Rasna Warah, the Kenyan writer, journalist and author who died on January 11, 2025.
I knew she was dying. She had told me so herself in an extended telephone call just before Christmas, on December 22.
She called to inform me that she was losing the fight to a cancer that had ravaged her body for more than two years.
Nevertheless, I was still shocked, and terribly saddened when I got the message last Saturday afternoon that Rasna Warah had passed on at the age of 62.
I was at one of those ‘mbuzi’ sessions where men from the neighbourhood gather round to deliberate on community affairs, while enjoying barbequed goat ribs, mutura and other delicacies, washed down with generous amounts of muratina and other lubricants, when I got the news of Rasna’s exit.
Most inconvenient timing, I thought, as from then on I was rather distracted, frequently stepping out to receive and make various phone calls while surreptitiously wiping away the tears.
For a moment, I thought of leaving the gathering to head back home where I could grieve privately while carrying on the conversations with Rasna’s wide circle of friends and colleagues within the media and social activism fraternity, but then remembered that telephone call from three weeks earlier.
While pretty distressed, Rasna was resigned to any eventuality. She was adamant that she did not want any wailing or extended mourning once she exited, and informed me that with her husband, celebrated fellow journalist Gray Phombeah, they’d already started putting in place arrangements for her cremation.
So I stayed on, nursing my private grief unknown to the rest of the mbuzi group. That December 22 telephone call was the last of many long conversations I had had with Rasna since she was diagnosed with cancer around the middle of 2022.
Our long conversations
She had called me with the news while aware that I was caring for my wife, Christine, who was also battling the ‘Big C’. In many ways, we became sounding boards for each other. She informed me that from the onset she had decided to go for alternative medicine rather than the conventional route of chemo and radiotherapy.
We kept a close conversation after that, sharing information on the respective progress of her regimen and my patient.
When my wife passed away in early December that year, Rasna was one of those who called frequently, not just to condole with me, but to share stories of courage and resilience.
Our conversations were not limited to grief and illness. We discussed politics, the state of the media, the decline of civil society, the shenanigans evident in international ‘do-gooder’ organisations and development agencies, all subjects close to her heart.
What came out was that Rasna was not afraid of death, but deeply concerned about unfinished business. Even when in pain and accepting the reality of terminal illness, Rasna exhibited more concern about the State of the Nation, particularly narrowing civic space and brazen human rights abuses since the Jubilee coalition duo of President Uhuru Kenyatta and his deputy William Ruto was elected in 2013, a regression accelerated under President Ruto from 2022.
She was often resigned to the fact that opposition political leaders mandated to keep the government had abdicated their cardinal responsibilities and were intent on being admitted onto the gravy train.
But what pained her most was that media, civil society, religious organisations, academia, professional associations and the other groupings that provided the intellectual input and organisational strategy for the campaign against one-party dictatorship at the beginning of the 1990s, and the route to a new constitution from that period up to 2010, had been effectively cowed into submission.
She worried about the families she was in her small way supporting around the environs of her home in Malindi. She was concerned how her husband Gray, a legendary journalist in his own right who, in retirement had become her loyal, loving and principal caregiver, would cope while battling his own health challenges.
Conversations were not so much about her, but about family, friends, neighbours, colleagues and the future of her beloved country.
Rasna was a unique person. Many would assume that hailing from a prominent Kenyan-Asian family, she would be a child of privilege. Of Sikh heritage, her father had formed and run the famous Studio One on Nairobi’s Moi Avenue, a legendary photographic studio where virtually all of Kenya’s rich and famous had their official and family portraits taken.
The shop window display was a veritable gallery of who’s who in Kenya that had patronised the place, featuring the likes of First President Jomo Kenyatta, his first two Vice Presidents Oginga Odinga and Joseph Murumbi, two later vice presidents who rose to the presidency Daniel arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, as well as the likes of Tom Mboya, Charles Njonjo, J.M. Kariuki, and Masinde Muliro.
Rasna could have inherited the family business, but chose instead a path that few in the Asian community take: She embraced her Kenyaness, plunging wholeheartedly into media, social and political activism.
Her social circles and her work shifted from the tightly-knit and often self-isolating Asian community to the broader palette that makes the Kenyan nation. In the process, she not only voluntarily presided over her own disinheritance, but also isolation and ostracism from her roots and racial identity.
That was the ultimate sacrifice from one who chose her country Kenya, over tribe, race, colour, religion and other identifying factors.
