Oyunga Pala is a Kenyan writer, journalist, and editor, whose literary craftsmanship spans over two decades. With narratives drawn from the global African community, he has kept readers engaged and provoked a rethinking of African modernities through versatile content curation, editing, creative-writing for print, magazines, radio, television, and the film industry.
Exploring the boundaries between the extreme and the everyday, while deliberately challenging stereotypes of African ‘Otherness’, Oyunga remaps the African world beyond its geographical boundaries. He insightfully examines circumstances that afflict African migrants and diasporas by devoting his energy to exploring the fullness of the human experience.
As a chronicler of the modern African experience, Oyunga attends to the specificity of location and the ways that culture, geography, history, and architecture shape experiences. He attends to the dense texture of everyday life and the varied practices of African self-making by carefully observing the big and small things motivating human interaction thus challenging any claims to a single African story.
Oyunga currently resides in Amsterdam.
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The Ones We Lost: How Reflecting on Death Helps Us To Lead A Meaningful Life
For many years, Oyunga has chronicled stories of life and death as both existential and ritual experience among the Luo community, Kenyans, and Africans at large. Since 2020, he has explored the themes of Living and Dying. Life exists in the midst of death and yet death remains one of the most disruptive affairs of our lives. The book revolves around the idea that the stories of death are the stories of life, and by focusing on how our loved ones died, we extract lessons for living fulfilled lives that prepare us for the inevitability of death. It focuses on how we can unravel the mystery of the separation, by accepting the reality of death and what it is meant to teach.
Contents.
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- Is this How I die?
- Baba’s Gone
- The Unmournable Ones
- The Urban
- Children of a Revolution That never Was.
- Comedy and Tragedy
- Death of a Father figure.
- The Pugilist
- Our Man in Somalia
- Memories of Silence
- Fall of a Rugby Great
- Gone, without a whisper
- Dani is dead
- Digging your own grave
- Death in a strange land.
- Here But I’m Gone.
- The Winter of our lives.
- Baptism by Fire.
Epilogue
The Ones We Lost, is an anthology that comprises a collection of short essays and curated obituaries drawn from a two decade career as a columnist and a participant-observer of Kenyan social reality. Each story is independent but also interconnected, weaving the common thread of using those stories of those who died as a mirror to raise awareness in how we take responsibility for our lives.