Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2012 Print ISBN-13: 9780195382075 Published online: 2011 Current Online Version: 2011 eISBN: 9780199857258 Dictionary of African Biography Edited by: Henry Louis Gates, Emmanuel Akyeampong, and Steven J. Niven Odhiambo, Elisha Stephen Atieno 1946–2009), a historian of political and cultural ideas and practice in East Africa, was born in Liganua, Alego, in western Kenya. Educated at Liganua, Nyadhi, and Hono schools, he excelled at Alliance High School before attending Makerere University, where he took his BA in 1970. Following further studies at Oxford, he completed his PhD in 1973 at the University of Nairobi under Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot. He took up a post in history at the University of Nairobi, teaching there for nearly two decades. In 1989, he joined the Department of History at Rice University, Houston, Texas, where he was the first black tenured member of the faculty. In the 1970s and 1980s, he held visiting faculty positions at Syracuse, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. In 2008, he retired for medical reasons, returning to his western Kenya home at Ndere with his wife Jane. His 2009 death in Kisumu followed a lengthy illness. He left four children. Both at Nairobi and in Houston, Atieno Odhiambo was a spirited mentor of rising young scholars in the fields of African history and African cultural studies, encouraging research into previously unrecognized aspects of Kenya’s past. His scholarship was punctuated not only by philosophical reflection, but also by exquisite references to facets of everyday life, from the word games of Kenyan children to shifting styles of dress and verbal expression, to the personal documents of people as varied as local teachers, grave diggers, and kiosk merchants. At several conferences, workshops, and seminars he offered poignant commentaries in the form of song, calling up experience as a gifted chorister at Alliance High. A historian dedicated to excellence in research and teaching of Kenya’s past, his writings included references to the historical experience of other societies and nations. Likewise, he moved fluently across the social sciences and humanities, drawing shrewdly from diverse literatures, including eastern African fiction, poetry, and popular and traditional music and writers and social critics, such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Atieno Odhiambo’s studies of the political and social contours of the worlds of Kenya’s white settlers, taken up first in his 1973 Nairobi PhD thesis, revealed an alertness to contradiction, debate, interpretation, and representation as well as a capacity to understand how old orders and strongly held ideas and practices could engage, condition, and shape new economic and political forces and conditions. His first books— The Paradox of Collaboration and Other Essays (1974) and Siasa: Politics and Nationalism in East Africa , 1905–1939 (1981)—demonstrated that Kenya’s histories could not be easily synthesized into a common, national narrative; indeed, he gave notice that historians must recognize the ways in which histories were being produced in a multitude of different settings. While one should not abandon the challenge of synthesizing history, Kenya’s untidy past and complex cultural repertoires could not be stripped clean for the benefit of a modern national historiography. His early writing on Mau Mau reflected on the implications of “Mau Mau historiography” amid a search for some kind of unified history of Kenya and of decolonization. Indeed, he early took up the stance of a historian of historians, histories, and historiographies. In the 1970s, his was a metahistorical position unfamiliar to many working the furrows of recovering East Africa’s past, though the sociology and politics of producing history was certainly the subject of steamy debates in junior/senior common rooms at the University of Nairobi. Later, Atieno Odhiambo would join with Professor John Lonsdale in a dedicated engagement with scholarship on Mau Mau and Nationhood (2003). If a unified Kenyan history could be produced, it required more than an assemblage of pieces and regions. It would be constituted in the recognition of the salience of difference and contest—especially over class, wealth, access to resources, and power—as much as the commonality of experience and affinity. Here, Atieno Odhiambo’s deep knowledge of the life of Kenyan and Luo leader Oginga Odinga— signaled in Atieno’s publications in the 1970s on the Luo Thrift and Trading Corporation (LUTATCO)—moved understanding and meaning away from ideological labels and political categories toward a search for a new historical literature informed by fresh approaches in the fields of political economy, historical sociology, comparative politics, and historical anthropology. Over a fifteen-year period, he collaborated with historical anthropologist David William Cohen on several articles and three books navigating different yet overlapping phases of Kenya’s past: Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (1989); Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (1992); and The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990 (2004). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Atieno Odhiambo gave support to a number of Kenyan academics and intellectuals who were arrested and detained by the government. In 1986, he himself was detained and tortured during an extended period in Nyayo House, Nairobi; the charges against him were never stipulated. Following his departure from Kenya in 1989, and over his two decades in Houston, he sustained his links to colleagues, family, and neighbors in Kenya through nearly annual visits home and through organizing workshops and seminars for students and scholars of Kenya in Houston. [ see also O , J O ; and O , B .] bibliography Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. “From African Historiographies to an African Philosophy of History.” In Africanizing Knowledge: African Studies Across the Disciplines , edited by Toyin Falolo and Christian Jennings, pp. 13–63. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Find this resource: Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. “ ‘The Song of the Vultures’: A Case Study of Misconceptions about Nationalism in Kenya .” Journal of Eastern African Research and Development 1, no. 2 (1971): 111–122. Find this resource: Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. “A World-View for the Nilotes? The Luo Concept of Piny.” In African Historians and African Voices: Essays Presented to Professor Bethwell Allan Ogot , edited by E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, pp. 57–67. Basel: P. Schlettwein, 2001. Find this resource: