“He who fears the sun will not become chief.” African proverb.
By Minkail Olaitan
Growing up, I knew there were leaders whose voices carried the weight, the burden, the depth and the strength of a people. I was raised on the song of freedom and the jamboree of independence. As a Nigerian, I was fed the tale of the Giant of Africa, and those tales were things of immediate pride.
But there are things the ignorance of childhood conceals: the festering wound of history served on white plates. The hidden noose on a continent’s neck, as if to say you cannot be totally free. For years, that knowledge seemed unimportant to me. The absent-mindedness travelled with me from classroom to adulthood, a comfortable fog.
Then I heard P. L. O. Lumumba speak about the African condition, about the challenge of Black people, citing history until it rang. It felt as if the gods were in rage.
Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba was born on 17 July 1962 in Usenge, a village near Lake Victoria in Kenya’s Siaya County, and later raised between that lakeshore and Nairobi. His parents, the Reverend N. H. O. Mahondo and Jane Ongira Thoma, gave their firstborn a name that was already an argument. He was called after Patrice Émery Lumumba, the Congolese prime minister murdered in 1961 for insisting that independence was not a gift from Belgium but a struggle won in blood. A child does not choose such a namesake. A household does. From the beginning, the boy was asked to live toward a continent, not merely toward a career.
At thirteen, he visited an uncle who was a medical student at the University of Nairobi and heard young law students arguing about justice. In another telling, he recalls the eloquence of the lawyer Samuel Ogango. Both stories point to the same ignition. Language, he understood early, could be an instrument. If English had been used to administer the colony, it could also be used to prosecute the colony’s unfinished business. He set himself to master it. He would later say he never wore jeans on campus, never joined the easy theatre of student violence, and began wearing the dark suits that became his public skin. Conscience, not fashion, was the first discipline.
He took a first-class Bachelor of Laws from the University of Nairobi in 1985, a master’s from the same faculty, then a doctorate in the law of the sea at Ghent. He lectured. He litigated. He served as secretary to Kenya’s Constitution of Kenya Review Commission. For a brief season, he directed the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission, from July 2010 to August 2011, and learned the mortality rate of honesty in public office. When he and his team treated the mandate as real, parliament found a way to dissolve the institution. He has said the brief, in practice, was not to fight corruption but to appear to fight it. The observation is not Kenyan only. It is continental.
What made him a frontman of the contemporary liberation argument is not a presidency he never held. It is the rarer office of a man who will still name the disease in public. He narrows Africa’s crisis until it cannot hide behind poetry. “Many years since then all African countries claim to be independent,” he has told audiences. “But many times our independence does not go beyond flags and national anthems.” History is not taught, so the young have no future tense. Minerals leave. Oil leaves. Young men and women queue at embassies for a green card while the soil that could feed them is treated as a curse. The coloniser, he warns, is returning in new clothes.
The eloquence is unmatched because it is armed. He does not decorate the room. He inventories it. “The tragedy of Africa,” he has said, “is that Africans are in the business of canonizing thieves and demonizing its saints.” Then he summons the dead as a jury. “When I look at Africa, many questions come to mind. Many times I have asked myself what would happen if Dr Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba were to rise up and see what is happening… because what they will be confronted with is an Africa where the Democratic Republic of Congo is unsettled… but it’s not on the front pages of our newspapers because we don’t even control our newspapers and the media.”
That historical alertness is the spine of his leadership. He keeps returning to a confession once made on Ghanaian soil by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, a head of state speaking of another: “Nkrumah was right, we were wrong.” Lumumba repeats the line because it is the verdict of a founder on the delay that still governs the continent. If Africa grew used to the titles of president and minister, Nyerere admitted, unity would become harder, not easier. In 2014, the University of Dar es Salaam named Lumumba the Distinguished Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Lecturer, an institutional nod that placed his voice in the same lineage he refuses to let gather dust.
Leadership, in his practice, is less a title than a refusal to flatter. He has told rooms of the powerful that Africa starts what it does not finish. He has told the young that if they have no sense of history, they cannot have a sense of the future. He has told the pious that praying without action is superstition. The African Institute of Leaders and Leadership, the PLO Lumumba Foundation, the lecture circuit from Nairobi to Accra to Johannesburg to halls of the diaspora: these are the apparatus he keeps building so that speech does not die as applause. He wants a new breed that can think, administer and stay.
I recognise in him what my childhood anthems never explained. Independence was a ceremony. Liberation is a curriculum. The Giant of Africa was a compliment we paid ourselves before we had done the audit. Lumumba does the audit in public, without mincing, and still insists the continent can give the world something better than raw material and lamentation. He stands among the few whose voices still travel the length of Africa with alacrity because they have not been purchased into softness.
When I first heard him, the rage I felt was not only his. It was the sound of a delayed education arriving all at once. The noose I had been taught not to see had a name. The wound on the white plate had a history. And a man from Usenge, carrying another man’s name like a torch that refused to go out, was saying that the beautiful ones will not be imported. They will have to be raised, taught, and sent into the rooms where Africa is still being decided.
That is the giant dream I now attach to his labour: to enlighten a people and to place in their hands the apparatus of a freedom that does not expire when the anthem ends. The gods, if they were in rage that first afternoon, were only catching up with a lawyer who had already begun the case.
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Can a nation truly call itself free if its independence ends at the flag, the anthem and the ceremony?
STAY IN THE MOOD
Freedom is not something inherited once and forgotten.
It must be studied.
It must be questioned.
It must be protected.
And sometimes, before a people can move forward, they must first find the courage to name the wound.
Stay informed. Stay curious. Stay connected. Stay in the Mood.
