Raila Amolo Odinga – the Alternative Social Actor in Kenya

Raila Amolo Odinga’s life and political career were marked by a persistent tension between centrality and marginality, an inherited peripheral position reproduced through decades of detention, exclusion, and periodic recall to power during national crises. His death in India in October 2025 and the return of his body to Kenya crystallized this spatial symbolism. This study examines how Kenyan political cartoons, themselves a peripheral genre within news media, framed Odinga’s death and whether they granted him posthumous entry into the political centre or reaffirmed his location at the periphery. Using a qualitative design, four cartoons published in major Kenyan print and digital media were purposively sampled and analysed through Barthes’ two-order semiology, Entman’s framing theory, and Galtung’s and Wallerstein’s centre-periphery theory. The cartoons repeatedly seek to restore Odinga to national centrality, dignity, and belonging, yet each also exposes structures that sustained his marginality. The study conceptualizes this unresolved pattern as mythological suspension, whereby collective grief produces emotional resolution while leaving structural accountability incomplete and political reckoning remains unfinished after death.