ADONG AROM GI BAO MA KANERA
May I grow as tall as the eucalyptus tree in my uncle’s homestead
SOMETIME AROUND 1830, in a homestead to the south of Winam Gulf in what is now Nyanza in western Kenya, a young woman gave birth to a boy behind her simple mud hut. By tradition, she was probably alone for the birth, but older women were at hand in case she got into difficulty. The baby was the second son of Obong’o, who was by now well established in the Kendu Bay area. Nobody can recall the name of the baby’s mother, nor the names of his sisters, for the Luo are a patrilineal society and women don’t figure in genealogy. Nor does anybody know the exact year the baby was born, least of all the month or the day. Yet we know that young Opiyo was the firstborn of twins,1 for the Luo have a tradition of bestowing on their children names that describe something about their birth. Piyo means “quick,” or in this context, the quicker of two twins to emerge. Opiyo’s family have no record of the name of the second-born twin, who would, by tradition, have been called Odongo if a boy, or Adongo if a girl (dong means “to be left behind”). If the twin was a girl, then her name would not be recorded in the oral history of the family, and if the baby was a boy, we can only assume that he died as an infant.
Opiyo grew to be a strong and respected leader among the Luo of south Nyanza and his family went on to prosper in their settlement in Kendu Bay. However, his arrival into the world was not greeted with the universal joy usually associated with a newborn son. In Luo society, twins are considered a bad omen for a family. As is customary among the Luo, the local women wailed and cried following the announcement of his birth; this was intended to scare away the evil spirits that had brought about the double birth. His mother’s parents, who lived in a village nearby, were also quickly given the unwelcome news, for it was important that they too know about the calamity that had befallen the family. The new parents also subjected themselves to a variety of rituals that were intended both to protect their children in their vulnerable first few days of life and also to relieve themselves of the taboo and social stigma attached to bringing twins into the world. Obong’o and his wife had to give up their normal clothing, wrapping tree-vines around themselves for several days after the birth. Obong’o’s wife was confined to her hut for several days, and she relieved herself in a large earthenware pot hidden at the rear of her hut. If Opiyo’s younger sibling did in fact die during these early days, then its body would have been callously tossed into the pot as a form of penance. This period of taboo could not be broken until the family performed a special ceremony several days after the birth.
These complex and elaborate ceremonies surrounding the birth of the twins were only the beginning of a lifetime of rituals for young Opiyo. These traditions are an essential part of Luo life, and to ignore them would leave a person vulnerable to the omnipresent forces of evil—not to mention ostracism by family and neighbors. Although Christianity now exerts a powerful influence on the lives of most Luo, many of these rituals are still as important and relevant today as they were when Opiyo was born, more than 180 years ago.
Traditionally, a Luo woman marries long before she reaches her twentieth birthday and usually gives birth to her first child within a year of marriage. Although Opiyo was his mother’s second son, she was likely to be still young when she gave birth to him. Opiyo’s father, Obong’o, had three wives, and he spent three or four nights with each woman before directing his attentions to another. He was expected to have sex with one of his women every night, and his wives frequently competed among themselves for his attention.
Aloyce Achayo, a retired headmaster and a Luo cultural historian, explained the subtle ways in which the wives might have vied for Obong’o’s attention:
Let’s say that you have four or five wives, and you come back to your homestead at the end of the day. As you are coming in, an astute wife will send her children to help her husband. In this way, the children will bring their father back to their mother’s hut, and so the man will now go to that home first.
Children are prized in Luo society, and women were expected and encouraged to have many children. It was something of a collective effort: setting aside her rivalry with the others, Obong’o’s first wife, Aoko, would sometimes advise him to sleep with a younger wife if she knew one of them was coming into the fertile stage of her monthly cycle. Like all Luo men, Obong’o slept in a small hut called a duol, and he would creep out after dark to discreetly visit the wife of his choice for the night—always returning to his duol before daybreak.
