Over My Shoulder:  Remembering Atieno Odhiambo



            David William Cohen

            Lemuel A. Johnson Collegiate Professor of African Anthropology and
History

            The University of Michigan

            February 26, 2009



            Yesterday, February 25, 2009, I learned the very sad news of the
passing in Kisumu, Kenya of dear colleague Prof. E. S. Atieno Odhiambo,
following an extended illness.  I was not able to grasp the nature of this
illness but I recognized that this illness was constituting an immense gap in a
world of learning, among those many seeking understanding of Africa’s past
and future.  I have felt this gap, this disappearance of one of the most
brilliant minds ever to contribute to comprehending Africa, as also the loss of
an original and challenging “voice” over my shoulder.

            My earliest memory of Atieno. . .December 1973. . .the great hall
of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa. . .the International
Congress of Africanists.  I was presenting a paper on pre-colonial Luo history.
 Atieno was one of seven or eight lecturers and graduate students from Nairobi
sitting just above and behind my shoulder.  After the session wrapped, Atieno
was the first to engage me.  In a Congress in which there was an overhanging
tension regarding Africanization of the academy and the questionable place of
the scholar from outside, Atieno welcomed my contribution, through an
engagement with the ideas and arguments of the paper.  And I felt welcomed, as
a scholar and colleague.  We were, in a certain sense, kin, Atieno having been
supervised to a PhD in History by Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot; in turn, Ogot
and I were fellow students who had a few years earlier completed PhDs under the
supervision of Roland Oliver at SOAS, University of London.  In another way, we
worked in different landscapes:  I was formed in the study of precolonial
eastern African history; Atieno was just establishing himself as a fresh and
influential voice in the study of the colonial period.  There was much to learn
from one other.  Atieno’s work on the deeper political and social contours of
Kenya’s settler colony drew him to recognize how old orders and strongly held
ideas and practices could engage and shape new economic and political forces
and conditions.  He was concerned with the partiality of African
historiography, that studies of colonialism, nationalism, and decolonization
had to take account of the real untidiness of historical development; that
scholars must recognize the strangeness and consequent failures of
compartmentalized knowledge produced in universities with research programs
ordered in and divided among disciplines.  Atieno’s first two books The
Paradox of Collaboration and Other Essays (1974) and Siasa:  Politics and
Nationalism in East Africa, 1905-1939 (1981) reflected the extraordinary
possibilities of a new historical literature formed through the exercise of
questions, approaches, and theory from multiple sites and engaged with diverse
literatures. If a unified Kenyan history could be synthesized it required more
than an assemblage of pieces and regions.  It would be constituted in the
recognition of the salience of difference and contest—especially over class,
wealth, access to resources, power--as much as the commonality of experience
and affinity.  Here, Atieno’s deep and extraordinary knowledge of, engagement
with, Oginga Odinga and the works of his life—signaled early in Atieno’s
early publications on the Luo thrift and trading corporation (LUTATCO)--moved
understanding and meaning away from the easier stuff of labels and categories
towards a search for that new historical literature that transforms the
meanings and purposes of political economy, historical sociology, comparative
politics, and historical anthropology.  His early writing on Mau Mau was about
the movement for sure, but also about the implications of “Mau Mau
historiography” amid a search for some kind of unified history of Kenya or of
decolonization.  This was a metahistorical question unfamiliar to many working
the furrows of recovering East Africa’s past in the 1970s, though it was
certainly the subject of steamy debates in junior/senior common rooms at the
University of Nairobi.  Later, Atieno would join with John Lonsdale in a
dedicated engagement with scholarship on Mau Mau (Mau Mau and Nationhood
(2003).  And, when the moment came to honor the father of modern Kenyan
historiography, Professor Ogot, it was Atieno to whom everyone looked as the
one to pull off this tribute, as he did in the collected volume honoring Ogot
that Atieno edited:  African Historians and African Voices (2001).

