — The Baby Avocado

Do: Recognize displacement or migration itself as a form of loss. Don’t: Mistake being valued for your “exotic appeal” for belonging.

19. On the Unspoken Cold — Diaspora Grief

Do: Name the success-guilt and the weight of doing better than the people you left behind. Don’t: Let “people are dying crossing the Mediterranean to be in your position” become the reason you’re not allowed to grieve your own losses.

20. On the Ideal Child — The Special One

Do: Give them your unconditional love because it is the best gift you can offer as a parent Don’t: Spend years trying to fix the child to match a rhythm that was never going to be theirs.

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This is in memory of Reverend Philip Owuor (Pip)

“Well done, good and faithful servant” Matthew 25:23

With Pip during my sister’s funeral.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, Half-priced Books, Prestige Bookshop and Lolwe bookshop in Kisumu.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

The text message arrived just a few minutes after noon. It was from Omosh.

Run to this home. I am stuck. Hold it for me.

There was a follow up message, a smiling picture of an older gentleman with a full head of grey hair and spectacles, his fair face dotted with dark freckles. Oredo did not know the area where Omosh said the funeral was taking place, though he wasn’t worried. He was sure his cousin Blanda, who owned a boda boda would know. Sure enough when he called Blanda for transport, he said he had actually dropped a caterer there that very morning for the vigil and the funeral would take place the next day.

On the bumpy ride to the home, he studied the picture as Blanda filled him in on the back story. The deceased was a former headmaster, well known pioneer educationalist. He didn’t come home often. Retired but lived mostly in Nairobi. The widow was from Uganda. Very beautiful.Three kids, an older daughter married to a mzungu who hadn’t arrived from America but the two sons had arrived with the body that morning. One was Ja Nairobi and the other one looked like he lived abroad because that hairstyle was like a musicians’. Oredo asked if they spoke Dholuo and Blanda said they didn’t look like the type that spoke it.

He asked Blanda to drop him outside the gate, where they found a harvested maize plot had been converted into a parking lot filled with cars and a few motorcycles. He scanned around, spotted two men standing under the shade of an Ober tree, hidden from the view of the main gate.

They were smoking. They were not from around here. These were definitely his sons and the resemblance was unmistakable. From their dress style and posture he could tell they were born-city. He guessed that the taller of the two young men must be the one living in Europe because of his hair. He had long dreadlocks tied in a band at the back of his head and Blanda was right. He looked like Ja Reggae and Oredo nicknamed him Rasta. The other one was definitely from Nairobi. He had a well nourished chubby frame, was wearing dark glasses and held two phones. They both greeted him warmly when he walked up to them and he started by offering a courtesy greeting in Kiswahili,

“Poleni kwa safari” and that seemed to surprise them to hear a stranger acknowledge the journey they had taken to get a body to the village for the burial, because they turned their full attention to him, both lowering their cigarettes to ensure the smoke did not drift in his direction. When the Rasta spoke, it was in fluent Dholuo that surprised Oredo. They definitely did not look like the type that knew Dholuo. Clearly they had not gotten lost and still understood our ways and that emboldened him to ask outright,

“Can I taste your cigarette?”

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The Rasta seemed puzzled but the chubbier one with two phones, took a quick drag of his stick and then handed Oredo his half smoked cigarette. Oredo took a greedy drag, his dry cracked lips hissing as he inhaled, savored it and blew it skyward in a stream and then after looking for the words in his head, he offered his verdict,

“This thing is smooth. You cannot even feel it in your throat. Not like the things we smoke in this village” and they both seemed to find his comment very funny and laughed.

The chubbier one with two phones beckoned his brother, who did not understand at first and after he flashed two fingers, he caught on and the Rasta extracted two white cigarette sticks with gold tips for Oredo who received them with both hands, clasping them and then tucking them carefully into his breast pocket. He thanked them and walked away towards the gate.

The gate was wide open and the main house occupied a central space in the large compound. On both sides of the house, they had erected white tents for the guests. There was a small crowd of newly arrived guests seated in the plastic chairs under the tent and some in the verandah of the main house who looked like VIPs and probably arrived in the two black 4 wheelers vehicles parked in the compound with drivers leaning on their bonnets.

Oredo adjusted the floppy hat on his head and took a deep breath and then let out a scream from the depths of his chest, that startled the two drivers who had been scrolling on their phones,

“Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!

And simultaneously flung his hat on the ground and with that dramatic opening he launched into his favourite dirge against death, the great robber,

Who would buy sugar for us now?

Who would teach us good table manners?

The people in the tent and the verandah took notice and some in the tent even stood up to observe him. A woman had her hand pressed flat against her chest, and her eyes of concern trailed him. He kept it up, half jogging, half walking, back and forth on the open lawn in front of the verandah, his hands clasped behind his head, lost in grief.

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“Jowi!Jowi!Jowi!”

When he finally stopped, after five minutes of commanding attention, he was out of breath. He noticed that two drivers and the people in the tent had turned into attentive spectators. He stood still now, his loud dirge reduced to a murmur twisting his head from side to side while staring at the ground, his fists curled and pressed onto his waist, looking very remorseful but also on the look out for the signal and sure enough it came. The woman who had pressed her hand on her chest when he started wailing sent someone towards him, and he had her instructions,

“Give the visitor some food.”

and a young lady arrived and ushered him to the back of the house, where he found a busy kitchen. The smoke was thick and the women with lesos tied around their waists worked with urgency.

He was shown to a chair with a stool in front of it and moments later the young woman returned with a plate heaped with rice, chapati, roasted potatoes, meat stew that had started dripping on the side of the plate. She told him to wait for a spoon and walked to an open dish rack and returned with one stating that they had already prayed for the food in the kitchen.

He knew it was quality food even before the first spoonful. They were a well off family. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten pilau this good at a funeral and it had spices, like something they would serve you in a restaurant in Mombasa. He ate slowly and no one bothered him but his eyes roamed trying to fill in the gaps in his story. These must have the beautiful wife’s relatives from Uganda Blanda mentioned. He had seen that fashion style before, the colourful long dresses that bunch up at the shoulders. They must be in charge of the food because this was not the usual standard. Omosh would regret missing this one.

When he finished, the same young lady returned to take his empty plate and offered him a glass of water. He stood up after emptying it and realised that he was stuffed and started looking forward to smoking the cigarettes that he could feel in his breast pocket that fortunately, had not gotten squashed during the vigorous activity of mourning.

He started walking towards the gate and the drivers were back to their original positions, leaning on the bonnets glued to their phones. When he got outside of it, he bumped into the two brothers returning from their smoke break.

The chubbier one asked him, “Have you eaten?” Oredo just tapped his belly to indicate that he was stuffed. The Rasta then asked if he was the one mourning earlier and Oredo nodded. The Rasta spoke in English of the nose,

“Thank you for doing this for Baba”, and then the chubbier as if waiting for the cue pressed a note into his hand. Oredo instinctively crunched it and without looking at it, slipped his hand into his pocket. Then clasping his hands together in gratitude he asked for a light and gently pulled one of the cigarettes he had been given earlier and the Rasta lit it up. They stood watching him as he took a long drag and declared again,

“This thing is smooth”

And both brothers laughed before the chubbier one asked,

“Will we see you tomorrow?”

Oredo replied, “ How can I miss? I’m just running to check on my cows”, and then as an after thought he asked, “What time does the service start?”

They told him. Ten o’clock sharp, the priest is very strict on time.

“Ten”, Oredo repeated, nodding, already walking away, “I won’t be late” and he walked away leaving a trail of cigarette smoke drifting after him.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

Nandi swore she’d never return. The door of the airplane was flung open and the passengers filed out, many walking casually. The heat in Kisumu did that to you. It hits you square. Her suitcase was one of the first to arrive on the baggage belt, and she pulled it off and walked into a lobby jammed with taxi drivers, security guards, V.I.P drivers, and idlers. She wore a flowing kitenge, a tall headwrap, and big round dark glasses. She gave off that, just-leave-me-the F-alone, vibe. Nobody seemed to care.

“Sister, taxi!”

“Where are you going madam? I carry sanduk for you?”

“Auntie! Wait! Please! We have good car hire here!”

She keeps walking. She has a name on a phone screen and through the wide open doors to the parking lot, she spots a tall man waving a hand and holding up a phone. That’s her uber. She picks up pace. Then she hears them before she sees them and is walking towards them. They are staring at her and not hiding it. They talk loudly in Dholuo.

“Ma en:It’s her”

“Ok en:It is not”

“Ma en:It’s her”

“Ok, en anyisi,:It is not, I am telling you”

“Omera, ma en: My friend, it’s her”

She doesn’t turn her head or change her pace. The tall man meets her halfway across the tarmac and takes hold of her suitcase, matching her pace as he weaves between cars to his white Corolla. She gets in and is thankful for the AC and feels relief as the car pulls away. At the roundabout, they turn left towards Kisian, away from the city, to an Airbnb in Seme by the shores of lake, property of a diasporan who had built a hacienda in rural Kisumu.

She looked at the Riat hills on her right as the airport faded in the background and they had been peopled overnight. She adjusted her headwrap looking at the rearview mirror, glad that the driver wasn’t playing any music and he was not a talkative type and then he asked on cue,

“Is this your first time in Kisumu?”

“No!” and as if reading the room, he went quiet again. The road trip was fairly quick and there wasn’t much traffic on the highway. They turned off the main road onto a dusty murram road where a number of boda bodas were situated at a bus stop and drove past homesteads, until it appeared they had run out of road and arrived at a large imposing gate of a walled compound and when the gate was flung open, the driveway was paved with cabro blocks.

The house even looked more grand in reality than it did in the pictures. A bit out of place with its lush English gardens, swings, paved paths lined with flowers, two peacocks roaming on one side of the lawn and sprinklers spinning on the other, and the centre piece, a storeyed brickfaced building with arches everywhere and a courtyard with a long pool in the middle of it. She asked the caretaker why she couldn’t see the lake and he led up a wide stairway to the upper floor, through a bedroom that spilled onto a balcony that opened up into a vista. There it was, Nam Lolwe and the pristine blue spread out into infinity merging with the sky. This was the background of their first encounter, at a podcast that was named Nam Lolwe recorded in Kisumu in Dunga overlooking the lake, seven years ago.

