Tajudeen’s influence was profound

It is said that those we love, the gods love more. And it is also said that we never realise the extent of our love until it is lost.

Both sayings are true, as was brought brutally, painfully home to me over the past two weeks. First by the loss of the brother of one of my closest friends.

And then by the death this past Monday of Dr Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, probably best known for his role as secretary general of the Pan African Movement.

But he had many other roles as well. Kenyans exiled and resident in London through the 1980s knew him as one of their strongest allies in the struggle for democracy — not just in Kenya but in Ghana and Nigeria as well as for the struggle for Eritrean independence.

The outpouring of grief from across the continent and beyond, from Africa’s foremost thinkers, from the highest levels of leadership to the most normal of citizens is, I think, without precedent.

There is no other African who was so known by so many from all walks of life in all African states — and this without being a head of state of Nelson Mandela’s calibre.

THIS GRIEF IS MANIFESTING ITSELF in ways that will last — apart from the memorials already conducted in Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Pretoria and planned for Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania and the United Kingdom. His home state in Nigeria will be naming a school or street in his honour.

For he was such an extraordinary person. Big in body, laughter and voice, he could be heard coming a mile away. Big in engagement with all things African, big in spirit in terms of his embrace of any African concerned about the continent.

I met him first a decade and a half ago, at a conference in Arusha — ostensibly convened to discuss the Rwandan refugee crisis in the region only a year after the genocide, but more importantly, to address the politics around humanitarian aid in the Rwandan refugee camps, in which it was already clear the Interahamwe had taken control, effectively preventing the Rwandan Patriotic Front from demobilising them.

But beyond the angry debates — aimed at shifting the key international humanitarian actors in the region — there was the side of Tajudeen that anybody and everybody he drew into his ambit knows so well.

The evenings filled with food and laughter — as well as the inevitable arguments about African politics, the dissections of the players therein and all of their relationships.

From him, over the years, I learnt a huge amount about Africa and its movers and shakers. And, through him, I met many of them — with his benediction, as so many of us found, doors swung open, not just politically and professionally, but personally.

HE APPROACHED ORGANISING IN A very personal way. While he was still based in Kampala (only leaving when he finally disagreed with Yoweri Museveni over the latter’s third term), I never needed to tell him that I was there.

He would either be involved in whatever I was there for, or hear that I was there and simply appear — sweeping me and anybody else he could find away for fish or meat and another of those long evenings, at which always there were other Africans from whom could be heard directly what was happening in their own countries.

He had just had, on Saturday night, a similar evening at his house here. And then Monday morning, came a telephone call at about 6 am. He was gone.