My father loved to retweet Rasna Warah. I think in her, he believed he’d found a kindred political spirit. Someone who saw all the injustice for what it was and had the courage to scream, “For crying out loud!”
But my father, being the parastatal man that he was, born during colonialism and adulting through the Jomo Kenyatta to Daniel arap Moi eras, was imbued with The Fear. The fear of arbitrary arrest. The fear of abduction. The fear of torture. The fear of death. This same fear which has been resurrected under the William Ruto regime in this, the year of our Lord, 2025. So like most people of the later half of the 20th century, my father was cautious of saying too much too loudly.
Rasna Warah never seemed afraid.
She was one of the first female columnists in Kenya, in an era where the concept of feminism in the country was like a candle fighting for its flame against the strongest winds. On top of rallying for the rights of women, Rasna Warah brazenly criticized and critiqued the government. She did not mince her words and neither did she hide behind a pseudonym.
Her name was Rasna Warah and if she were to die, she would die by the truth of her pen, an ethos my father would spend my entire life inscribing into me. That words can be justice, that one’s words are not only thy shield and defender, but shield and defender for the voiceless and the wordless.
In the end, the most vile regime of them all, cancer, came for them both. My father in December of 2023. Rasna Warah just days into 2025. Both lived and died by their words, clutching the pen of truth and justice until their last breaths were drawn.