Luanda wasn’t even her type. He was dark skinned and stocky, his round face borderline chubby and they were the same height. He wore his hair short, his moustache and beard trimmed to precision and he always dressed sharp. He was a guest on the podcast and she had come to close an advertisement deal. They met at the reception and she had no idea who he was and had never listened to his music. When he started talking, he was the complete opposite of what she had imagined. He was kind and patient and that’s how the affair started with a simple request.

“I am playing in Nairobi next Saturday at Greenspan mall, Doonholm. You must come”.

What she encountered was mind boggling. He was like a god in the Benga universe, loved by the fans, both men and women behaving like adolescents in his presence and once he held the mic, he was a wizard, casting a spell on his audience. So it was strange that he chose her, and nobody thought it was a good idea. Not her mother nor his wife. But Luanda claimed he was unhappy and persisted until her resistance broke and they got married as his second wife. It was a bad idea but she was young and naive and she thought she could change him and claim him to herself. Their most understated similarity was their stubbornness. Nobody told them what to do.They lasted two years. The most intense years of her life, ever. No children.

At first Kisumu hated her but then attitudes softened because the fans said she was the lucky muse and Luanda’s biggest hits were recorded in those two years. She was the one he came back to, his 1st lady whenever he was in Nairobi and the arrangement held. Nandi didn’t ask what Luanda did out there but when he walked through the doors of the house, she was the only Abebo of his life.

His death was strange. The morning was completely ordinary. The band manager had joined him for breakfast and they ran over the details of the festival as was custom before a performance. She fed him, ironed his outfit, wished him luck and was watching Netflix when the news arrived that he had collapsed mid performance and was getting rushed to hospital. He died in the ambulance at the gates of Nairobi hospital and they wheeled him straight to the morgue.

Her worst nightmare began that night, on a peaceful Friday night in September. She became the most hated woman in Kisumu. The one who killed a man everyone loved and would now inherit his wealth. Her own family had insisted that she shouldn’t go to the funeral and maybe, she should have listened to them.

They were fans rolling in the dust and even the men were ululating, the entire gathering inconsolable. A section of them wanted her ejected and heckled through her testimonial shouting “Janek: murderer” but Luanda’s mother stood her ground and asked the MC for the microphone and told off the hecklers. Her co-wife however, was stiff shouldered and mum, hardly making eye contact through it all even as they sat next to each other.

The crowd was pressing on the family from the back, people trying to all get a glimpse of the final lowering of the casket and when it came to her turn to throw soil into the grave, she hesitated, holding the dry coarse soil in the ball of her fist and started reciting a silent prayer with her eyes shut. It was at that moment that a stranger grabbed her hand from behind and shouted at her, “Dir loo! Fling the soil” followed by a chorus of “Orito ang’o: what is she waiting for” and before she could figure what was going on, she felt the sharp sting of a whip in the middle of her back. She turned around instantly and threw a handful of soil in the direction her assault came from and it landed on a choir member’s face and in the melee that ensued an innocent bystander was flung into the grave, landing flat on their back on top of the coffin with a thud that sent everyone silent. She had to be rushed out of the homestead for her own safety and she had not returned since. That afternoon she became known as the witch.

Five years pass quickly. Nandi thought she had left that life behind her. It was her elder sister who paid for her ticket to the Netherlands. She had been fifteen years settled there, divorced, the one who’d raised the younger siblings through school. She found herself in Ede, a small Dutch municipality in the middle of the country with no African community. Her sister put her to work, as an informal nanny to her nephew, off the books. She overstayed her visa and focused on caring for the boy. The child anchored her; his mundane, ordinary needs gave her structure and stopped her mind from returning to the trauma of her appended life. When the child started regular school, she was left with unstructured time and herself. The old ghosts returned.

The fallout with her sister had been a long time coming. She wanted her to remain small, work on getting her papers to start a new life in Europe. She got tired of the hiding and one evening after a motivational podcast binge on YouTube, she declared to herself, “the obstacle is the way” and told her sister of her plans to return home. Her sister was livid.

To do what? Then what? Are you out of your mind, after what those people did to you? How can you waste five years in Europe and leave without papers?

Hurtful words were exchanged and her sister issued an ultimatum. Nandi chose voluntary repatriation because she was fed up with wallowing in shame.The years of smallness and fear had brought her nothing and she was done with being afraid.

She spent a peaceful night in Seme and she woke up to a familiar feel of rural serenity. Cockerels crowing, cows bells clinking and the sound of the waves on the lake lapping gently against the shoreline papyrus reeds. She found the tall uber driver in his clean Corolla already parked in the compound. He was early. They made small talk and then began the drive to Nyang’oma near Muhoroni by the banks of the river Nyando to Luanda’s home. Nothing had changed here and the village was exactly as she remembered. The unremarkable flatness of this land strangely reminded her of the Veluwe in the Netherlands. Luanda had never built her a house and the homestead had three houses: the first wife’s, his brother’s and his mother’s. She was surprised to find a small group of women, standing in the long verandah of Luanda’s mother’s house silently watching as the car drove into the compound. They did not move from their position. But her mother in law greeted her from the distance by simply stating the obvious,

“NyaGot, iduogo limo osiepni? Daughter from the hills, you have returned to visit your friend?

A young man approached her, greeted her formally, and told her he would direct her to the grave site. It turned out that he was a nephew, a village relative who now worked as a guide because the grave site received regular visitors. She followed his lead through a grove of bananas to the grave that was now all built up. They had housed his grave in a white stone roofed mausoleum with benches on both sides of the tombstone marking the burial spot. It appeared it was visited regularly because the bunch of flowers on the grave had only started wilting. The young guide retreated and gave her a moment of privacy.

Nandi stood stiffly upright, reading the epitaph, stopping at “beloved husband” and felt numb until she sat on the bench and then her eyes started watering. She found she couldn’t move from that position and all the emotion she had suppressed for five years came rushing through, but nobody disturbed her. So she sat for a long time, trying more than once to get up but unable to, her eyes permanently wet.

It was her mother-in-law who came to fetch her alone. She walked in quietly, her frame sturdy for a 70 year old woman and sat beside her on the bench without saying a word and then moments after clasped her hand, squeezed it and said,

“NyaGot, koro oromo. Wadhi wachiem; This is enough. Let’s go and eat”,

and she stood up first and then Nandi followed her through the banana grove towards the main house.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

There is an oral tale from my childhood: the story of Nyamgondho wuod Ombare. Of all the folktales I heard growing up, it’s one that stayed with me most. I can’t place exactly when I first heard it, but I still remember the illustrations from an oral literature class in primary school. Some stories stay with you, and only with age do we discover that the innocent folktales of our childhood were cautionary tales all along. I think of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, the Emperor’s New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, or Luanda Magere, the warrior who turned into a rock, simple tales that now read as sharp mirrors of character and behaviour in society. But back to Nyamgondho, son of Ombare.

This famous Luo folk legend tells the story of a destitute fisherman who lived in extreme poverty in Nyandhiwa village by the shores of Lake Victoria, in what is now present day Gwasi location, in Homa Bay county. He got by setting up traditional woven fish traps known locally as mgondho. The tale takes its name from this, Nyamgondho, means ‘the daughter of the fish trap’ in Dholuo.

The poor fisherman would lay his traps in the late evening and return in the morning to check for a catch. On this fateful morning, he stumbled on a strange encounter. Trapped in the fishing basket was a mysterious haggard and ugly old woman with a goat. This sight startled Nyamgondho and he was about to throw her back into the water but the old lady pleaded with him to take her home so that she would warm herself by a fire and in return she promised him great wealth on the one condition that he never revealed where he found her. He took her home out of the goodness of his heart and gave her something to eat and a place to sleep. By accepting the woman and the goat he accepted a debt. He treated the old woman with kindness and she in turn worked hard to build his wealth.

The son of Ombare’s life changed after this encounter and his wealth, then measured in massive herds of cattle, sheep, and goats filled his homestead. Overnight his status changed and he made the old woman his wife. Over the years Nyamgondho grew wealthy and married more wives. He started frequenting drinking dens and with every additional wife his pride grew. One evening, after drinking with his fellow male folk, they chided him about his ugly first wife and he returned home filled with anger. None of his wives who each had their own houses agreed to open their doors to him including the first wife and that left him livid and it was at her doorstep that he poured his anger.

“Even you, this ugly old thing that I dragged out of the lake, won’t open the door for me”. The lady of the lake upon hearing the harshness of his words asked whether those were truly his feelings and Nyamgondho raised his voice louder and asked her to leave because he could no longer stand her sight. The next morning she woke up at dawn and played tunes out of a wooden flute, while walking towards the lake shore. As soon as her feet touched the water, all the livestock in the homestead began to follow her and one by one disappeared under the surface of the water with her, never to be seen again.

Nyamgondho ran to the edge of the lake in distress, pleading for her return while trying to stop the animals from following the woman but it was all in vain. The tale ends with Nyamgondho so stricken with grief and regret that he froze and physically transformed into a tree that still stands in Gwassi today.

Nyamgondho was never a wealthy man but rather a custodian of her grace and when he broke the covenant, the grace receded back to source, leaving him as empty as the day he found her.

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I drew from this tale the apparent cultural lessons. Stay humble. Don’t let pride, arrogance and peer influence creep in and destroy a relationship. Moderate alcohol intake because it can lead man to foolishness. Husbands, respect your wives even when they become old and haggard. Don’t despise humble beginnings or withhold gratitude for the invisible hands that hold us up. Be kind to the poor and vulnerable and never betray trust that has been earned.

The folk legend has endured for these obvious lessons. It is easy to translate into modern day relationships because those vices are the currency of most marital disagreements. The couple that starts humble, builds together before pride afflicts one leading to contempt and an irreversible fall out. The humble partner whose labour is rendered invisible and their contribution goes unacknowledged until after the break off and then arrives the sinking realisation that the prosperity was an attribute of the discarded partner’s character.

