Pope Francis Dead! Aga Khan Dead! Pheroze Nowrojee Dead! Alack! 2025 is a Doomsday Year!
I have had a good privilege of living during respective time of leadership of each of the last four Popes of the Catholic Church. I was young, not yet mentally developed, but the sharp and stinging news of death of John Paul I in August 1978 was beyond escape on excuse of being young. Voice of Kenya (VOK), Then the only Radio station in Kenya at that time announced and re-announced how Albino Luciani,(family name of Pope John Paul I ) had died only after last 33 days in the office as the Pope. It was a moment of strange feelings given the peaceful situation at that time in the sensethat news about death was not common, and no Pope had ever died within such short duration in the office at such a young age.
In spite of the ever breaking nature of news about mysterious death of Pope John Paul I , I was unfortunately immature and young to know who and what was the person in Pope John Paul I. Twenty years later, I luckily came across In God’s Name, a book by David Yallop, written in a style of investigative journalism , chronicling events before and after the death of John Paul I. In this book, I learned that Albino Luciani was an energetic, intellectually dynamic, morally combative and imaginative Pope. He was morally and intellectually a challenge to Karol Wojtyla, his successor, who became John Paul II. Consciousness about Luciani must have inspired moral uprightness and characteristic intellectual resilience in Wojtyla.
Resilience and spiritual as well as intellectual braverypersistently dominated Wojtyla’s social character and life in his spiritual leadership. This character was imperatively some kind of professional asset given that towering intellectual competence was a basic requirement for pontifical leadership. Otherwise, if the office of the Pontiff had someone else with lesser intellectual mettle, Christian Poland would have been swept away under the forceful reality of global revolutionary consciousness of the time. Both Luciani and Wojtyla were charismatic and very comfortably at easy with the poor.Contrastingly, Ratzinger, who became the successor to Wojtyla, as Pope Benedict the VI, was a top-class radicalthinker, a polished Marxist with bourgeoisie consciousness that left him with no tincture of interest in uplifting the poornor using the church to work for ecological harmony and substantive equality.
Pope Francis, came to the pontifical office after Ratzinger. Pope Francis has been charismatic in socialization, warm in personality and exuding hope each and every time in each and every place. He came to Kenya in November 2015 when the country was under stark grip of collective hysteria from recurrent events of Islamic led terrorism, during this time terrorist attacks here and there were at the peak. Only for Pope Francis to humorously dismiss the collective public fear that was evident among the people by stressing that ‘he had fear for the mosquito, but not the terrorist’. It was a veryrationalizing and hope-restoring statement that revamped the fire of hope among the people of Kenya at that particular time.But anyway, just as Okot P’Bitek would put it, Pope Francis has now ‘gone to the land of no return’. Yes, visiting the land of death is a no return journey. It leaves the gap behind to be borne by the living ones. I agree, death of Pope Francis is a deep loss to the current human society, it is a gap we can not fill now, it will take time to be filled.
Pope Francis has just died when the world has not yet healed the wounds it recently suffered in the death of the Aga Khan.Especially, for those of us who come from the poor world, precisely Africa, and more precisely Kenya. We were deeply wounded given that Aga Khan was a substantive solution to our challenge of medical poverty, education poverty, mass communication poverty and money market poverty. Since 1963, Aga Khan have been using personal money to establish modern hospital facilities, modern kindergartens, modern primary schools, modern secondary schools, modern high schools and university institutions, not forgetting to mention people focussed Diamond Trust Bank in different countriesand regions of East Africa. I mean, the Aga Khan entrepreneurship spirit in East Africa is the living example of revolutionary struggle against tyranny of poverty. Or if I can ask, what else is an effective revolution other than fighting disease among the poor, promoting education at all levelsamong the poor, promoting agricultural science and medical technology among the poor, promoting good health care among the medically vulnerable and establishing money market infrastructures that observe extensive practice of social banking and corporate social responsibility without class-based prejudice and exploitation of the local masses?
Clearly, Aga Khan entrepreneurship is an effective model of social revolution that aims at improving quality of human life through people friendly entrepreneurship while at the same time avoiding with all measure the temptation to succumb toprimitive accumulation of riches.
As a Global South Citizen and a friend of literature, I also want to observe in this article that death of Pope Francis hasjust come when the literary community is still grieving the untimely passing on of Mario Vargas Llosa. For those of us that enjoy consuming literature, we can recognize the depth of loss, when we imagine the inexhaustible capacity of Llosa to create insuperable fictions, well researched non-fictions, intellectually glowing essays as well as intellectual bravado as a praxis of literature which Llosa often displayed in his fearless political socialization when he is crusading for human rights, freedom, ecological civilization and social democracy in Peruvia, his country of birth and other political spacesbestriding Latin America.
Deep down at home in Kenya, things have not been good.Death has been stocking our intellectual and leadership fraternity. Within the past four months (Jan to April 2025), we have already lost over five towering intellectuals and organic scholars of irreplaceable stature, and if at all they can be replaced, then not within the foreseeable future. The untimely deaths of polished scholars like Prof. Abdalla Said Bujra(social Anthropology scholar), Prof. Bethwell Allan Ogot (Historian) and Pheroze Nowrojee (Constitutional Lawyer) is one other daunting and taunting experience to the people of Kenya, but most impeaching of it is to the global communityof lovers of freedom, knowledge and reason. Most disturbing is the collective insouciance among Kenya’s current political class to the death of Pheroze Nowrojee. Even though Nowrojee has been ignored by the political class in Kenya, the fact remains that all the current good things in Kenya’s politics are outcomes of Nowrojee intellectual audacity and struggle as a constitutional lawyer during the second liberation of Kenya. During the struggle, he was always in court defending the victims of political un-correctness, healways did this without asking for money. After the liberation, the people he had defended in court used advantage of the numerical strengths of their clans to be elected to powerful positions in government. Most of them forgot about the ideals of struggle in the second liberation only to embark on using the newly acquired political offices to achieve primitive accumulation of money and riches. Nowrojee did not change, he retained his clean revolutionary consciousness, he remained in his law firm working for genuine income, henever wavered from the call to protect democracy, this is why he kept on writing poetry of freedom. He retained his slender and tall physique with a very warm encouraging deep chested laughter to the very late. His eyes were sparkling and sharp,focussed on defending justice through good governance. They are such musings that can make one to cry; Pope Francis Dead! Aga Khan Dead! Pheroze Nowrojee Dead! Alack! 2025 is a Doomsday Year!
Alexander Opicho is a Poet, Short Story Writer, Essayist, Playwright, Culture Critic, and Corporate Trainer from RCMRD, and write from Nairobi, Kenya