Parties without conviction can’t move generations

One Sunday morning in 1946 or perhaps 1947, the late Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, with his wife, took their young sons to be baptised at a Church in Maseno. As Jaramogi made his way there from Bondo, he was determined to commit an act of rebellion. He was dead set on not giving his sons ‘muzungu’ names like ‘Obadiah Adonijah’, the name he himself was given upon baptism. As he probably expected, the morning ended in drama, and his boys were not baptised. 

In his book ‘Not Yet Uhuru’, Oginga tells us that his wife, Mary Juma, fled the scene embarrassed, and left her ‘obnoxious’ husband arguing publicly at the altar with a revered man of God. In the end, the Odinga family was kicked out of the ‘Colonised House of Worship.’