I had never thought of this folklore as a story about grief that is entangled with such total shame, it makes it impossible to mourn in company. It struck me that there are some injustices so grave that there is simply no coming back from them. The Nyamgondho story is a tale of irreversible consequence. By committing the ultimate betrayal, he became the author of his own ruin.

The transgressors’ life is owned by shame and they lose their sense of personhood. They become like a shadow in the community, alive in the flesh, but seen as walking, dead. The repercussion is not direct punishment but a kind of disassociation. The community does not condemn him; they simply stop seeing him. He becomes a living cautionary tale, alive in flesh, but dead to the village. No one sits with him in his grief. His sorrow goes unacknowledged in the court of public opinion.

Nyamgondho is also a cautionary tale on unresolvable grief. There are some acts in society that constitute such total betrayal of values that they can only lead to the consequence of an irredeemable shame that sets upon one like leprosy. Though they still stand, they remain separated from all associations that gave life and in that state of loneliness, they wither without the benefit of mercy.

The community’s withdrawal, I now wonder, is less about righteousness and more a survival instinct. They watched the lake swallow and reclaim what it had lent. To sit with Nyamgondho in his grief would be to be tethered to a man, the lake itself, the source of life, had rejected. So they abandon him to his shame, not out of cruelty, but more like the quiet desperate logic of fishermen who have seen a boat sink and fear the under current.

One irony stands out. Nyamgondho was never his name. He was Mai, son of Ombare, until the woman from the lake entered his life, and Nyamgondho, daughter of the fish trap, was hers. He spent one drunken evening trying to degrade where she came from. For that, he lost the cattle, the wives, the wealth and in the end, his own name too. No one remembers him as Mai. The tale that survives him is told under her name. He denied her origin and became remembered by it instead.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

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I dread summer. I don’t say this lightly. Summer is when the schools hand you back your children and the parenting burpees begin. For some of us, it is not a holiday.

I wasn’t thinking about any of this when I drove into the Amsterdamse Bos and parked the car. I had mapped this forest the way other men memorize Premier League football fixtures. It was the most visited location on my excursions with Maria, because the forest has no doorways. She could roam free here. In the summer they opened the public splash pools and in the blaze of a hot day, playing under a water fountain was every child’s delight.

The parking lot was full of vehicles. The bike parking spot had so many bicycles it looked like a grand scrapyard. How did people find their bicycles at the end of the day? The normally quiet forest was buzzing like a concert. I looked at my daughter in the back seat. She had already unbuckled herself.

This wasn’t the plan. The original plan was to ease the cabin fever with a circuitous drive through the forest, because drives were calming. We were going nowhere in particular. But I keep a bag packed in the boot every time we step out of the house: a change of clothes, swimming costume, lotion, bandages, plasters, paracetamol, a towel, wipes, a packed snack, fruit, cookies and juice all folded into a single backpack she has to carry herself. They say the weight gives a child a sense of safety. I have watched her scoot around without it just fine. What the weight actually does is slow her down. A backpack has a grip. A sprinting child does not.

In summer, everyone thinks alike, so all the public parks in Amsterdam are crowded. Nobody passes up a day of sun here. We ended up here because Maria recognised the route and started demanding Swimming! Splash! I’d brought her once before, three summers ago, when I was still naive and unprepared. There was a barbecue, Africans in the park, the annual ritual, families gathered with food, parents seated with a beer in one hand and a plate in the other, watching their kids clown around. I was on my feet for three hours straight. Somewhere in that first hour I understood that none of the other parents there had any idea what my afternoon actually was.

“Just let her play,” someone offered. There’s no answer to that sentence. My daughter doesn’t carry the borders other children carry inside them. Every ice cream cone in that park, as far as she was concerned, was hers. She was also a runner and the forest is full of inviting and unguarded waterways. In crowds this large, her sensory stimulation was heightened and a meltdown could be triggered at any moment.

I have learned since that there is a specific kind of loneliness in that sentence, just let her play. It assumes the only thing keeping me on my feet is anxiety. I looked like an inexperienced helicopter parent, with an only child seeing danger everywhere. Nobody in that park was withholding kindness. They simply had no reason to imagine that this normal looking child had a completely differently wired brain. There were no borders in her world. An ordinary situation could change in a heartbeat and it didn’t help that her speech wasn’t formed, so it would take a really discerning adult to realise that her sometimes erratic behaviour had nothing to do with being a brat or negligent parenting.

Maria had climbed through to the passenger seat. I decided we’d change here because I wasn’t chasing her into the kids’ pool fully clothed. I pulled the backpack from the boot, wrapped her in a towel, and we changed behind the open car door in the parking lot. I took her hand in a grip she was already testing. It was a short walk from the parking lot and the pool came into view. Packed. An oasis, minus the coconuts. I scanned for the toilets on the way in. There were two, gender-separated, nowhere near enough for a crowd this size. The bushes would have to do, if it came to that.

Maria was delighted, pulling against my grip. I let her go and watched her run straight for the fountain spray. For half a second I thought I should film it, then remembered you don’t do that here, not with other people’s children in frame. By the time I looked back, she’d already positioned her mouth at the exact angle to drink straight from the spray without straining her neck. How did she figure that out? I got to the edge just as she’d moved on, skipping through the water, delighted with something new.

I watched her, caught my own face doing something I didn’t like, and made myself stop. Regulate first, breathe in, stay in the moment. I still had the backpack on one shoulder. I took off my shoes and placed the bag down.

I had found a spot near the edge of the shallow pool between a three-generation Indian family with a canopy, folding chairs, a full badminton set, and a young couple roasting patties on a small camping stove, the buns already sliced open in anticipation. Both families had children too. Neither of them was watching the water the way I was.

I tried not to forget how far we had come. We were out in a crowded public place, and she was playing without me hovering a foot behind her like a body guard. There she was now, flat on her chest, repeatedly dipping her head in the shallow water and then lifting her head up and spouting water. I noticed a few children standing still watching her and in their faces I read confusion. Then off she went, and picked up a water gun that was floating about and started to examine it. A child appeared, obviously the owner but Maria was too absorbed in figuring out how it functioned. A parent appeared next to the child, I picked up the tension in her body and I waded into the pool and asked the lady if the gun belonged to the boy and she nodded, no words uttered, her lips pressed tightly. I apologised and asked Maria to give it back. She looked at me and dropped it back in the water where she had found it and scooted off. I picked it up and handed it to the woman who immediately moved away with her child like people evacuating a danger zone.

In the early days, these kinds of encounters were a source of embarrassment. I read all sorts of nuances in them. Racism, prejudice, judgement. Nowadays, it doesn’t bother me much. I don’t expect people to understand or see my situation clearly. They say, those who know cannot tell. I had stopped obsessing about her behaviour in public, wishing she could just do normal, because I realised that her normal wasn’t typical.

When we first received the diagnosis of neurodivergence, we did what all concerned parents default to, paying heed to every stitch of advice from the experts, who were sometimes young women out of college, checking a list and sharing the standard guidelines of how to parent a neurodivergent child. The child was seen through the lens of her symptoms and her challenges, and the educational system marked her special. Her pathway was predetermined.

We got drawn into a relentless schedule of therapy interventions: speech, occupational, behavioural, and waiting lists, hoping for the miracle of conversion.

I remember calling my mother then, the way you call home when you feel lost, expecting either shared panic or comfort, and getting neither. My mother heard the word neurodivergent the way you hear a word in a foreign language and waited for me to translate it into something she recognised and then said, “Nothing unusual, children are different” and then began a roll call members of the wider family who had been born different but turned quite okay in the end.

I tried to stress the frustration of parenting, without the support of the village taking shifts without being asked. The aunt who shared her name, who would have pitched a tent in our house because she had read exhaustion before we could admit it. A grandmother who would have composed a special praise song for the child and sang it every time she met her. Here, the village was a rotating cast of professionals who swore by questionnaires and billed by the hour.

Through the early years of schooling, during the parent-teacher meeting, I would typically listen as a teacher explained her developmental delays in comparison to her peers, listening to the long list of things required of her in a school environment that she couldn’t do and every time at the end of their submission, I would ask, “In your observation, is there anything you noticed that she was good at?” and all, without exception would reply with something vague and it was as plain as day that they never considered that question.

We watched the developmental markers go past, as her peers celebrated milestones, we were reduced to the language of delays and regression. We got used to the fact that our child would not be getting regular birthday invitations. Morning moods fluctuated like the Dutch weather and restful nights sleep were never guaranteed. Then somewhere amidst my obsessive research for solutions, I stumbled onto a small book by radical educator Caleb Gattegno and the title was Know Your Children As They Are.

It was a lightbulb moment.

A new journey began. We returned to the base of the mountain and started learning our child’s internal world, mapping her sensory triggers, her regulatory needs, her joy, her frustrations in granular detail.

I stopped focusing on the public judgement when a meltdown caught us in the supermarket, or when friends wondered why I had to leave the party early and alluded to my rigidity. I paid attention to my language, refusing to start every encounter with a disclaimer about my child’s anticipated behaviour, especially in spaces where the understanding was absent. In time, I started to avoid any place that was restrictive and that even included houses of people I counted as friends.

This is the nature of parenting in hard mode, where every outing requires a tactical plan and learning how to walk the thin line between a meltdown and pure naughtiness. Strangers could never understand the ingenuity of my adaptations, the high cost of experience or the moment-to-moment de-escalations I have to perform. All they see is a label - Autism, ADHD - and not the child thriving in spite of it.

It is difficult to explain that you can be joyous and frustrated at the same time. Who do you tell about the daily exhaustion and expense of parental labour without sounding like you are complaining about your child and inviting unsolicited advice from people who suggest that the fault lies in your family history? You worry about a future when you are gone and the hardships your child will face, the social rejection, bullying, misunderstanding, and the exhausting battle it will take for her to find a place in a world not built for her brain.

You come to a point when you accept that it is a commitment of a lifetime consumed by care and advocacy because the diagnosis is never going away. It is not one to be resolved and there is no miraculous healing on the horizon waiting as a reward to your devotion. This becomes the essence of acceptance, a cumulative experience of love that goes unrecognized.