Yet for such a brave and forward-looking choice, she often had to bear cheap, racist jibes from fellow Kenyans, those who dismissed her as a ‘muhindi’ for merely exercising her rights to free speech and having the temerity to criticise those wielding political power and authority.
She was not alone. Rasna was part of a small band of Kenyan Asians who recognised that Kenya is their only home, and determined that they could not shut themselves up in a cocoon of economic privilege, but join hands with others in helping build a free and prosperous future for all.
In those ranks stood fellow patriots like lawyers Yash Pal Ghai and Feroze Nowrojee, land justice campaigner Davinder Lamba, editors Salim Lone and Zahid Rajan, rights activists Zarina Patel and publisher-printer Anil Vidyarthi.
Those, in turn, were worthy successors to an earlier generation of Kenyan Asians who, in the pre-independence period, gave heart, soul and resources to the struggle against colonial oppression and occupation. The list includes luminaries such as politicians Pio Gama Pinto, lawyers Fitz de Souza and Achroo Ram Kapila, trade unionist Makhan Singh, merchant Alibhai Jeevanjee (Father of Zarina Patel), publishers Manilal Desai and Girdhari Lal Vidyarthi (father of Anil Vidyarthi) among many others.
Incidentally, the senior Vidyarthi was the first journalist in Kenya to be charged with sedition, by the colonial regime, in 1946 for publishing articles in favour of freedom for Africans. His son, Anil, was the last person in Kenya to be charged with sedition, by the independent government in 1998 for publishing articles against corruption and dictatorship.
Another worthy post note might be that Rasna was preceded into the hereafter by another icon of the Asian community in Kenya, Hindpal Jabbal, 87, who was an authoritative consultant in the Kenyan energy industry. Unlike her, Jabbal was not a loud social justice activist, but still a respected and fierce voice within his chosen sphere.
He campaigned against electricity generation models that emphasised super-profits for cartels within the sector pushing corrupt independent power production deals at the expense of both domestic and industrial consumers condemned to high electricity bills.
A recent newspaper tribute referred to him as the son of a trade unionist, missing the fact that he was the son of the legendary Makhan Singh, a pioneer labour leader in Kenya who was also the scourge of the colonial administration.
Rasna approached everything she did with passion and dedication. When she took a sabbatical from local media to work as an editor with United Nations Habitat, the break afforded her the opportunity to study first hand, document and expose the corruption, incompetence, racism and general rot within the UN system and international development agencies operating in the region.
The sojourn spawned two books on Somalia, War Crimes: How warlords, politicians, foreign governments and aid agencies conspired to create a failed state in Somalia and Mogadishu Then and Now: A Pictorial tribute to Africa’s most wounded city.
Others include UNsilenced: Unmasking the United Nations culture of cover-up, corruption and impunity, and Lords of Impunity, an insider’s account of theft of donor funds, sexual exploitation of refugees and other outrages within the global body.
Shared pain of cancer
For those efforts, she became a persona-non-grata at the United Nations offices in Nairobi and some of the major aid agencies.
She also authored Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery, which delved into the history of the Kenyan-Asian Community.
In the local media, Rasna was a prolific contributor at different times to the Nation Media and Group and Standard Group stables, as well as small independent outlets such The Elephant and Kwani?.
That last call from Rasna was not just a farewell, but a search for answers. She wanted to know why people behave the way they do, and if there is hope for humanity. She was wondering if all her work and efforts toward a better Kenyan had been in vain.
She told me frankly that she was reaching the end of the road, unable to take in or hold down any food, and wanted to know what my wife had taken when lack of appetite hit hard.
We discussed options in liquid foods in home-made chicken and vegetable soups, or high protein shakes available at pharmacies that contain all the daily nutritional requirements. None of that seemed to excite her.
Another option, to boost appetite and combat nausea, was marijuana. When my wife was very sick, I can reveal, a friend got her some bhangi gummies (sweets) that were approved for medical use in the United States.
Her local doctor had no objection to trying them out, but we never got to dispense them because she was admitted to hospital shortly afterwards for the last time.
It was the shared pain of one being a cancer victim and the other a carer for a loved one suffering the same scourge that brought Rasna and I closer together. We always had so much to discuss in hours of telephone conversations, that often ended up with us both in tears, me crying for her pain and she crying for my loss.
Fare thee well, my friend. Aluta Continua.
