Biographies

The story of Odungi Randa cannot adequately be told simply by saying that he became Chairman—or Ker—of the Luo Council of Elders. His biography runs through some of the most turbulent chapters of Kenya's political history: colonial rule, the struggle around independence, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga's break with the post-independence establishment, the Kenya People's Union, political repression under the one-party state, detention and torture at Nyayo House, and finally his emergence decades later as an elder seeking to arbitrate questions of Luo culture, leadership and unity. It is, in many respects, the story of a man who moved from the margins…

Joram Japheth Oyangi Mbaja—whose name also appears in historical records as Jafetha Oyangi Mbaja, Japhetha Mbaja Oyangi, and more commonly simply Oyangi Mbaja—belongs to a generation of Kenyan political activists whose contribution to the struggle for freedom extended far beyond the formal achievement of independence in 1963. He was an anti-colonial agitator, political organiser, trade-union-linked activist, Kenya People’s Union figure, political prisoner and associate of some of the most consequential opposition leaders in Kenya's twentieth-century history. Yet Mbaja occupies an unusual position in Kenya's historical memory. He appears repeatedly in government records, newspapers, histories of opposition politics and human-rights documentation,…