So you carry the knowledge alone and that solitude is genuinely a loss of being witnessed as a parent. Yet that isn’t the tragedy. The true tragedy is the inability of the parent to recognise that their unconditional love is the biggest gift they could give to their child.

There’s a grief in there that I’ve never put a name to. It isn’t for anyone who died. It’s for the child I spent years quietly steering towards normal, correcting her rhythm to match a rhythm she was never going to have, before I understood that there was nothing wrong with the child but everything wrong with how I had chosen to see her, through the frame of public opinion and a diagnosis.

A child shrieking pulled my attention to the pool. It wasn’t my baby. Maria had dropped onto her haunches at the fountain’s base and started slapping the water, humming to a pattern only she could hear the music in. An older version of me would have called her back up and cautioned her to be careful. I watched instead, smiling. She had been in the water for over half an hour and there had been no incident.

The badminton game went on behind us. Somebody’s patties were catching, sweetly, on the little stove. The sun did what it does here in July, auditioning for a better climate. Maria did not look like she was ready to leave the water.

I could relax, so I lowered myself down on the grass, my eyes never leaving sight of her.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

For the last three years I have sat with other people’s grief the way a doctor sits with other people’s bodies. I have written about all kinds of loss in my weekly substack column. I did not set out to become a chronicler of grief. I only wanted to survive my own grief by becoming an honest witness to my sorrow and turned to writing as a reflection tool to find meaning in loss. What I found, instead, was an education in what witnessing does for the people doing the surviving. I share here what I have actually seen and I hope it reaches someone who is going through a dark episode in their life, drowning while surrounded by a crowd who do not know how to bear witness.

1. Every house has tasted loss. There is an old story about a woman named Kisa Gotami who carries her dead child to the Buddha, begging him to bring the boy back. He tells her he will help, on one condition: bring him a mustard seed from any household that has never known death. She goes door to door, hopeful at first, and every single house has buried someone. She comes back empty-handed, and that emptiness is the whole teaching. My version of this story came after the loss of my father as a young teen. It was when my eyes truly opened to the universality of loss. I thought mine was the most painful and unjust until I looked around the room and realised it was just my number that came up.

2. It’s not about healing. When my sister died, I did not set out to build a project. I was fortunate to realise that suppression wasn’t working this time and I had to admit that I was suffocating in the aftermath. I thought the writing would close the wound. It didn’t. What it did instead was to take the rawest material of my life and, piece by piece, turning it into something someone else could actually hold in their hands and use. That’s the essence of the alchemy of grief project, moving from sorrow to strength and understanding that the goal is not the erasure of grief but the transformation of raw loss into something that can be held.

3. You mourn what mirrors you. My uncle Apollo died at twenty-five, a gymnast, who collapsed and died while exercising in a gym, and I was too young to remember meeting him. But I grew up with one black-and-white photo of him in tapered trousers and a huge Afro, pensive, not smiling, and I have carried that face for forty years like a private wound. Meanwhile a dormitory fire once killed sixteen schoolgirls in Kenya in a single night, and I felt the rage for about a week and then it passed through me like the weather. I am not proud of that asymmetry. But pretending grief is fair, that it distributes itself evenly according to the size of the tragedy, is a lie that will make you feel guilty for being human. Grief is not democratic.

4. Most people don’t know they’re swimming in grief until you name the water for them. There’s an old story, the one often credited to David Foster Wallace: two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes by and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim for a while, and then one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?” That is most of us, most of the time. We are so submerged in our own unnamed grief that we stop experiencing it as a distinct thing at all, we just think it’s the general temperature of being alive. Most of the reader feedback I have received is from someone telling me that my piece finally named a version of grief they had been swimming in for years without a word for it. Sometimes it is the stranger who gets to see and name the waters you are submerged in.

5. When someone is grieving in front of you, sit still in the discomfort. A man once showed me an ultrasound photo on his mantelpiece and told me it was his son, Myles, who would have turned six that year. I did not say sorry twice. I did not offer God’s plan or suggest that it was God’s will. I just stayed still, and eventually he said, “You’re the first person who didn’t feel a need to say anything.” He was an unseen father who survived three miscarriages and he felt seen for the first time in a long while. The silence was held open long enough for him to feel safe to open up.

6. Notice the people who are sheltering you before they are gone. A parent, an elder, a mentor, a friend, the person you go to when a problem needs holding. We often don’t register what they’ve been doing for us until the shelter is gone and the sky feels suddenly, unfamiliarly open. Ask them your hard questions now and do not wait until they are gone to give them their flowers. Say thank you, now.

7. Some losses will never resolve. My cousin Nick disappeared on the road to Tanzania decades ago and was never found. I remember asking his siblings, “Any news?” for a while, then stopping, because there was nothing kind left to ask. A Tunisian fisherman named Chamseddine Marzoug spent ten years pulling the bodies of drowned unidentified migrants from the sea near his village and giving unnamed strangers a grave when no one came looking. He was not trying to fix anything but instead honoring what could not be fixed because someone had to stop pretending the disappeared did not exist. True compassion begins exactly where the demand for closure ends.

8. Children can handle the truth better than our euphemisms. A five-year-old named Tanya kept asking her uncles where her grandmother had gone. “She’s resting.” “She’s gone to heaven.” Nothing landed, because none of it was true in the way a five-year-old needs to be true. Finally one uncle just said: “Tanya, your Dani died.” She went quiet, looked at the trees, and said, “I feel sad now,” and let herself be picked up. The truth, however hard, is something a child, or any of us, can actually stand on. The euphemism just leaves you circling.

9. To really witness someone’s tears is to do something, not nothing. A father named Meshack Ojwang stood in front of cameras after his only son was tortured and died in a police cell and simply wept, unfiltered, in public. Watching him, I understood something I’d half-learned from years of village funerals: hearing the story of how someone died, standing still for it, refusing to look away, is not passive spectating. To really see another person’s grief, not flinch from it, not rush them past it, is itself an act of care. It tells them the loss was real and it mattered. It is the one thing that stops a brutal death from being quietly filed away as normal.

10. When a death is unjust, let the grief be ugly. Do not perform composure you don’t feel. Four African women at a Gaza memorial in Amsterdam saw each other and simply broke down, wailing, “crying ugly”. I recognized that immediately, because I once stood in a hospital yard at seventeen, after staying up all night with a schoolmate who I believed was recovering, and when a nurse finally told me he had died of meningitis, I picked up wooden benches and threw them, desperate to break something because nothing made sense. They told me to calm down. I wasn’t being irrational. I was having the only rational response available to an irrational death.

11. Money sent from a distance is not nothing. But do not let a number replace a person. Every diaspora Kenyan I know has been added to a WhatsApp funeral fundraiser group without being asked, sometimes three at once. The group’s real currency turns out to be the amount typed next to your name. Someone wiring ten thousand shillings from Vienna gets publicly thanked and quietly ranked above the neighbor who sat with the widow every single evening until burial. I understand the guilt behind that transfer. Distance makes you want to compensate for the body, the tears, the presence you cannot give. But ten days after the funeral, the tents come down, the group goes quiet and gets archived, and the widow is often left alone in an empty compound with nobody checking on her, because the money only paid for an event. It is only after the event that the true weight of the loss descends and by that time, everyone has moved on, caught up in the busyness of life.

12. Suffering that has found a meaning is lighter to carry than suffering that hasn’t. While I was arranging a sudden family funeral in Uganda, an old friend named Felix Masi, who I hadn’t seen in over a decade, appeared and handed me a small, nondescript paperback: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl wrote it after surviving a concentration camp: suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning, even the meaning of sacrifice. You do not need the loss to make sense on its own terms. You need to find something it can stand for.

13. The relationship with the dead does not end. It just changes shape. My grandmother Wahonya used to call teenage me “my husband,” reminding me that the spirit I carried linked me to something older than my own single life. My own brother, who died in infancy long before I was born, has no headstone; his grave is only known because a giant Mama Mutere tree grew from that spot. John Mbiti gifted us the term “the living dead”: people who are gone in body but still fully present in memory, in names, in the trees that grow where they’re buried. We keep those who have gone before us alive by talking about them and holding them in memory.

14. Presence outperforms wisdom, every single time. When my sister died and I had to arrange a cremation, none of our usual pastors knew how to bless, one clergyman, Francis Omondi, made the calls, found no one else willing, and then simply came, at his own cost, by road and by air, all the way to Uganda. I don’t remember a word he preached. I remember that he came. If you don’t know what to say to someone in grief, come anyway. That is the whole lesson.

15. Cutting yourself off from grief cuts you off from your own people. A man I know built a New Year’s resolution around blocking every trace of mourning from his timeline, tired of funeral fundraiser requests and condolence posts. Within a week his feed was all influencers and positive vibes, and his actual friends had vanished from view, not because they’d left, but because every one of them was grieving something and his filter had quarantined all of it. Three hundred messages piled up in five days. You cannot filter out other people’s grief without filtering out the people.

16. Losing a career or a role you built your identity around is real grief. A man named Elijah sat awake at 2 a.m. trying to write a resignation letter after eleven years at a company that had just made his role redundant, cycling through rage, shame, disbelief, asking ChatGPT how to say a professional version of the words he actually wanted to use. His executive coach had asked him one honest question, what part he’d played in ending up there, and he couldn’t sit with it. That grief of career loss is as real as any funeral I’ve stood at. We just don’t give it a ritual, so people are left composing their pain into a polite paragraph at midnight, alone.

17. Grief that is refused a name does not vanish. It goes underground and comes back as something else. When a young TikToker named Brian Chira died in a hit-and-run in Nairobi, five thousand young people descended on his grandmother’s village for the burial. They arrived with alcohol and watered the flowers with it. They took selfies at the graveside. To the older generation watching, it read as disrespect. But it was the only funeral grammar this generation had ever been handed. Grief that a society refuses to recognize as legitimate doesn’t disappear, it goes underground and resurfaces later as spectacle, as numbness, or as rage with no clear target. Naming your own grief honestly, even without anyone’s official permission, is cheaper in the long run than paying for it later in a shape you no longer recognize.

