This is a book about professionals who get committed to their work, who turn that work into a cause.
Praxis, Power and Passion is about the professional ‘going back to the roots’ or rerouting their knowledge to the source.
Rarely do Marxist or socialist thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci or Agostino Neto appear in public conversations in Kenya these days. Who still remembers Marxism? Who is Gramsci? Is Marxism that thing about overthrowing some order or having a revolution? Is it about workers and capitalism and capitalists? The proletariat and bourgeois? Well, are these not terms and philosophies of the past; of a time when the world was divided between the East and the West? Haven’t we all been liberated from communist or Marxist thinking after the fall of the Berlin Wall?
But why would Gramsci and Neto excite anyone reading a book by a Kenyan? Because both thinkers promote the idea of praxis. Although sounding very much a classroom term, praxis happens when the classroom experience (theory) and lived reality (practice) meet. Thus, even though Praxis, Power and Passion: My Medical Journey Through Africa (2025) by Dr Ernest Omenge Nyamato, is a very personal story of a doctor who worked in Kenya, and across Africa, especially in public health. This is a book about professionals who get committed to their work, who turn that work into a cause and what they discover in the encounter between them and the people.