            We found common ground in the intriguing intersections of layered
historical studies ("Ayany, Malo, and Ogot:  Historians in Search of a Luo
Nation," C.d’EA, 1987).)  And we found common ground in the discoveries of
histories that seemed a bit more complicated than the resident truths and
histories that shifted the focus of historical interpretation and
representation.  The essential argument of my 1973 Congress paper—that the
Nilotic Luo speaking migrants of the 17th century comprised not one cultural
and historical formation but perhaps two distinctive strands--found its way
into our first conversations but then also into the first chapter of our first
co-authored book, Siaya:  The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape
(1989).  In our work together on that book, Atieno and I found ourselves in
productive conversations regarding the possibilities of bridging the
differences in orientation that distinguished precolonial African histories
from those focusing on the colonial period.  In those conversations, some of
which were in Baltimore and Washington during Atieno visiting professor
appointment at Johns Hopkins in 1985-86, where I was a member of the History
faculty.  These conversations continued through thick and thin across some
twenty years, and through several published papers and two more books (Burying
SM:  The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa, 1992; and
The Risks of Knowledge:  Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister
John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990, 2004), to complete what we came to call a
trilogy.  Atieno contributed the sentences that marked the final published
account of our twenty year collaboration, published on page 271 of Risks:

This work completes our trilogy.  It moves from our original formulation of
“the problem of knowledge,” in A. J. Ayer’s words, as we explored its
multiple and unfinished contours in Siaya and in Burying SM, into the
tenancious interstices of “the risks of knowledge.”  The search for a
comprehension of Ouko has unfolded in an age when doubt is every day
superimposed on confidence, when questions face off against impunity, when the
sure things sometimes seem shaped by fate.  In this setting, uncertainty is the
fragile formative ground of debate and critique.

As I write this, I am aware of the fragility of my own knowledge of Atieno’s
many-stranded career as a scholar and citizen.  I ask those reading this to
understand that Atieno is here and yet not quite here in this most difficult
time of writing about a dear colleague, lost to me.  It is Atieno, his hand,
and his thought that are missed at this time of writing.  I ask those who also
knew him and who knew some of these and still other strands of his life to
contribute their recollections of appreciation towards the recomposition of a
life, not in an effort to produce a coherent, organic whole—because he for
sure would not have accepted this—but to recognize the intersections of the
many parts of his life with the many parts of the world he lived, and spoke
about, and surely dreamed about.

This is not one of those times, and there will never be another time, but there
were times, episodes of intensive work together, when we could and would
complete each other’s sentences and paragraphs even if we might not agree on
the point at hand.  Atieno’s head was “full of books” and my study table
became full of yellow pads filled by Atieno’s hand.  I sent him stuff off my
computer; he augmented, adjusted, rewrote; I added, rewrote, refined; he
refined and revised; I cleaned up; he cleaned up; papers, chapters, and books
co-authored appeared.  We searched among other duties and sometimes dire
constraints to find times to work side-by-side.  I traveled to Houston.  He
traveled to Ann Arbor.  We once somehow found a midway point at Tri-Cities
Airport in Johnson City, Tennessee, and worked in a motel room near the
airport.  We continued writing in the airport lounge as we waited for our
respective flights, even becoming common witnesses to the crash of a small
plane on the runway in our line of vision.  We worked together in and around a
series of incredibly rich workshops Atieno organized through the Center for
Cultural Studies at Rice University.  In 1986, we organized our schedules to
meet in Beyreuth to complete Siaya, but while we met, the work was not really
possible, as Atieno had just been released from some terrible weeks in
detention in Kenya that began with his return from the academic year stay at
Johns Hopkins.  We shared a book manuscript but I could not know what he had
experienced in that confinement in Kenya.  Later, we arranged to meet and work
for 24 hours in Basel, where he was for a month a visiting professor, but this
too did not happen for reasons too silly to relate here.

We experimented with our writing separately and together.  At a meeting of the
African Studies Association, Atieno asked—indeed, insisted that—every
person who had been in Kenya in 1985 or 1986 (among some two or three hundred
in the room) speak to what she or he thought was going on in the S. M. Otieno
burial saga.  When our book manuscript was “finished” we asked several
individuals to read the manuscript and tell us “what the case was really
about and how the story should be told!”  We were delivered six scripts and
we successfully pressed the publisher to add them to the end of the book as an
“afterpiece”.  Some of the critique delivered therein might have caused us
to revise the manuscript but it was Atieno’s conviction that continuing
debate and critique was a crucial piece of discussions moving among the several
sites including public debates in Kenya, courtroom drama, and scholarship in
fields such as law, sociology, women’s studies, anthropology, history, and
religion.  Burying SM was not only a text describing an incredible debate; it
would appropriately itself become part of continuing and new debates over a
range of issues pertinent in Kenya and the world.