18. You do not always get to choose your witnesses. Let the ones who show up in. A man turned forty alone in a small Dutch village and posted a lonely, half-joking birthday invitation on Facebook. Three strangers actually came: a South African, a Ugandan, a Kenyan neighbor he’d never met. Somewhere along a river walk, one of them asked how he was really doing, and he cried in front of all three, admitting it was his first birthday without his mother. They let him cry, then each poured a little of their own drink onto the ground in her memory. He had not chosen a single one of them. That was exactly why it worked.

19. Some people cannot say the true thing directly. Do not mistake that for not feeling it. On a train platform, a new father named Beno kept pressing an older father, Samora, for fatherhood advice, for the truth about how it changes you. Samora’s arms stayed folded, his answers stayed vague, “there is really no script,” “just don’t forget yourself, man,” until it slipped out that things were “not sunny at the ranch” at home. He never said the actual sentence. The silence and the deflection were the whole answer, if you knew how to listen for it.

20. A loved one’s wishes about their own death can be an act of mercy. My sister asked to be cremated, quickly, without fuss, and for years I carried that request as if it were transgressive. Then I watched a footballer named Allan Thigo make the identical request, and I finally understood what both of them were actually doing. They had watched what a long illness does to the people who love them, and their last coherent act was trying to spare us the extended weight of it. Sometimes the most loving thing a dying person can do is make it easier for everyone left standing.

I did not arrive at any of this by having answers first. I arrived at it by staying in rooms other people wanted to leave. The only qualification I have ever had for writing about grief, is that I stayed in the room long enough to actually see it. Grief is communal and requires a witness and most times, that is all people ask for, to be seen.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow here, at Nuria Store, at Text Book Centre branches in Nairobi, and across major bookshops in Kenya.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

You would think, I know a lot about heat. I am a grown man, born and raised under the equator. I have been sun soaked and baked for decades. My skin tone is glistening melanin. I was born in Kisumu, during one of the hottest months where intense daytime temperatures beat down, and make the air thick with dust. This was my introduction to the world.

I have holidayed in Lodwar where it is blinding to look at the sky. The heat interrogates your marrow, cooking your thoughts until you start to ponder over existential questions. I have lived in Lamu, where I abandoned underwear and resigned to the aerated simplicity of a shuka and a vest. All through this, never thought to apply sun screen because common sense dictates that you stay under a green canopy until the heat passes. Heat was just something to be managed and it had its rhythms.

You would think, it holds that I have real lived experience of heat. After all, I am a genuine survivor of a near-death, heat-related event. The memory is still fresh though it happened decades ago. I had registered to run the full Lewa Safari marathon because, what is a marathon other than a very, very long jog. I had done all the pragmatic things. Jogged 5kms daily for about two weeks, abstained from sex, then the night before did carbo loading, just to make sure I had extra juice for the trail. On top of all this, I had acquired a military-issue tactical Camelbak hydration backpack with a delivery tube and bite valve, a flexible plastic hose that runs over the runner’s shoulder and clips to the front of the vest for effortless hydration on the go.

You would think that sounds well prepared. I thought it odd that the race organisers wanted us at the starting line by 6.45am and when they mentioned it was because of the heat, I didn’t panic. The first 5k was great by any measure, steady cadence, upright posture. I was way ahead of the herd and had the elites in my line of sight for at least a kilometre. Then the engine started overheating. The hydration therapy did not produce the anticipated results. The camelbak soon felt like an actual camel on my back. Somewhere around the 7k mark, the gasket blew and I was reportedly spotted on the side of the trail chugging the water. The rational thought process had slipped away at this point and I only had one thought in my mind, I have to survive. So I carried on as the entire herd ran past me, even the walkers came and went, each with a similar look of concern and the recurring query,

“Are you okay mate!”

It was the ego that stopped me from laying on the ground and waiting for the rescue chopper, because after all the old ladies trotted past, I knew I wouldn’t survive the roasting that awaited me at the end of this race if I quit. I imagined in my head that I was maintaining an easy jog pace but witnesses described a big man slugging through the dust, perpendicular to the ground. I should point out the Lewa marathon circuit is a double loop of 21kms. Since God is good, all the time, I made it to the end of the first 21k and got into a fight when the race marshals insisted that was not the end of the 42k. It was the proverbial last kick of a dying horse that fortunately, missed its target, resulting in a rather undignified collapse. But I had made my case. I was not going back to hell.

You would think that must have been a turning point. Indeed, to some degree it was, I moved on to a relatively modest stint as a one-acre farmer in the blazing hot Siaya sun. I had learned to respect the sun and followed the lead of the veterans. That meant getting to the farm before sunrise, so that it would find you after the momentum was gained and out at its peak at 1pm. That was the rhythm. With those incredible weather credentials, I ventured North, with only one fear on my mind: winter.

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My introduction to European weather as a child came through Santa Claus, who operated amidst the cold and darkness. I would learn that comfort indoors in winter was a privilege. Heating is costly and the natives here have learned to tolerate the cold. My first summers in Europe were cold and wet, I thought no wonder the Dutchies all abandon their country in the warmest months of the year. I remember it rained straight for two weeks in July and by the time autumn arrived I was punctuating every conversation with a weather forecast. The chill seemed to follow me everywhere, from the outdoors and into my bed. One Kenyan veteran aptly described it as, whether you like it or not, weather.

But I survived northern European winters and resisted the urge to return to paradise. The cold in the Netherlands has thrown everything at me but I am no longer fazed. I was one of the calmer residents when a snow storm and high winds came in February and triggered a code yellow warning. There was countrywide travel chaos and Schiphol international airport cancelled over 60 percent of its scheduled flights. It was a third-world level, open-air market ruckus. The government, faced with a criticism of unpreparedness for this weather event, said it would pass. Not worth changing infrastructure for a few days of heavy snow. We are not Norway.

You would think, what else is there to worry about after this. Summer must be a breeze, given my tropical pedigree. Just last month, the Netherlands issued a code red warning. There was a heat wave melting everything on its path through Europe and it was now the Netherlands’ time to fry.

The phone buzzed in the early morning with an emergency alert. Code red. I had never received a warning this formal about warm weather and by my estimate, it was just going to be the equivalent of a stifling hot day in Kisumu, in January. I checked the app with the trepidation of a man checking his bank balance the morning after a wild night. Thirty six degrees Celsius, the little sun icon was stretched across the day and it said it would feel like thirty eight.

By midday, I had checked it over ten times. I know this because my wife pointed it out as she asked me what my coping strategy was. Back home a grown man does not consult an app if he should go outside. He reads the sky and makes a decision. Here, I was refreshing my weather app like a party agent waiting for the final vote tally. Public transport was disrupted and I heard rumours of infrastructure malfunctioning.

At 2pm it hit thirty five, one degree short of the app’s own prophesy and when I went on social media, my feed was jammed with apocalyptic messages; stay indoors, avoid strenuous activity, hydrate and all sorts of cooling hacks from novices showing signs of early stage heat hallucination. Those bastards got to me. I sat down in panic.

I had watched the street do it for two days before I attempted it myself. Every house in the neighborhood had its curtains drawn by seven in the morning, and at first I couldn’t make sense of this native custom in a country known for its open windows and no curtain policy. I asked a local, an academic, about this strange custom thinking someone important had died and was this the Dutch version of flying the flag at half-mast. She explained. It is to keep the heat out. Whatever you do, do not let the sunlight in. The house will trap the heat. Open the windows at dusk when the outside temperatures are lower than the interior temperatures.

I felt like a fool. We had kept our windows open and kept wondering why the house was stuffed with thick, unmoving air, possessing rooms like an evil spirit. The house was warm enough to bake bread and I had recurring thoughts about buying a boat.

By the next morning I had become a full convert and militant in execution, like a bouncer deciding who gets past the rope. Curtains were drawn at seven, blinds down and the house kept in a state of daytime darkness more suited to a vampire, monitoring the app and waiting for the outside temperatures to drop low enough to allow cool air in. I caught myself, sometime in the afternoon, explaining this system to a Kenyan friend with the stuffy authority of a man who held a patent to this invention. My wife overheard me and asked why I hadn’t done this from day one and I told her some lessons are worth the sweat.

I had purchased two portable fans and they were frankly just a placebo gimmick for the kids. I made another call to the local, the academic, about the minimal use of air conditioning and ended up on the receiving end of a lecture on environmental responsibility and common sense. The summers are mild, it only lasts a few days, she said as I stared at the thirty six degree reading on my app.

After this call, I went to the local supermarket for ice, because my stock had run out. I was too late. What remained in the cold section was a single devastated shelf of ice cream. Outside the supermarket I found a queue of elderly people waiting patiently to buy ice cream cones. My eyes settled on this man, who had the rugged sturdiness of a World War Two veteran, slurping up his ice cream cone with glee on his face. I began to suspect that this love of ice cream was not really about the heat. It appeared to me as a license to indulge in a scoop of childhood joy, to return to a time when all you needed to endure the heat was a dip in the canal and an ice cream cone.

I needed to get back to the house before my own box melted but stopped to watch a group of giddy boys jumping into a canal that I have never seen anyone swim in, with no ceremony or negotiation with whatever lived down there. Where I come from you do not enter a water body on a whim. It is strongly advised to approach any water body with appropriate respect for whatever unnamed thing might be renting the bottom of it.

By the third night, I understood that the memory of heat I had been carrying was different. The European summer sun and the tropical sun are not the same creature. The heat here did not dial down after 4pm. The thermostat read thirty at midnight, the same number it had read at two in the afternoon, and my wife and I sat facing a single fan and not enjoying each other’s company as we hydrated with whatever cold sugary drink could deliver the placebo effect we needed to get through the night. Summer nights can be as brutal as the days and come with restlessness that makes a mosquito menace pale in comparison. At least with mosquitos you can duck under a net.

