Former Prime Minister Raila Odinga, was once taken through a bizarre ritual to guarantee safe passage into Europe.
Back in 1962, Odinga embarked on one of the most daring journeys of his young adult life, as he headed to Europe via the unpredictable Mediterranean Sea.
Once Gibraltar was withing view, the crew aboard Raila's ship gathered all the passengers in preparation for a strange age-old ritual meant to bring good luck during the dangerous voyage.
"Seamen believe that, before anyone tries to navigate any of these dangerous waterways, they must undergo a ceremony of preparation for what lies ahead," the ODM party leader narrated in his 2013 autobiography, The Flame of Freedom.
The crew entertained Odinga and his fellow voyagers with tales of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle as well as scary stories of countless ships that had gone down in the boiling waters around the Cape of Good Hope.
It was for these precise reasons that the ship's crew insisted that Odinga would have to undergo the full ritual.
"The ritual was done so that the waves of the sea and the creatures of the deep ensure their safe passage," Raila explained.
Once they were sailing through the calm straits of Gibraltar, the initiation process began after the sound of a blaring siren.
Raila and his fellow passengers scampered off to different hiding spots as per the instructions, with the strangely dressed crew was tasked with spotting each one of them and initiating them individually.
"When they found me, they grabbed me and held me by my hands, shouting, hitting me, and dragging me up the staircase on to the deck. By now I was feeling rather intimidated - and worse was to come," the former PM writes.
He was then forced into a steel pipe about 45cm in diameter where he was flooded with water to within an inch of his life before the merchant ships' captain pulled him out and declared him purified.
"I was given a new name as a disguise so that the spirits of the deep would imagine I was a fish and would spare me in case we shipwrecked. My name was Seenadel - sea needle in German," the charismatic opposition leader recalled.
