Kenyans are wont to refer to Raila Odinga , the long-reigning 80-year-old opposition leader who died on Wednesday, as the “Enigma of Kenyan politics,” a reference to the title of a 2006 biography of him penned by the Nigerian author, Babafemi Badejo. His unequalled ability to survive, even thrive, at the top of the country’s political landscape for decades confounded his rivals and inflicted headaches on the regimes he plagued. But I think he would be best remembered as more mirror than mystery: the personification of Kenya’s tragedy.

The son of Kenya’s first vice president, he carved out a path as a crusader for freedom and better governance that led him from the country’s prisons and torture chambers to some of the highest political offices in the land. But at the end of his life, th

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