After Opiyo was born, his mother cut the umbilical cord with a piece of sharpened corn husk called a muruich and then smeared her newborn son with butter—a tradition that was both symbolic and practical, as the grease reduced the baby’s loss of body heat. Next she dug a shallow pit and buried the placenta within the family compound—another important symbolic gesture to tie the child to the family and the tribe, and an act that was even more significant because he was a male.
The Luo believed that anybody with bad intentions toward the family could harm the baby through witchcraft in the days after the child’s birth, so following the burial of the placenta, mother and child were confined to her hut for four days. This period inside her hut also had the practical advantage of allowing the baby and his mother to rest and bond before the celebrations began. Although no one except for Obong’o was allowed to enter, people still brought copious quantities of food to the hut because it was believed that mothers who had just given birth needed lots of food; in fact, new Luo mothers are called ondiek (hyena). For the next six months Opiyo was breast-fed; eventually his mother would gradually wean him off her milk and begin to feed him a gruel made from finely ground millet flour and water. By the time he was two years old, Opiyo would be eating the same food as adults.
On the fourth day after his birth, Opiyo was brought out at dawn and placed just outside the door to the hut, carefully watched by his parents, who sat a safe distance away. This ceremony is called golo nyathi, literally “removing the baby,” and it represented Opiyo’s introduction to the world. Golo nyathi usually marks the start of a great celebration, particularly for a healthy newborn male. But as Opiyo was the firstborn of twins, the family participated in a different type of ritual. Several days after the birth, Obong’o and his wife joined the rest of their extended family in a ceremony where large quantities of beer were consumed. By tradition, the dancing that accompanied the revelry was intentionally licentious, and the family referred to the couple in the foulest and most obscene language imaginable. The proceedings were intended to lift the taboo from the parents, although the ignominy of being a twin would haunt Opiyo for the rest of his life.
On the fourth day after the birth, Obong’o had sexual intercourse with his wife. The couple carefully placed Opiyo between them before making love, a ritual that is called kalo nyathi, literally, “jumping over the child.” Many events in Luo life need to be consummated by sexual intercourse; in this case it symbolized that the child belonged to the couple. The ritual was also a form of cleansing after the birth, in the hope that another baby would soon follow. If Obong’o had sex with any of his other wives before kalo nyathi, the Luo believed that Opiyo’s mother would never conceive again. To be safe, Obong’o would sleep with the new mother for several weeks after the birth. Opiyo’s final birthing ceremony occurred a few weeks later. It was called lielo fwada, “the first shaving of the child,” when all of the baby’s hair was removed. In many parts of Luoland, this ceremony is still practiced today.
The names of Luo children can tell you a lot about the individual and their family. Traditionally, babies are given two names (and sometimes more), and nicknames are also commonly used. The first, personal name says something about the child’s birth: Otieno is a boy born at night, Ochola is born after the death of his father, Okoth is born during the rainy season, Odero is a boy whose mother gave birth by the grain store, and so on. The child also takes the father’s personal name as a surname, so Opiyo’s full name was Opiyo Obong’o.
(Of course, the Luo may adopt other names when it suits them, which can cause some confusion. The name Obama was frequently used across generations; Opiyo’s elder brother and Opiyo’s second son both had it as their personal name. The name is thought to have originated in the early eighteenth century. Opiyo’s great-great-grandfather was called Onyango Mobam—Mobam means “born with a crooked back,” indicating that he was probably born with curvature of the spine—and the name presumably became corrupted to Obama.)
A girl’s personal name usually begins with an A, so Atieno is a girl born at night, Anyango was born between midmorning and midday, Achieng’ is a girl born shortly after midday, and so on. When a woman marries, she becomes known by her husband’s surname.
The vast majority of Luo, probably more than three-quarters of them, use this unique form of naming. However, when missionaries brought Christianity to Luoland in the early twentieth century, some people began taking Christian names when they were baptized. Therefore Charles, Winston, Roy, and David are all common first names for boys, and Mary, Sarah, Pamela, and Magdalene are typical girls’ names. Barack (which means “blessed one” in Arabic) is unusual, and it comes from President Obama’s grandfather, Onyango Obama, who converted to Islam while in Zanzibar after the First World War. (When Barack Obama defeated John McCain in 2008, practically every child born in Nyanza that night was called either Barack or Michelle, and both names have remained very common ever since. It is something that will cause chaos in Nyanza’s primary schools in about three years’ time!)
