The audiences watch their hero as he falls and stands up again to continue with the fight to bring a solution whose fruits everyone would enjoy, but mostly the hero would never take the mantle, as ERIC LUNGAI argues
The celebrated African writer, Chinua Achebe, finally died. So sad about his death. One thing, nonetheless that many communities across the globe will forever remember him for is his creation of the undying character Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart.
So many people identify themselves with Okonkwo such that it is difficult to believe that he was a mere fictional character who made Amalinze the cat’s back to lick the ground and then later on killed himself for the unfairness that had set in the society, which he couldn’t face.
Famous Okonkwo
In fact, by the end of the novel, the only person you remember very well is Okonkwo: how he used to walk with a spring, how he could unleash a thorough beating to his wives without relenting, how he was fearsome in war and such stuff.
Such is the case with all other tragic heroes in most contemporary and classical literature. Tragic heroes are a sight to behold, whose lives even after death, is never easy to forget by the people who interact with them. They remain relatively germane regardless of their supposed hubris and hamartia, and children who don’t even know them will want to identify themselves with them at whatever costs.
What with a figure like Oedipus, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King? A man of wisdom, who sets ‘his’ city free from its afflictions, later rewarded with the kingship, and ends up siring children with his own mother, even after his parents had struggled to kill him at birth.
While reading the text, one is tempted to understand that the conception of fate and fatalism is at the centre stage of the play and thus looks at Oedipus as a mere puppet, which is controlled and crushed by gods without his knowledge and for no good reason at all.
Oedipus complex is a psychosexual stage experienced by growing children, thus created by Sigmund Freud, basing on this tragic hero, who killed his father and married his mother.
Tragic heroes
Many other Shakespearean celebrated tragic heroes who are still mentioned in every literary scholar’s breaths include characters like: Brutus in Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, found in plays that correspond with their names.
According to the Aristotelian definition, a tragic hero must evoke in the audience a sense of pity or fear, saying that: ‘The change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity’, which we have always seen here.
The audience is subjected to a catharsis while watching their hero, who represents their feelings, and when he is likely to fail, they don’t feel relived either.
Aristotle establishes the concept that the emotion of pity comes not from the supposed character becoming better, but when he receives unwarranted bad luck.
He contests that the tragic hero has to be a man who is eminently good and just, whose misfortune is conveyed about not by malice, but by some error (hamartia).
The concluded General Election can be compared to tragedy, which is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing.
Tragedy is important in that it has remained a site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change just like life is contested for in the elections. And thus, one person who can unrelentingly deserve to be compared to the tragic hero in Kenyan political scene is Raila Odinga, whose struggle to ascend the political acme of this country has always ended when he was so near. A man who has fought endlessly, been jailed and exiled, put in detention without trial, loved by many, brought freedom to many but whose journey has to be always curtailed by unknown dark forces that are either within himself or are controlled by the gods of fate.
Raila and Oedipus
Comparing Raila with Oedipus, for instance, similarities abound where both are individuals who find themselves in countries plagued by political turmoil and they have to offer solutions that are to lead to the country’s liberation.
They do the job quite well, and gain the people’s favours and elders’ approval to be their leaders and take them to the Promised Land. Along the way, trouble starts. People are helpless and they are dying and need them to help where necessary and bring change to their lives. They consult the gods and offer the solution.
But their stay up there is unstable, as they are fought by dark forces of fate, only known to the gods of political realignments. Their ends are almost similar. They are denied what they see with their eyes as their own and compelled to desert their royal lives and opt to live macabre lives in droughts of destitution.
Raila’s journey in the Kenyan political scene since he joined it way back has been murky and even though many people have suggested after he lost the just concluded election that he should retire, it will be difficult for him to do so.
Even if he is to retire now or in the future, is he going to be forgotten fully and his name withdrawn from all the lips of his followers?
Like all other tragic heroes, it will be difficult to forget Raila Odinga in any context that deals with politics in the Kenyan history.
He has grown to achieve the stature of Okonkwo or Oedipus or Macbeth, whose lives in the fictional worlds have been forced to be a part of our lives, whether willingly or by forced reading in schools.