At the internationals barbeque in the park that weekend, trading survival stories, the whinging was dialed up. A Zimbabwean mate described his flat as a kiln, another raised theirs to a sauna and someone bragged about sleeping in a tent in their backyard. I offered my own thermostat reading and was met with nods of approval. Weather whinging was not really about the weather. It was a cultural integration test, and I had proven fluency.

I felt a strange sense of camaraderie on my way home. We had survived something together, even something as small as a ridiculously warm week. The neighbourhood streets were empty in the way they get after 10pm here. The sun was still up, this time pleasant but nobody was outside to enjoy it. What nobody at that barbeque mentioned was that this was, in fact, going to be the norm.

Something had shifted and it wasn’t for the better. For most of the year, this sun behaved like a torch held at arm’s length, all light but no heat, and then for two or three weeks, it drops the act and comes at you like it has a grudge to settle. Back home we had a name and shape for this kind of behaviour, El Nino, a weather event that misbehaves and is expected to. Here it came with the benign term, heatwave, while a more appropriate term would be Sahara is coming!

The thought lingered in my mind. A heatwave that recurs is not just freak weather anymore, it is a forecast of the world my daughter will grow up in. My daughter asked me, on the worst of the three nights, why I kept telling her to sit still and not kid around and I opened my mouth to repeat my imported tropical wisdom, and stopped before I uttered a word. She was looking at me the way she does when she suspects the answer was going to be vague but she waited anyway.

I had a whole inheritance of heat wisdom and none of it had a translation for children who are not bilingual in climate. How could I teach her about heat fluency and to move through the heat without carrying its assault on her skin when she had seen me succumb to panic and take refuge in ice cream? I ended up telling her to obey her parents, as the bible instructs, and to sit still in front of the fan, then bought her compliance with another rainbow ice lolly.

I now keep the freezer stocked, the way you’d keep a fire extinguisher, for an emergency. My daughter thinks this is just what her father does in summer, dispensing ice cream like a drug dealer. I haven’t confessed to her that I am waving a white flag. Some inheritances skip a generation. This heat, I suspect, is just getting started, and I’m still learning the language I’m meant to be teaching her.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE and across major bookshops in Nairobi.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

“Hi, my name is Chira, Brian Chira, and I saw the whole accident.”

That was 2022. A roadside accident in Kenya. A crowd of witnesses has gathered in front of a female reporter’s microphone, and as she adjusts her earphones to start the live broadcast, a young man in a frumpy, white T-shirt steps forward, naming himself before anyone asks, articulate and composed at a scene of death. Nobody in that crowd knew his name yet. Two years later, the whole country would.

Here was a young man sharing an account of a grisly road accident, articulate in his recounting and confident in his manner. His name would find me again in March 2024, following his own tragic death after a hit-and-run incident at 3 a.m. on March 16. A news report said Chira had been ejected from a club in Gacharage, took a boda boda, and when the rider took the wrong side of the road, Chira alighted. He ran towards the main road and was struck by a white Canter vehicle that did not stop. The autopsy revealed that he died of multiple organ injuries and blunt force trauma.

He was only 23 years old at the time of his death.

It was the outpouring that stopped me, the sheer viral volume of it, and got me reflecting on who he was and why the circumstances of his life connected with so many of his peers who came to celebrate him at his funeral.

The build-up to his funeral lit up social media before a single wreath had been ordered. The Chira Clan crowdfunded the burial and raised over eight million Kenyan shillings in days. On the 26th of March 2024, over five thousand young people descended on Gathanje village in Githunguri in rural Kiambu and overran it.

The village was overwhelmed. Some mourners arrived with alcohol and watered the bouquets with it. They took selfies at the graveside. It mimicked a mass content creators’ gathering. They performed because performance was the only grief language available to them. To locals and observers, it read as disrespect, but to the Chira Clan, it was the only funeral they knew how to hold. This was a generation attempting to mourn without having inherited the tools for mourning.

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Grief expert Kenneth Doka calls it disenfranchised grief. This is grief that society fails to recognize as legitimate, that receives no ritual, no validation, no communal architecture for release. When the recognition is withheld long enough, grief does not disappear. It goes underground and resurfaces as performance, as spectacle, as young people watering flowers with alcohol because nobody taught them the older grammar of sorrow.

Brian Chira’s grandmother, Esther Njeri, had one request. She buried Brian in a graduation gown that in life, he never got to wear because he dropped out of university for lack of fees. She dressed him in the future that was taken from him. The mainstream press arrived and reported on the alcohol, the selfies, the sexuality of the deceased, and the chaos. The press corps covered the spectacle and forgot about the grief that compelled five thousand people to come to a village in Kiambu to bury someone most of their parents had never heard of.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Brian Chira’s back story, before TikTok made him famous, is one of layered loss. His fame came from his charisma, relatability and honesty. He personified the frustrations and setbacks of his generation, and he had the ability to share his pain with unflinching honesty. Chira was orphaned at eight, both his parents taken by HIV/AIDS, a disease that moved through two decades of Kenyan life and left a generation of orphans around the country in the care of grandmothers. He came under the care of his grandmother, living in Githunguri, Kiambu. Chira would later contract HIV himself, after being sexually assaulted by a friend at a party in Mombasa. He had blacked out. The friend who betrayed his trust later took his own life. Chira wasn’t afraid to speak of any of this. He turned his pain into content.

This is the singular trait of Chira’s generation. They do not suffer in silence. They name what is hurting them. They take the trouble to identify what is not normal.

In Chira’s story, we find a symbol of a bereaved generation that arrived on the scene already carrying unprocessed loss, passed along like a tin can kicked down the road, from one generation to the next, until it joins a pile of uncollected garbage by the roadside that keeps growing until those who live around it stop smelling its stench or noticing its abnormality.

Brian Chira and his generation are the kids who shout that the king is naked. The public reaction is to call them disrespectful for drawing attention to something everyone else has trained themselves to not see. His story is where the inherited traumas of a generation become visible.

The original sin of this country was the war of independence that arrived as a negotiated settlement, the betrayal leaving the freedom fighters, the Mau Mau, the youth of that generation, unburied and erased. There is no clearer example than Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi, who was executed by the British on the 18th of February 1957 and buried in an unmarked grave within the grounds of Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. His widow Mukami spent the next 66 years asking one question: Where is my husband’s body? She survived Kenyatta, Moi, Kibaki, Uhuru, and Ruto. In 1990, Nelson Mandela, five months out of prison, came to Kenya and asked to see Kimathi’s grave and to meet his widow. He left having done neither. Neither the grave nor the widow could be produced. Mandela finally met Mukami in 2005, only after Mau Mau had been quietly decriminalized. Mukami died in May 2023, aged 96, still not knowing where her husband lay. Though his statue now stands on a street named after him in the centre of Nairobi, his grave remains unknown.

Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe teaches us that sovereignty is not only the power to govern the living. It is also the power to decide whose death matters, whose body deserves a location, and whose grief is permitted. The Kenyan state answered that question in 1957 and has been defending that answer ever since. The dispossessed remained landless. The land clashes that followed across generations were the unresolved argument returning in violence. And the template was set. Name the crime. Honour the martyr. Bury justice in an unmarked grave.

JM Kariuki was murdered in 1975 for imagining a different Kenya that was not defined as a country of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. A parliamentary committee named the killers, and yet nothing happened. That sequence, the naming of the crime, and the inaction that follows became the template for Kenya going forward. The public came to terms with a state that is under no obligation to keep its promises because there was really no consequence for breaking them. Unlike Dedan Kimathi or Tom Mboya, whose statue stands on Moi Avenue in Nairobi, twenty metres from where he was assassinated in 1969, JM Kariuki has neither a street named after him nor a monument. JM’s demand for economic redistribution remains a live indictment of every government since.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s did not just take lives. It decimated a generation and with it the ritual holders. The elders, the mid-generation, the very people who knew how to conduct a burial, how to hold a family through loss, and how to give grief a communal shape. The cultural tools for processing grief were overwhelmed at the precise moment that loss became overwhelming. The Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1990s removed the guard rails simultaneously. Public health facilities became dysfunctional. Cost-sharing rendered dedicated healthcare a matter of privilege. Burial became logistical rather than ceremonial. It was like a time of war, but characteristically slow and unacknowledged. A violence that had no single author and therefore no one to hold accountable. Families mourned their dead in helpless silence. Like COVID, which arrived decades later to repeat the lesson, societies discovered they had never built the infrastructure for collective grief. What remained in place was only for collective forgetting.

Swiss-American psychologist Pauline Boss developed the concept of ambiguous loss to describe what happens when grief has no resolution. What happens when there is no body to bury, no verdict to receive, no moment at which mourning is permitted to close. Boss developed the framework for families: the soldier missing in action, the parent lost to dementia, the child taken, leaving no trace.

But what happens when the family is an entire nation? What happens when the unresolved losses are not one family’s private wound but a country’s accumulated, unacknowledged, and unaccepted grief, passed down through silence, and through the bodies of children who grew up in houses where certain names were never spoken, and certain dates arrived each year without ceremony?

Kenya is that nation.

The land clashes of 1992 were state-sponsored ethnic violence that swept through the Rift Valley and the Coast, leaving between 1,500 and 3,000 dead according to some accounts, and hundreds of thousands displaced, many of whom remain displaced to this day. Kenyan author Kinyanjui Kombani documented what the statistics could not hold in his novel The Last Villains of Molo. Kombani writes about five young men brought together by the Molo clashes of 1992, forging a friendship that crossed the ethnic lines along which people around them were killing each other. The children of the violence built solidarity from its rubble. Nothing happened to the perpetrators.

The cycle repeated in 1997. The state revived the same script, enacted it with the same impunity, and confirmed what 1992 had already suggested, that there would be no consequences. Something changed in the fabric of Kenya, at least for my generation that came of age during this time. The fiction of a nation dropped, and the realization settled that political stakes could turn your neighbour into a raging arsonist and that there was no place to run to for justice. Ignorance was no longer a defence. This is where the silence was born of people who knew exactly what had happened and had learned that knowing changed nothing.