            For Atieno, debate and critique, informed by philosophical
reflection and knowledge of the everyday, was an essential piece of living in
the world which could not be segmented into scholarly and public domains.  It
was appropriate, if not predictable, that Atieno would agree to draft the
“Foreword” to Wambui Waiyaki Otieno’s provocative account of her life,
from her viewpoint:  Mau Mau’s Daughter:  A Life History (1998—edited by
Cora Ann Presley), and that Atieno would be one of the individuals encouraging
Wambui—the widow of S. M. Otieno and the one vanquished in the judicial
decision relating to the disposition of her husband’s remains—to complete
this work, to make sure that publics would be able to read her life and her
positions in her own terms.

There was a question that seemed too common.  How did we work this
collaboration, write together, co-author, across different formation, different
locations of our work, different experiences of living in the world?  I have
always sensed in these queries the anticipation of an answer:  Cohen, in the
US, provides the gestures to scholarly literatures and philosophical domains;
Atieno, in Kenya, provides the empirical stuff.  But this was wrong, always
wrong!  Despite Atieno’s rich and poetic sense of the complexities of the
lived world of Kenyans, Atieno was generous in giving me space to work through
what I understood was going on “on the ground” when I drew on my own field
research in Uganda and Kenya or on my zest for close reading of court records,
narrative accounts, and newspapers.  Atieno’s strongest contributions were
always in surprising reaches into world literatures, fiction, poetry, drama,
music, philosophy, and biography.  During times of our most intense work on
Risks, and well after Atieno had harnessed his hands to a computer keyboard, he
would send me two or three referential fragments a day, occasionally several in
an hour’s burst.  But Atieno’s strengths lay not only in being able to
introduce into our work remarkably salient ideas drawn from Marx, Hobsbawm,
Thompson, Mudimbe, and Garcia Marquez—who else among my close colleagues
could quote from Gibbon, Paz, the Old Testament and the New, and Richard II,
via Shakespeare?-- but also able to bring into play the word-games and songs of
Kenyan children.  In 1985-86, at Johns Hopkins, Atieno was a visitor who not
only taught students working in different fields of history, he was also a
visitor who turned up and participated in an extraordinary array of seminars
and conferences across the university.  The Johns Hopkins métier was the
robust discussion of papers read in advance and Atieno always seemed the one in
the room to have read the paper most carefully and the one most prepared to
introduce ideas from unexpected regions of intellectual life.  His
interventions could be most productive; he never, however, required the
discussion to turn in his direction.  More, he came to the discussion and
contributed to it uniquely and quietly.

Atieno certainly valued the open quality of the Hopkins seminar.  Once, in
early October 1985, we traveled together with Rhys Isaac to a college in the
southwestern corner of Virginia to give a few papers and classes for the
faculty and students there.  Atieno remarked the strong distinction between the
Hopkins style of seminar in which people work together on a paper around a
table and the architectures of classrooms and instruction at that Virginia
college in which chairs and tables were riveted to the floors in lecture room
style and the students were riveted to a learning environment that did not
encourage open discussion.  Curiously, importantly, the paper Rhys Isaac gave
at the college that day was a compression of a longer argument that the
Jeffersonian-Madisonian principles of freedom of worship came not out of an
exquisite philosophical library, or some singular pre-constitutional theory,
but rather out of the efforts to engage, to acknowledge, the rough and tumble
struggles of Baptists, through petitions and otherwise, to find security in a
colony, Virginia, whose religious and political life was ordered by the
Established Church.  Here, again, it was a history of a formative debate among
people of all walks of life that was producing a free republic.  When Atieno
reached Rice and organized seminars and workshops there, he encouraged and
expected conversation, participation, from around the room, bringing everyone
into the discussion and debate, giving everyone occasion to speak.  In the Rice
workshops, the métier was not only an open seminar style, a la Hopkins; they
were also constituted to bring together into common conversation scholars from
Africa and the U.S, and scholars from multiple disciplines (including
occasionally from outside the academy).  I had the good fortune to be present
at a few of these Rice events, and I recall thinking of them as the academic
instantiation of the idea of “the republic of the taxi,” a construction
that Atieno launched into our common work.

