Rasna Warah, 63, who died last Saturday after a two-and-half-year battle with cancer, missed writing her column— the bullhorn for speaking truth to power.
Her consistent writing, spanning over 20 years, tapped into public outrage and channelled into social conscience. Even in the fragmented spaces she came to occupy in online publications and on social media, her opinions deeply resonated with readers in Kenya and across the world for their brilliance, penetrating analysis, fearlessness and humanity.
She burst into the national limelight with her inimitable turns of phrase when she was only 29, at the time the youngest opinion writer, with her take-no-prisoners feminist column, ‘Straight from the Heart’, published in The Standard. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kenya was a bull pen, and then President Daniel arap Moi was the leader bull.
Although her father, Kulwant Singh Warah, owner of the historic Studio One on Moi Avenue, had photographed Moi— as well as many other political potentates— evidence of which is available on Kenya’s currency notes, Rasna was unimpressed by the president’s machismo, performed by muting women and making them invisible.
History provided the spring for the moral courage that would be her north star throughout her life. Earlier, a 10-year-old girl with big round eyes had stood clutching her father’s hand as the train whistle pierced the Nairobi morning air. The coaches pulled into the railway station, and a flood of brown-skinned humanity spilled onto the platform. They were fleeing for their lives.
In August 1972, Idi Amin gave a 90-day ultimatum for the 80,000 Asians in Uganda to leave for “milking Uganda’s money”. The railway their grandfathers had built to Uganda, would be their road to salvation.
Detail in the picture of a community being profiled would fill out a decade later when the government in Tanzania, rapidly nationalised Asian businesses; and the image would granulate further when Indian shops and homes were looted and women raped during the attempted coup by the air force men in Kenya in 1982. That picture would define the little girl’s life mission to bring down barriers and stereotypes constructed by fear, ignorance, injustice and inequality.
Born in 1962, a year before Kenya’s independence, at The Aga Khan Hospital, in Nairobi to Manjit Kaur and Kulwant Singh, Rasna defines herself as a Kenyan through historical associations.
Her great-grandfather came to Kenya from Lahore, then part of India, to work on the railway. When Lahore became part of Pakistan, her family lost their ancestral home. Building the Kenya-Uganda railway with indentured Indian labour enabled the British to extend their imperialism into East Africa but it also marked an important site of the history of Kenyan Indians and the beginning of a new life for many families.
Rasna’s autobiography, Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self Discovery, published in 1998, traces the record of the Kenyan Indians in an effort to understand herself as a child of three worlds. She observes that the contribution of Indians to British rule in East Africa “left them with neither the authority of the oppressor nor the humanity of the oppressed”.
Being a member of a minority group— Indians, recognised as the 44th tribe in 2017, number just under 100,000— left her dangerously exposed in the cauldron of Kenya’s ethnic politics, where power and protection issue from numbers. She did not help herself, by her own account, by marrying a man from a super minority community. She and Gray Phombeah, the legendary journalist renowned for his writing ability to put life in a stone, married secretly and it took her a long time to tell her mother. Acceptance was not automatic.
Rasna’s dry humour showed during an interview with the BBC on her mother and her marriage: “She’s been practising voodoo on him,” said Rasna, laughing. “She is always sending us her pickles and without fail Gray and I have an argument after we have eaten them.
“Finally I admitted to him that it was my mother sending them and he said: ‘That’s the reason! You know, in Africa we never eat food sent by our enemies!’”
“It’s so exhausting being Asian in Kenya,” she would groan. Despite the hardships, Rasna was never going to quit on Kenya.
Her global education opened her eyes to the world beyond her community and Kenya, and she would bring it all back home. She had attended high school in Naini Tal, a small hill station in northern India, and she would have studied botany and zoology at the University of Nairobi had she been the conforming type. Instead, she enrolled for a psychology and women studies degree at Suffolk University in Boston, US, where she lived for five years. Thereafter, she earned a master’s degree in communication for development from Malmo University in Sweden.
Nairobi, even with its chaotic matatus and absence of pedestrian-friendly development, has always been home.
While working for UN Habitat, where she served as editor for a decade, she visited Mathare and Kibera slums as part of her work and saw first-hand Nairobi’s dehumanising inequalities that make it a highly unlivable and insecure city.
Still, even in that misery, she could still discern an unbeatable optimism and zest for life. She and Gray retired to Malindi to escape from a city going to seed, but she was tormented by the huge lizards in her house and the crushing poverty and exploitation all around her that imprisoned hundreds of thousands. Always alert to the dynamics of uneven power, one of her most cherished memories of visiting rural Kenya was when she was gifted bananas in the former Central Province.
Her departure from a well-paying UN job is a sore spot in her life: She blew the whistle on the use of less than honest statistics as well as misconduct and suffered retaliation. Her two books, UNsilenced, on the culture of cover-ups, corruption and impunity, and Lords of Impunity, described by former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga as a compelling argument for change, are testaments to her courage and doggedness whenever a fight picked her.
A prodigious reader, Rasna edited the anthology of essays on development, missionaries, mercenaries and misfits, and published a collection of her essays and articles, Red Soil and Roasted Maize as well as the two books on Somalia, Mogadishu Then and Now and War Crimes. She contributed the short story, ‘The unbearable heaviness of comfort’ to Kwani? and ‘Have Another Roti’ in Nairobi Noir .
Fluent in English, Kiswahili and Punjabi, her words sliced like a scimitar; her tweets terrified the duplicitous because they had truth as the common denominator.
The powerful and the crooked would tremble when she began to shout down the barriers of cultural stereotypes, social injustice and political impunity.
Besides the Nation , for which she wrote for 12 years, her byline featured in Africa is A Country and Debunk Media as well as the Mail & Guardian and The Guardian of the UK.
Last year, when discussing possibilities of returning to mainstream writing, she emailed saying: “We are rapidly descending into a full-blown dictatorship. I do miss my column and it would be great to be able to write regularly again but how can I do it now when I have to weigh every word and wonder if [someone] will come after me? These are dangerous times.”
In this life, it was impossible for Rasna to fade away meekly. She was the prickly conscience of her nation. She would never contemplate leaving the battlefield even when she was deeply wounded.
Last year, when the youth-led protests broke out, she saw a glimmer of hope and believed the new generation had seized the baton for driving the struggle forward: “The protests demonstrated that it is possible for Kenyans to rally around a cause without being chaperoned or persuaded by any political leader or politician.”
She would dress in the long Asian tunic, the salwar kameez, and accessorise with an African necklace and flashing red lipstick. In difficult moments, Rasna was always there for people— the only charge she levied was integrity. She opened her home to writers, offering her signature samosas, allowing them to grieve and regroup after tumultuous events, and was the alternate host when the late editor Ali Zaidi was not convening poets, playwrights, painters and writers. She could be honest to the point of tactlessness, generous to a fault, and always grateful, especially for the outpouring of support after she was diagnosed with cancer.
Even when she was struggling, Rasna’s expenses, including paying fees for children from disadvantaged families.
Describing the cocktail of paranoia and mediocrity that defined the cult of Moi-ism— characterised by disappearances, and sedition crackdowns, years ago, she told the BBC: “People were even afraid to think, in case their thoughts could be seen.”