Even after President Moi vacated power in 2002, the respite was brief. The ghosts had not been exorcised. When the 2007 post-election violence erupted, it was those unhealed wounds that were torn open again. Over 1,300 dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, and then followed the familiar sequence: the quest for justice that led to the ICC proceedings in The Hague, with the promise that this time would be different. The men whose hands carried blood would marshal support on a sovereignty platform and capture political office, and the cases collapsed soon after as the silences returned.

The grief of 2007 joined the long list of unresolved losses converted into political currency. Accept and move on became the national slogan. We were witnessing disenfranchised grief at a national scale because what happens to a person when you realize that the boot on your neck belongs to the hand that feeds you? When the people mourning loudest at the funeral are the sponsors of the crimes, silence becomes the only available adjustment to absurdity.

Over these decades, the crucial ritual architecture of mourning was dismantled, layer by layer, crisis after crisis. By the time Brian Chira was buried in March 2024, there was nothing left to hold the weight of what five thousand young people brought to that graveside in Githunguri.

Three months later, in June, the streets of Nairobi erupted.

Before they masked up and took to the streets, many wrote their own obituaries and posted them to their social media timelines, instructing followers to notify their families and organize their burials if the police killed them. A generation that had studied Kenya’s pattern long enough to know that they might become its next unseen entry chose to go anyway.

Over sixty young people were killed in the state’s suppression of the Finance Bill protests. The sequence held. Mass loss of lives. Named perpetrators. No accountability. And then, as before, the grief was converted into political currency. The 2007 post-election violence produced a government of national unity. The 2024 protests produced a broad-based government. Different eras, but the same transaction, the dead paying the political bill, the living expected to accept the change and move on. After every election cycle, grief is left unattended or left raw by design because of the political potential it holds to prevent reckoning and to be banked whenever convenience demands.

But the transaction failed this time. The conversion mechanism had broken down. The political class that normally captures grief and weaponizes it into ethnic arithmetic had already performed that trick in 2007-8, and this generation had watched the whole sequence in real time. The trick had been performed too recently and too visibly. A generation that grew up watching grief converted into power and position could not be made to hand their grief over for the same purpose again.

Therefore, what can a generation do with grief it cannot name? Brian Chira turned his story of grief and survival into content and his pain into entertainment. Social media became a stage available to a young man without ritual architecture, without elders to guide him through loss, or a political channel willing to take his grief seriously. It was the last public stage, where he could share his testimony to an audience that recognized what he was carrying because they were carrying the same thing.

This is what the generation that we labelled Gen Z is doing all along. The social feed has become a mourning ground because every other mourning ground was inaccessible, and the public spaces policed. A generation with nowhere to grieve did what humans have always done when the recognized channels close. They found another way.

Brian Chira’s burial and the June 2024 protests were not separate phenomena. They were the same grief on different stages, both leaderless, both excessive by the standards of those who had learned to grieve in silence. Both generated a collective outpouring that far exceeded the immediate occasion, because the immediate occasion was never really the point. The point was everything buried underneath it.

This is what public grief looks like when it stops waiting for legitimacy. What June 2024 revealed was not a protest that burnt bright and faded. It was a grief ritual. The streets became a mourning ground, and for a moment, the grief stopped waiting for permission.

Two years later, the question is not what the generation achieved. Grief rituals are not measured in political outcomes. What matters is what was finally named; the sixty years of accumulated loss, spoken aloud in public, without being immediately converted into someone else’s political currency. Whether that naming becomes closure is a question this anniversary cannot answer. The wound is older than the generation carrying it. And the older the wound, the longer the vigil.

What remains is Esther Njeri, Brian Chira’s grandmother, alone at the headstone, tending the grave. The Chira clan has moved back to the feed. The five thousand are elsewhere. But Njeri remains, doing what her generation knew how to do, and the New Native is still learning on their own terms, what she already knows.

This article was first published at The Elephant

https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2026/06/30/kenyas-bereaved-generation-and-the-birth-of-a-new-native/

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available on Amazon: Kindle | Paperback.

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Grief operates asymmetrically. A recent death reaches back and pulls up older ones, and what you find when it does is not always what you expected to feel. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the passing of an eminent Kenyan scientist Prof Shem Oyoo Wandiga, laid to rest on 12th of June.

The grief of that loss pulled up another- Prof Fredrick Moses Okatcha, who died on December 24th, 2021. Both were distinguished scholars who spent many evenings in conversation at United Kenya Club in Nairobi, where I made their acquaintance. Two elderly men of the same generation, men of intellectual depth and men at ease with an unhurried way of occupying a room. Both are now gone within five years of each other. I did not fully understand what they were to me until they were no longer here. Both became father figures, quietly, before I had the language for what they were doing. This matters more than it might otherwise appear for a young man who lost his own father as a teenager.

Prof Okatcha in particular took me in without ceremony. I earned a place in his weekly routines as a dedicated chauffeur. We logged many hours that way, with him in the passenger seat, me driving and allowing the conversation to go wherever it needed to go.

Prof Okatcha was born in 1938 in rural western Kenya. In 1959-60 he was one of the students selected to study through the American student airlift programme organised by Tom Mboya. While a student in the United States he had the honour of meeting Malcolm X, President Harry Truman, Senator Paul Tsongas at Yale, and George Romney, former Governor of Michigan State. Prof Okatcha attended the University of Central Missouri, Yale University, Michigan State University and returned to serve his country eventually rising to the ranks of Professor and Director of Educational Psychology, Kenyatta University, Nairobi. During his tenure as an academician at Kenyatta University, he was also the Dean of Faculty of Education, Director of Continuing Education and International Programs.

Okatcha was also a peer of Barack Obama Snr and when Barack Obama became the first Black president of the United States, I had the privilege of arranging for an interview about his memories of Barack Obama’s father for the Adam magazine where I served as editor.

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What always surprises me when I come across these kinds of reflections is how prophetic they appear and how truth remains unaffected by the passage of time. What follows are his words, captured in 2014 for Wisdom of The Elders, a coffee table archive of personal reflections from over seventy kenyans who have lived through changing times, conceived by Susan Wakhungu-Githuku of Footprints Press and photographed by Bobby Pall. I came across my copy during a recent house clean and sat with it longer than I intended. What stopped me was how little his words had aged. A man speaking in 2014 about tribalism, compromised democracy, and a generation shaped by poverty reads in 2026 like someone who already saw what was coming and said so plainly. This is what genuine wisdom does. It stays unaffected by age.

While not all elders are created equal, there is no shortage of wisdom for the keen student of life. This is an appeal to my generation and to others to find the value of capturing the wisdom of their elderly seniors while they are still alive, for the insight of their lived experience is invaluable.

I urge you to read him slowly.

How would you describe yourself?

A well-educated, hard-working, successful academician who is internationally recognised.

How would you describe your childhood?

I was raised in oblivion, full of malnutrition and diseases.

How did your parents earn a living?

My parents were poor peasants with no formal education. They earned nothing.

What were some of the important events that were happening during your childhood?

Missionaries were providing education and spreading Christianity. We also heard about Mau Mau, Dini ya Msambwa (a political religious movement), World War II, and circumcision ceremonies.

How do you feel about these events?

Education and Christianity were stimuli for modernisation, but I do not know the contribution the other events made toward the modernisation of Kenya. They were turbulent times characterised by unrest from the citizenry. The yoke of colonisation had taken its toll and people were agitated.

What do you think about life today?

Life today is hectic and full of pressure and tensions, and devoid of kinship ties — a price for modernisation. Gone are the days when a young boy could chase and catch wild rabbits which were found all over in rural areas or ‘reserves’ as they were called.

What is the biggest change you have seen the country and people of Kenya undergo?

We have sadly shifted from being nationalistic during the colonial days to being pathologically tribalistic in the post-colonial period. Kenyans are more materialistic than before and the pressures of daily life are stifling. The mass migration to the cities and towns is robbing the rural areas a chance to thrive.

What do you think are some of the big changes yet to come?

Poverty and tribal conflicts are likely to increase, so will corruption, unless steps are taken to remove the sources of these ills. Economic stability continues to evade the average Kenyan and the illiteracy of people with certificates is becoming the norm.

How should we equip ourselves for the journey ahead?

We should provide our youth with a good education that promotes the good values of national unity; encourage cross-tribal marriage; and hand over the baton of leadership to a younger generation of Kenyans.

What are your thoughts on the future ahead?

The future does not look bright unless we unite and think nationally. We fought for undiluted democracy but when it came, we diluted it. I wonder if we will ever get it right despite the intellectual input available.

What are your thoughts on the secret to a long life?

It is important to be happy with yourself and do the best you can with the little you have, and more will come to you. Respect your station in life and work on improving it honestly.

Health?

Health is an ongoing process. The body is constantly changing and you have to deal with it. I am glad to be lucid and able to ambulate independently.

God?

Depends on one’s psychological orientation. There seems to be a proliferation of ways to worship him these days.

Gender roles and gender issues?

Initially there was little respect for women. Presently there is mandatory respect for women enforced by the law. Traditional ethics still seem to dominate gender roles no matter what definition we apply.

Money?

Essential but not always the driving force and never a source of happiness. It lubricates life but is never a source of happiness.

Love?

Depends on its nature. It is the most misunderstood concept next to God, and commercialisation has really distorted its function.

Politics?

It worries me that democracy has totally eluded us. Aspirants in the political sphere have adopted a negative agenda and we the populace are reduced to watching the games. We lack coherent political strategies, much to our detriment.

Education?

It is a sad statement when Parliament is the accreditation body on Education via the act. Kenya continues to have poorly planned educational policies because the people in leadership are not seriously invested in education.

Environment?

The majority of our population is agrarian. It behoves us to increase awareness of the environment for the greater good of all. Planting trees should be mandated by law.

The next generation?

A compromised democracy produces children who are likely to be predisposed to truancy and other societal ills. Poverty predisposes one to engage in acts of murder, violence and lawlessness. The poverty alleviation agenda alone is not likely to be the solution for the next generation.

What makes you happy?

I derive satisfaction from knowing my family and friends are doing well. I have a large network of people I relate to well.

Sad?

