In her writings spanning more than two decades in books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, anthologies and lately on X, Rasna Warah was preoccupied by recurring themes. She was, first and foremost, vehemently opposed to Western imperialism. She castigated US violence and its string of forever wars, which she blamed for destabilising countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. She was particularly passionate about the ongoing Israeli war in Gaza because of its catastrophic cost to civilians.
What especially made Warah’s writings stand out was their sheer immediacy and her capacity to link them to the domestic struggles in Kenya. For instance, in an article published in the Elephant titled “War on Gaza has exposed US hypocrisy”, she rightly argued that the Palestinian struggle is akin to the fight against colonialism. To put the matter into historical perspective, Warah observed, “When colonised people take up arms to fight for their freedom, are they terrorists or freedom fighters?”
In the same vein, Warah’s essays persistently singled out, among other ills, bad governance, excessive corruption, and state capture as some of the obstacles preventing the country from making progress. She specially called on us to reimagine what makes us Kenyan and the enormous responsibility that comes with it.
For Warah, the 2007–2008 post-election violence was a major turning point because it exposed the fragility of Kenya’s democracy. She rightly argued that the electoral crisis, which erupted after the disputed 2007 general election, exposed much of the civil society space for not rightly anticipating the crisis that cost more than 1,100 lives and resulted in the displacement of over 600,000 people.
In an article in the Elephant celebrating Gen Zs and highlighting the power of people-centred movements in bringing about genuine democratic change, Warah, with her characteristic use of flashbacks, writes of the failures of civil society after the 2007 violence.
“The Kenyan public was also beginning to question whether CSOs (community-based organisations) and NGOs were, in fact, part of the problem afflicting Kenya’s politics,” she wrote. “Some civil society and non-governmental organisations were viewed as being partisan or aligned to certain political parties or donor countries.”
The above statement also points to the growing discontent, even among the political class, especially in the lead-up to the 2013 election. This would lead to Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto – both International Criminal Court indictees and contenders for president and deputy president, respectively – to open a long-drawn-out war with civil society. The Jubilee administration (having won the election but still deeply bitter and insecure) would start referring to the civil society as the “evil society”. The political bitterness and unresolved grievances were born out of the feeling that elements within the civil society were out to have them jailed after being accused of committing crimes against humanity in the previous polls.
In her articles, published in the Daily Nation, Debunk Media and Africa Is a Country, Warah constantly wrestled with the question of deepening socioeconomic inequality, and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots.
This might explain her recent forceful writings on the acrimonious falling out that followed the tabling of the Finance Bill 2024. For example, while supporting the spontaneity and organic nature of the Gen Z-led protests that reached their peak with the storming of parliament on 25 June last year, Warah wrote of the growing power of new digital technologies to help mobilise and challenge political power structures and authority.
Warah compared the nationwide demonstrations to the Occupy Wall Street movement that took hold during Barack Obama’s presidency in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis [and] the “Arab Spring” in North Africa. The comparison was deliberate. Warah was actually situating the Kenyan youth revolt within a global trend of rage and discontent against political and business elites.
More recently, Warah took to confronting government apologists on X for allegedly lying to Kenyans and peddling false hopes, even as the cost of living weighed down the “hustlers” to whom President Ruto promised better lives.
One of her last writings recounted her painful journey after breast cancer diagnosis. It was a moving account that highlighted the astronomical cost of cancer care, the fear of our own mortality, the myths surrounding cancer treatment, and the benefits and dangers of chemotherapy. Warah, in deep reflection, wrote that having cancer “is like having an enemy residing in your body, hostile, predatory, waiting to pounce at any moment”. The enemy finally pounced on Saturday 11 January. She was 62.
Warah was born in 1962 at the Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi. From 2010, she was living in Malindi with her husband, Gray Phombeah. A prolific author, Warah is best remembered for books such as Triple Heritage: A Journey to Self-discovery (1998), Mogadishu Then and Now (2012), War Crimes (2014) and Unsilenced (2016).