A few days ago I listened to an old commencement speech. In May 2011, the actor Denzel Washington stood before the graduating class of the University of Pennsylvania and took apart a piece of advice every one of them had been given: make sure you have something to fall back on. He said he had never understood it. If he was going to fall, he wanted to fall forward.
His proof was a baseball player. Reggie Jackson, he said, struck out 2,600 times in his career, more than anyone in the history of the game. Nobody talks about the strikeouts. They remember the home runs.
I thought of Raila Odinga before the speech ended. This week it is one year since he collapsed during a morning walk in Kerala, India, and died. I wrote about him three times in these pages last year. One thing I may not have said plainly enough is the simplest thing about him. He tried.
Count his strikeouts, because he never hid them. He spent nearly eight years in detention. He ran for president five times and was never declared the winner. Early last year, he ran for chair of the African Union Commission and lost that too.
Now look at what the attempts left behind. His petition after the 2017 election led the Supreme Court to annul a presidential result, the first time that had happened in Africa. Whatever you made of his politics, a continent learned that a count can be questioned in a courtroom.
He was Prime Minister in the years when Kenya gave itself the 2010 constitution and the counties that came with it. He never held the office he wanted.
I know a little about going again. I passed my KCSE, but my marks were not enough for medical school. The dream was still alive in me, so I changed systems and sat in Form 5 and Form 6 to earn another chance, this time in the United Kingdom. The University of Bath accepted me, but for pharmacy, and the scholarship I had hoped for did not come. So the road turned to Tanzania and the University of Dar es Salaam, and there the medical degree came.
It came because of my mother, Magdalen Achieng Okoth. Hers was the voice that kept me going. She was not embarrassed to ask, and she asked wherever there was a door: Reuters, the Kenya government, the Chandaria Foundation. Because she was not afraid to ask, or maybe because she had no choice but to ask, the scholarships came that kept her son's dream alive. It is one year since we lost her too.
As a country we are hard on the people who try. We laugh at the candidate who lost, the business that closed, the student who repeated a year. I have been all three. Treated this way, people learn to attempt only what is certain. Others are paralysed by the fear of falling, and some become afraid even to speak up.
Kenya goes to the polls in August next year, and the temptation will be to say that nothing changes, so why bother. Of the country as a whole, I ask for only one act of trying. Register, and then vote.
Of some of us I ask more. If you lost last time, at any level, and still believe you have something to offer, run again. If you hold office, treat the petition, the question and the critic as the system working. If you are a parent, be the voice that says go again, and do not be embarrassed to ask on your child's behalf. And if you are young and your first attempt has failed, whether an exam, a clinic or a company, make the second attempt.
Raila did not get what he reached for. He reached anyway, in public, and each reach moved the rest of us forward by a step we now take for granted. You only really fail when you do not try.
He tried. So did my mum. So must I. Your choice is yours to make, but I would not advise anyone to stop trying.
Surgeon, writer and advocate of healthcare reform and leadership in Africa |[email protected]