I try to be optimistic in the face of challenges that bring about sadness. There is so much of it around, its almost habitual.

Excited?

I am a fellow of restrained passions and way beyond an excitable stage.

What more would you like to tell us?

The state of Kenya’s educational institutions worries me. Retired vice chancellors, commonly known as ‘Maziwa Lala’, previously holding administrator positions, are back in class trying to remember what they used to teach. University managers are enriching themselves on construction projects and unaccredited institutions give degrees on subjects not approved. This is all a reflection of the general malaise the country is undergoing. When are we going to figure out that a compromised education leads to inability to perform as the democratic nation we assert to be?

Prof Okatcha retired June 30th 2013. He spent his final years doing what he had always done. Thinking deeply, speaking plainly and remaining present to the people around him. I was one of those people and I did not know how much that would matter until I was sitting with a coffee table book in my hands, grateful that someone had thought to ask him these questions while he still had answers to give. His words about tribalism, democracy and the next generation read now as a ledger of things we were warned about and chose not to heed. The archive does not only preserve the past. It reveals the present.

We have no shortage of platforms for the voices of the young. What we are losing, quietly and without ceremony, is the other end of the conversation. So again, a polite prompt. Record your elders. Ask them hard questions. The answers will eventually outlast both of you.

Rest in peace, Prof.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.

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When I started my long afternoon walks, it was mostly for my gut. A middle age bulge that was starting to feel like a tire around my waist. For three years in a row, I had paid for gym membership and characteristically stopped going after Valentine’s day in February. You would think that gym management, confronted with a member who had not appeared since the month of plastic love, might put a pause on the subscription out of basic human courtesy. Gyms in this country operate like protection cartels. You wanted fitness, you paid for access to the facility and now you can’t leave. The money leaves your account diligently every month and there is no way to claim it back.

I used to be a gym rat. But somehow in the Netherlands, the gyms have become humdrum. There is something about walking on a treadmill indoors in Amsterdam that makes a man feel he is working extremely hard to remain exactly where he started. Walking to nowhere, my grandmother would say.

So this year, before February I engaged in the tedious bureaucratic process of cancelling my gym membership that I long since abandoned but remained shackled to by direct debit and went route 11 all the way. I started small and worked my way up to a regular 10 kms every Saturday which is nothing to brag about in a country so flat that if you stood on a stool, you could see the German border.

My birthday was coming that Saturday. I never celebrate the day, it won’t have bothered me much but this time I did not want to walk alone. So I made a midnight Facebook post. I attempted a joke about how back home a man could simply step outside and find company and all you had to say was,

“Can you give me a push?”.

I regretted that this post would reveal a sensitive side the moment I pressed, post and thought about deleting it. To my utter shock and surprise, the likes just kept coming and in the morning I woke to eight people showing interest. Two looked straight out dodgy. Can we DM, one asked? The other had a Polish sounding name, Juliusz and when I looked up his picture, he was more Musyoka. Two others thought I was in Kenya and didn’t read past the word, village, and the next guy promised to come if he could find a dog walker for the day. Definitely, the wrong kind of African. Fortunately, three strangers actually committed.

Three African men agreed to come to a village in north Holland to walk with a man they had never met, on the strength of a FaceBook post.

I should have known then, that this was not going to be a simple walk.

The first guy to arrive was from South Africa. He had driven and traveled furthest from Utrecht which is a city somewhere in the middle of the country. We call him Gomora. The second was from Uganda and he came by tram from Amsterdam. The third was an older country man with graying hair. His name was Pius and he looked like a Pius. Portly, bespectacled and the kind of man who finds joy in an open air church crusade.

The first thing Gomora did after he gave me a hug, was apologise for what was going on in his country. He appeared genuinely embarrassed and I tried to assure him that I was good but he kept saying,

“It’s wrong brah!”

The second man was Ugandan, a much younger man with a full head of hair. I had no idea Afro was back in vogue and he had only been in the country for a few months and open to adventure. I started calling him my neighbour, Sebbo, though his official name was John Walker Jr and when we gave him a puzzled look, he explained. “Imagine my father didn’t drink but he drove a van that delivered whiskey to liquor shops and they gave him the nickname”.

We sat there, on the waterfront, the three of us, with the young man chain smoking waiting for the last man, a Kenyan who actually lived in the neighbourhood as he would confess later. He was the last to arrive and he lived exactly 850m from the starting point. He casually arrived on his bicycle one hour late which seemed rude until he explained that he had taken a boat to a customer in Amsterdam via the same Amstel we would be walking alongside and cycled back and suddenly he became the most interesting character in the motley crew.

Finally, we all gathered, four black men, standing out in this Dutch hamlet and you would have thought we were old buddies from the way we were talking and laughing. The planned route was circuitous, along the Amstel river, through the polders, past overweight lazing cows and back to the single main street on the waterfront in Uithoorn to replenish burnt calories with draft beer.

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Just as the walk was about to begin, it started raining. Gomora, who had already apologised a third time that morning for the behaviour of his countrymen, which he described as ‘not ubuntu’, suggested we should wait for it to pass. Pius, a veteran water-man peered at the sky like a cockerel spies a hawk and said it wouldn’t last, pointing to a cloud in the sky. We pulled our hoodies and true to the prediction, hardly fifteen minutes into our walk, the rain stopped and the sun emerged in glorious streaks through the puffy clouds and Gomora wondered how Pius knew without consulting his weather app and he said something in Dutch which he then translated to, after rain comes sunshine. Ssebo started referring to him as “my senior” after that.

Above us, the clouds parted, and wider patches of blue sky emerged and it started getting warm enough for everyone to unzip their jackets. The pace was casual, more like a stroll and Pius was talking a lot. He complained about the inability of black people to stick together in the diaspora. I asked him why. He said it was jealousy. Gomora said it was trauma, “the legacy of divide and rule” but Ssebo disagreed and backed the jealousy claim with lived evidence. He told us about his tribulations, trying to start a business, selling Rolexes in Entebbe and we are not talking about watches. “I was known for my chapati rolex and would have gone far, but my own people bewitched me”.

“That shit doesn’t work”, Pius insisted and I leaned in to hear his response. Ssebo said he also began as a skeptic and he used to be proud of his spirit of generosity. His mother had warned him never to give a certain uncle cash in hand and he ignored her and called her superstitious. After that exchange, he started losing money and attracting all sorts of business troubles and that experience changed him. He didn’t trust easy anymore. By the time Ssebo finished listing the tribulations that followed that handshake, even Pius reluctantly concluded that it was some serious juju.

Then Gomora started telling us about a famous Zulu shaman known as Credo Mutwa who claimed that humanity is secretly controlled by a race of shape shifting reptilian extraterrestrials. You should have seen our faces. He had to produce evidence and played a video on YouTube and this Credo fellow was no cowrie shell rattling, white powdered faced shaman. We actually stopped to listen to Credo predicting COVID in the 90s and it sounded like a conspiracy theory that could be defended in respectable company. And that triggered Pius who made his case for witchcraft in Europe that he had dismissed as harmless cartoons and halloween fun until he caught his own pre teen daughter researching on how to cast a spell on some kids who were bullying her in school.

We were now staring at a muscular brown bull that had stopped grazing and was staring back at us. Ssebo had stopped to take a picture and the bull looked up, like it did not approve. Pius began taunting it and Ssebo said it looked like it went to the gym.

That’s when Gomora put his hand on my shoulder and asked, “ How are you doing, brah?” I instinctively replied, “I’m good” and he looked straight into my eyes and repeated, “ You sure, you good?” and I nodded, “yeah, yeah, I’m good”.

There wasn’t much talking after that. Perhaps because of the path and the silence of the countryside. It was a straight bicycle path, flanked by green empty fields with the occasional flock of wild geese, sheep and cows but empty for the most part and we really looked like aliens in this landscape.

We took a detour on the final stretch and Pius pointed to where his home was. We couldn’t quite tell but he pointed to a cluster of red brick houses across the river and then made a phone call and a white woman appeared on the balcony in the distance. We saw a faint figure waving. That was his wife. When he told us how old his formerly aspiring witch of a daughter was, Ssebo changed his deference to “my elder”.

Pius knew the owners of the brown bar with a jukebox that we settled in after the walk because he fixed their boats and and he conversed with them in Dutch so casually that it felt like he had shape shifted.

Ssebo couldn’t get over the fact that he had been served by a white man old enough to be his father and Gomora thought the draft was so smooth, he stopped to pour libation and said he wanted to make a toast. He confessed he had had his loneliest week in a long time, as a dislocated husband who followed his expat wife to Europe and that my Facebook post spoke to him. He was desperate for male African company. Then Pius and Ssebo both made their confession. Ssebo said he felt like he had been among his uncles and Pius told us, it was his Africanised wife who insisted he stop stereotyping black people and mingle with his own. Then I told them why I had made the post.

“It is my birthday, today”.

And Gomora began to sing and they all broke into song, singing happy birthday and attracted a lot of attention to us. Just when I thought enough guys, Pius started again, and even louder in Dutch and the owner of the bar and his mates joined in.

I was taken aback by the warmth. I had lived in this small village keeping to myself, focusing on what brought me to this country and I had never felt so seen and by absolute strangers. When they finally stopped, I found myself tearing and tried to hide them but Gomora spotted them and asked me if I was alright and the way he said it set something off.

I tried to hold it in but couldn’t. It was embarrassing but they just let me cry, with Gomora putting his hand around my shoulder until I was finished and then I felt I had to explain, “Sorry guys, those are for my mother. This is the first birthday I am celebrating without her” and Gomora hugged me and said, “Brah, You are good now” and these three strangers turned friends, all followed his cue and poured a bit of their drink on the ground in honour of my mother and then we stared at the flat motionless Amstel river for some time in silence before Ssebo asked Pius,

“My elder, is there a beer named after this river?” and we all started laughing from our bellies and for the first time in months, I didn’t have to tell myself, I was good.

You may now purchase my book Strength and Sorrow HERE.

Strength and Sorrow by Oyunga Pala is now available for purchase on Amazon for the Kindle and Paperback HERE.