The Story Behind Raila’s Favourite Song ‘Jamaican Farewell’

LWhen Raila Odinga’s voice filled the television studio that January evening in 2020, softly singing the opening lines of Jamaican Farewell, few could have imagined how prophetic that moment would become.

The veteran politician, relaxed in his Karen home, had chosen to share with NTV’s Joseph Warungu not a political manifesto or a campaign promise, but something more intimate: a song that had travelled with him through seven decades of life.

The melody itself carries a history as layered and complex as the man who made it his anthem. Jamaican Farewell emerged in 1956 from the pen of Irving Burgie, a Brooklyn-born songwriter who performed under the name Lord Burgess.

Burgie, whose mother hailed from Barbados, had served in an all-black United States Army battalion during World War II.

It was during those years, stationed far from home, that he first picked up a guitar and began weaving together the Caribbean folk melodies his mother had shared with him as a child.

After the war, Burgie attended the prestigious Juilliard School on the GI Bill, studying voice and honing his craft. By the early 1950s, he was performing at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard, singing Caribbean folk songs to audiences hungry for something beyond the conventional pop fare of post-war America.

It was there that fate intervened in the form of a mutual friend, William Attaway, who introduced Burgie to a young singer of Jamaican descent named Harry Belafonte.

Belafonte himself embodied the Caribbean diaspora experience.

Born in Harlem in 1927 to a Martinican father and Jamaican mother, he had spent eight formative years of his childhood in rural St. Ann, Jamaica, attending Wolmer’s School in Kingston.

Those years in Jamaica, breathing in the island’s music and folklore, would later become the wellspring from which his artistic identity flowed.

The collaboration between Burgie and Belafonte proved alchemical. Together with Attaway, Burgie composed eight of the eleven songs on Belafonte’s 1956 album Calypso, including both Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) and Jamaica Farewell.

The album made history as the first long-playing record by a single artist to sell over one million copies in the United States, remaining at the top of the Billboard charts for 31 weeks.

Jamaica Farewell is written in the mento style, a Jamaican folk music tradition that predates reggae and ska. Burgie crafted the lyrics as a meditation on departure and longing, painting vivid images of a sun-drenched Caribbean coast and the bittersweet pain of leaving behind a loved one in Kingston Town.

The song’s gentle melancholy, wrapped in a lilting Caribbean rhythm, created something that transcended geography and spoke to anyone who had ever said goodbye.

What Burgie and Belafonte could not have known was how this song would ripple across continents and generations.

The song was translated into multiple languages, including Swedish, German, Vietnamese, and Bengali. In Bengal, one version even became an anthem for the Naxalite revolutionary movement in the 1970s, proof that a song about personal farewell could resonate with political struggle.

It was this universal quality that drew Raila Odinga to Jamaican Farewell.

As the son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Kenya’s first vice president and a towering figure in the independence movement, Raila grew up in a household where politics and music intertwined.

The 1950s and 1960s, when Belafonte’s calypso craze swept the world, coincided with Kenya’s own journey toward independence and Raila’s coming of age.

In that 2020 interview, Raila recalled the musical landscape of his youth with evident nostalgia. “When we were growing up, Harry was up there. We had Cliff Richards, Elvis Presley, Jim Reeves, Ray Charles, and there was also Louis Armstrong. But Harry was my favourite, and my best one was the Jamaican Farewell,” he said. The song had even been translated into Kiswahili, he remembered with a chuckle, making it part of East Africa’s musical vocabulary.

But Jamaican Farewell was more than nostalgia for Raila.

The lyrics spoke directly to his own life’s trajectory: the constant motion, the departures, the partings from comrades and causes.

“Down the way where the nights are gay, and the sun shines daily on the mountain top, I took a trip on a sailing ship, and when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop,” he sang in his interview.

Those lines could have been written about his own political odyssey, from the lecture halls of East Germany to the detention cells of Nyayo House, from the opposition trenches to the grand halls of power.

The refrain held particular poignancy: “But I’m sad to say, I’m on my way, won’t be back for many a day.”

