Politics is part of my life. However, my politics have consistently been guided by certain fundamental beliefs and principles which are inviolable; I am afraid I cannot sacrifice these at the altar of career politics – Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, 1987.

Writer JOSEPH KARIMI opens a new series on Kenya's 'political fathers and sons' with a profile of the country's first Vice-President

Odinga's supporters hurled missiles and epithets at Mzee Kenyatta's entourage after the president had launched a scathing public attack on Odinga, condemning his leadership style and political leanings. Presidential guards opened fire on the protesters, killing 20 people and injuring scores of others. Odinga's Kenya People's Union was banned and he was detained, along with a number of top KPU men, including Achieng' Oneko, who had been close to Kenyatta and helped him in mobilising the masses during the independence struggle.

That event marked a milestone for Odinga who, throughout his political career – right from the colonial days through the Kenyatta era (he was independent Kenya's first Vice President) and President Moi's regime – was the most persecuted politician in Kenya's independent history. 

Perceived as a committed socialist, Odinga had to walk a fine line during the long years of the Cold War. With external pressures coming to bear on national politics, he was expelled from Kenyatta's government, losing both the national and party vice presidency.

Tom Mboya, who was the national secretary of the party, was accused of manipulating the Limuru Conference that manoeuvred Odinga out of the vice presidency through the creation of eight provincial vice presidents, in a sequence of events very similar to those that transpired at Kasarani on March 18 this year, when Odinga's son Raila, along with his National Development Party, were steamrollered into Kanu and Raila appointed party general secretary by "acclamation." (Four party vice-chairmen – Uhuru Kenyatta, Noah Katana Ngala, Kalonzo Musyoka and Musalia Mudavadi – were similarly "acclaimed.")

Bereft of a political vehicle, Oginga Odinga founded the Kenya People's Union (KPU) that same year, describing Kanu as having become "a right-wing party, dedicated to enriching and entrenching a small privileged class" contrary to its independence ideals. The new party's slogan was Ndume, the bull, which in the Luo community signifies heroism.

His deputy was Bildad Kaggia, the now frail ex-freedom fighter who was imprisoned at Lodwar with Kenyatta only to fall out with the president later over allocation of land to freedom fighters and the poor.

To rid Kanu of hostile members of parliament, the system pushed through a legislation requiring elected leaders to seek a fresh mandate on quitting their original party, scrubbing the existing rule of "crossing the floor." That was the genesis of the controversial rule that appeared to have been breached when Raila's NDP crossed the floor upon its members being appointed to the Cabinet last year. 

During the ensuing "little election," strong KPU candidates were disqualified on technicalities, losing to handpicked Kanu minnows as the local political tide turned against Odinga, courtesy of Mboya's influence. Things took a tragic turn, though, in July 1969, when Tom Mboya was gunned down by an assassin believed to have been recruited by Kenyatta's kitchen cabinet. 

Feeling stabbed in the back, Odinga's supporters accused Kenyatta of breaking the "umbilical cord" created between the two in 1963 when they and their supporters voted in Kanu, overwhelming Kadu, the Kenya African Democratic Union of which Daniel arap Moi was then a member.

So intense was the newfound animosity that Kaggia walked out of KPU on August 1, 1969, saying the party had not helped fulfil his political ambitions of seeing freedom fighters honoured, equitable allocation of resources, land redistribution and universal right to education and health.

That was not the first time Odinga had faced rebellion. In his schooldays, he was denied a scholarship for further studies by the colonial government despite having qualified. In his book, Not Yet Uhuru, Odinga recalls being teased by fellow students who claimed that his community was only good at showing off, not in investing in the future. 

"I was convinced that to start the battle against white domination, we had to assert our economic independence. We had had it drummed into us that the whites had the brains to give the orders and it was for Africans to carry them out. We had to show we were capable of enterprise and development in fields beyond our shambas," he wrote, "I hated the idea of our people begging from the government." 

Oginga Odinga was born in 1911 in Siaya District and was a student of Maseno and Alliance High School. He went on to Makerere University and in 1940, he returned to Maseno High School as a teacher.

While teaching at Maseno, he joined a savings company called Karadha that dismayed him by demanding interest rates beyond the reach of many members. This experience laid the foundation of what came to be called the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation, which was however open to all Africans in East Africa. 

It was the corporation that broadened Odinga's political horizons. With Oneko having started the magazine Ramogi, the company established a printing press in Nairobi that also printed other vernacular publications. Odinga won the Central Nyanza African District Council seat in the early 1940s, where he came out fearlessly in defence of the ordinary people's interest. He became a targeted man and describes his appearances in court to face various charges as "routine," mainly arising from his political and economic freedom crusade. In 1948, he joined KAU, the Kenya African Union.

"I was convinced that political power had to be struggled for and achieved as a stepping stone to any advance at all," he writes in Not Yet Uhuru. In 1956, eight Africans elected to the Legco (Legislative Council) on a restrictive-franchise basis elected Odinga as their chairman.

The eight African members included Oginga Odinga, Tom Mboya, Ronald Ngala, Daniel arap Moi, Bernard Mate and Masinde Muliro. "In my blood, I think I had been a politician all along. There was not a school where I did not form or lead an organisation of one kind or another."

When the African members demanded the right to form political organisations, the colonial authorities allowed the creation of district political groupings, invariably implanting tribalism in Kenya's body politic. The tribal loyalty prevalent in Kenya today only relented slightly after the Lancaster House Conference of 1960, when African members came together with Ronald Ngala as Chairman. (That same year, African leaders were to meet in Kiambu and created the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), led by James Gichuru, Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya.)

This made it possible to make a unified demand for a Responsible Government, the release of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta and other restricted leaders, and ending of the State of Emergency. That unity was apparently lost on the flight back home as white settlers worked hard on a "divide and rule" approach. 

On March 27,1960, an attempt to forestall this policy during a meeting of all political organisations at Kiambu Township foundered when Moi, Muliro and Ngala absented themselves and Taita Toweett staged a walkout. Kenyatta was unanimously elected Kanu president despite being still under restriction at Lodwar, 800 kilometres away.

With Odinga as Kenyatta's number two man, it was decided that all district organisations be dissolved and their assets transferred to Kanu, but that was not to be, because the absentee members announced the formation of Kadu within a few days.

In March 1961, elections were held under the new constitution. Although Kanu polled 604,578 votes, it only secured 22 seats as against Kadu, which polled 143,079 votes and secured 11 seats thanks to the Constituency Delimitation Commission, which gave great weight to the sparsely populated areas where Kadu support was likely to be greater. President Moi's ethnic balancing skills appear to have been honed then.

To further consolidate the white man’s influence, a new constitution was introduced, increasing the African representative members to 14, and the election of four Specially Elected Members from each of the three racial groups. 

The political machinations of this era are being replayed in the Kanu nomination where President Moi prefers, Uhuru, Kenyatta's son, to Raila, Odinga's son. 

In the current battle, however, Raila is something of an "outsider," having had, like his father, severe political confrontation with Moi, who has sent him to lengthy detention terms twice. Even after his father rejoined Kanu, he failed to fit in, jumping on the multiparty bandwagon in the late 1980s to relaunch his opposition career. Only a divided opposition that split votes along ethnic lines denied him the coveted top seat in the 1992 general election.

Raila, who was educated in the former East Germany, has been a politically independent man, like his father. Whether he will end up pleading with Kenyans to let him "just ascend to the presidency for just a short while," as his father did, only time will tell. The elder Odinga died in 1994.