Atieno certainly knew, and surely experienced bodily, the differences between
the free republics of ideas and debate that he could uncover in everyday life,
as well as those he could himself foster, and those arenas of repression and
limitation that so affected his teaching and writing career in Kenya from the
early 1970s through to his departure for Rice in the late 1980s.  Where some of
my colleagues in my field might be hard to find in their offices, Atieno was
always there listening to students and lecturers, responding to questions,
sharing his own library of published and unpublished work. . . at least when he
did not have to go in hiding during the purge-like times when Kenyan security
attempted to control free speech and expression and freedom of organization on
the Nairobi campus and beyond.  Atieno was close to a number of Kenyan
intellectuals and academics—students and faculty—who found themselves in
trouble and detention. Atieno and his university colleagues were experiencing
McCarthy-ism Kenya style. Atieno was certainly threatened with arrest—“man,
you have been warned!”-- and he was arrested and detained, and tortured,
across an extended period in 1986.  I know that Atieno took incredible risks in
associating himself with colleagues in trouble.  I wish I could say that about
more of his colleagues in those dark days who showed none of the same courage
when some of us working outside Kenya tried to assist with Atieno’s release
in 1986.  The future and authoritative biographies of figures such as Ngugi wa
Thiong’o and Raila Odinga will surely note the devoted support, at his own
great risk, that Atieno gave to these individuals when the Kenyan state turned
on them.  I knew not enough, or perhaps too much, regarding Atieno’s
engagements in the early 1980s, but I sense that future histories of Kenya will
have to attend to these years, will have to give space to these activities, as
constitutive of the greater democracy that Kenyans have sought in recent
election.  These are gap years in my knowledge of Atieno’s career.  While,
doing fieldwork in Siaya between early 1979 and 1981, I visited Liganua on
several occasions, bringing fish, rice, bread, tea, and sugar to Atieno’s
mother, I did not catch sight of him.  I know that there were many strands to
his life that I knew little of, and I do not comment here on the “republic”
of his household in Houston, which I visited several times, treasuring the
warmth of his family, and the richness of the intellectual lives that they
enjoyed in that house. . .or home.

            In Risks of Knowledge, we worked through the productions of
knowledge developing around the disappearance and death Kenya’s Minister of
Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Robert Ouko, February 1990.  We
marked the significance —and anticipated the long-running importance of—the
openness of the questions of who killed Ouko and how and why.  We did not,
emphatically, try to solve the question of “who dunnit”; rather we
attempted to grasp and interpret the specificities in play as knowledge
unfolded or was constructed around the forensic efforts of detectives,
commissions, and others to sort through the evidence to reach—and not
reach—answers to the question of who killed Ouko and knowledge of Ouko and
his demise was elaborated as publics themselves sifted through the public
records for meaning and for answers.  We did not go “to the field” to
achieve a privileged understanding of the various routes to knowledge but
rather drew upon, and directed attention towards, the extraordinary public
record developing out of the many investigations.  At times, this work felt
risky, at least to me, because I could see that our intention, our approach,
could be misunderstood as the next, and maybe better, investigation of the
crimes themselves.  I worried for Atieno through this project of fourteen
years, if not also for myself, for I felt that many paths that Atieno had
himself taken in his own now suddenly too short life were paths that overlapped
with the generation of Ouko.  For too many years, they had their loyalties
questioned by those in power in the country that they loved.  They saw the
breakage of ideas and ideals of a Kenya republic by those entrusted to assure
the delivery of a better Kenya to the next generations.  They saw that their
own personal safety lay in the difficult spaces between home and exile.  They
knew that a greater country would only grow in those spaces where speech,
writing, and debate would find protection.

*     *    *

            Less than a year ago, I wrote these words to Atieno on the
difficult occasion of his retirement from Rice.  I found a voice behind my
shoulder, suggesting poetry, suggesting many strands, suggesting questions as
much as answers.

Atieno:

Friendship discovered in the productions of ideas, shared ways of thinking
about things.  Friendship found in the turning of ideas into words.  Friendship
made in the animation of phrases, in the placement of commas, in the open
declarations of thoughts held within.  Sentences as in a lyric carrying
additional meanings and powers.  Three books, articles, chapters.  Twenty some
years of never having a thought without the presence of another voice. 
Relationships unfolding not from the thing itself, but more so the making of
the thing.  A way of looking at the world, and writing about it.  Five hundred
years.  Keywords:  risky knowledge, sociology of power, poetics, republics of
taxis, landscape.  Owiny, Omolo, Obalo, Ogelo, Ogot, Ouko, Otieno. . .crossers
of boundaries.  Add Obama?



Siaya, Atieno, nation, history, Luo?   In which order shall I put them?  I need
the other’s voice.

                                                            David William Cohen

                                                            Ann Arbor

                                                                               
    June 14, 2008



It is now 2009, Atieno.  This is too soon. I shall not stop writing with you at
my shoulder.  There is still history to do, and to make, for you, because of
you.

With love and greatest consolations to your family.

Be in peace.

David

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