For a man who spent years in detention, who watched political alliances form and fracture, who campaigned for the presidency five times, the song became a kind of personal psalm.

Three years earlier, in 2017, he had sung the same song for KTN News anchor Betty Kyallo, suggesting it had become a ritual of self-expression, a way of articulating what mere political speech could not.

Harry Belafonte himself understood this power. Beyond his musical success, he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement, maintaining a life insurance policy on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with Coretta Scott King as the beneficiary because Dr. King believed he couldn’t afford it. Belafonte used his platform to advance justice, much as Raila would dedicate his life to the pursuit of democracy and reform in Kenya.

The song’s composer, Irving Burgie, lived to see his creation become a standard covered by artists from Jimmy Buffett to Carly Simon.

His songs sold over 100 million records worldwide, and he also wrote the national anthem of Barbados after the island achieved independence in 1966. Burgie passed away in 2019 at age 95, never meeting Raila Odinga but having touched his life profoundly through six minutes of melody and verse.

In those final years, visitors to Raila’s Karen home often heard music playing softly in the background during their conversations, the classics from his youth providing a soundtrack to reflection.

He spoke less about politics and more about life’s simple pleasures: a cup of tea, an old record, time with family. The restless sailor seemed, finally, to be contemplating harbour.

The symbolism of Jamaican Farewell cuts deeper still.

In Burgie’s lyrics, the sailor must leave “a little girl in Kingston Town,” his heart remaining behind even as his ship sails on.

For Raila, Kingston Town was Kenya itself, the land he could never fully abandon despite the personal cost of his political journey.

His heart remained embedded in the soil of his struggles and triumphs, among the people whose hopes he had carried for more than half a century.

There is a particular kind of wisdom in choosing a song like Jamaican Farewell as one’s favourite.

It acknowledges that life is movement, that commitment requires sacrifice, that the pursuit of distant horizons means leaving safe harbours behind.

Yet the song is not bitter.

Its melody is gentle, even hopeful. It speaks of return, of memory, of love that persists across distance and time.

Belafonte once described his childhood years in Jamaica as formative, the place where he absorbed the rhythms and stories that would define his art.

Similarly, Raila’s political consciousness was forged in the crucible of Kenya’s post-independence struggles, in the stories of resistance his father told, in the contradictions between the promise of uhuru and the reality of power.

When news of Raila’s passing broke, Kenyans turned to social media to share their grief. Among the tributes, the lyrics of Jamaican Farewell resurfaced again and again.

It was as though the nation had collectively remembered that their departed leader had already told them, in song, how his story would end: with departure, with longing, with a promise that though the voyage must be made, the heart remains.

The song’s final verse carries a weight that seems almost unbearable now: “My heart is down, my head is turning around, I had to leave a little girl in Kingston Town.”

In the grammar of metaphor, this became Raila’s relationship with Kenya, a love story marked by devotion and disappointment, by hope and heartbreak, by an unwillingness to give up even when victory seemed impossible.

Irving Burgie died in 2019, Harry Belafonte in 2023, and Raila Odinga in 2025.

Three men from different continents, connected by a song that speaks to the universal human experience of departure. Burgie’s autobiography, published in 2007, was titled after his most famous composition: Day-O. One wonders what title Raila might have chosen for his own memoir, had he written one. Perhaps simply Jamaican Farewell would have sufficed.

The song endures not because it offers easy answers or happy endings, but because it acknowledges a fundamental truth: that meaningful lives are often lived in motion, sailing toward uncertain destinations, leaving behind what we love in pursuit of what we believe.

For Raila Odinga, who spent eight decades navigating the turbulent waters of Kenyan politics, Belafonte’s gentle ballad was more than a favourite song. It was a mirror, reflecting back his own journey in melody and verse.

As Kenya lowers her flags and raises her voice in remembrance, perhaps we should all listen again to Jamaican Farewell.

Not as background music or nostalgia, but as what it became for one man: a philosophy, a prayer, a promise that even in departure, even in farewell, the voyage was worth taking.

The sun still shines daily on the mountain top. The ship has sailed. But the song, like the man who sang it, lingers on.