Opiyo’s younger brother, who was probably born around 1835, was called Aguk. Normally this is a female name (the male version being Oguk, meaning a boy born with a humped back; together with the name Mobam, this hints at some genetic abnormality in the family). However, a boy is occasionally given a female name (or a girl a boy’s name) to indicate something significant or prestigious about the birth. For example, the only boy born into a large family of girls might be given his mother’s name to mark the honor of giving birth to a male heir; conversely, a girl could be named after her grandfather if he was particularly respected within the community, or if he was a renowned warrior and hunter. This reversal of names confers a special status on the individual. A woman with a man’s name, for example, will often be offered a chair to sit in when she is waiting in line, or she might receive a small discount when she is out shopping.
One final layer of naming that is very common in Luoland is the use of nicknames, which are always related to where the individual lives. A man from Kendu Bay might be referred to as “Jakendu”—in this case the preface Ja- is used in combination with the village or township of a man. A woman from the same location might be nicknamed “Nyakendu.”
As a young boy, Opiyo grew up in a large, extended family, with many brothers and sisters. The family homestead was also home to any widowed grandmother in the family, and the girls would gather in her hut, called the siwindhe. Girls usually moved out of their mother’s hut at a relatively young age, so as not to disturb their mother and father when he visited at night. In the siwindhe they learned about appropriate behavior for a Luo girl, the mores of the clan, and the sexual and social duties expected of them; it served as a classroom in a society without formal education.2 Opiyo’s grandmother also presided over storytelling and verbal games in the siwindhe. Friendly arguments often broke out over the precise interpretations of ngeche (riddles), such as “Which is the pot whose inside is never washed?” (The standard answer is “Your stomach.”) Sometimes the children were asked to solve a riddle that had several potential answers: “What is the four-legged sitting on the three-legged waiting for the four-legged?” The standard answer would be a cat sitting on a stool waiting for a rat, but children vied to find alternative answers. The girls stayed in the siwindhe with their grandmother until they married.
The most important area in the compound for Aoko, Obong’o’s first wife, was the agola, or veranda outside her hut, where the thatched roof extended beyond the mud wall, supported by pillars. Most of the domestic activities took place on the agola, including grinding flour, cooking, and tending to the chickens; a traditional hearth sat here, consisting of three large stones that raised the pots above the fire. Obong’o’s wives used traditional earthenware pots of varying sizes to prepare meals, with each pot kept exclusively for one particular food. Even today, the Luo will tell you that cooking in an earthenware pot is far superior to using aluminum saucepans.
After the day’s work was finished, Opiyo and his brothers would join their father in his hut for their evening meal. (Single men slept in their own bachelor huts, known as simba.) The men always ate separately from the women and girls, and Obong’o’s three wives would cook in the evening and bring the food to his hut. This was one of the few occasions on which they would ever come to his duol, which was always the preserve of the male members of the clan. The staple food was kuon (called ugali in Swahili), a dough made from hot water and maize flour; it is usually rolled into a lump and dipped into a sauce or stew. Everyone ate with their fingers (and still do), and ugali is used in a variety of creative ways when eating; sometimes a thumb depression is made in the dough to create a scoop, or it is flattened into a thin pancake and wrapped around pieces of hot meat. Fish, either fresh or sun-dried, was also popular, eaten stewed or roasted. The meal was supplemented with vegetables and legumes from the home garden, or anything that could be collected in the forest, including mushrooms, fruit, honey, and even termites.
Traditionally, certain foods were not eaten by certain members of the family; women, for example, would not eat eggs, chicken, elephant, or porcupine, and men would never eat kidneys. Obong’o, as head of the household, was served the best meat, such as the cuts from around the chest of the animal, the tongue, liver, and heart. The women ate the intestines and other offal. The skin of the carcass would then be tanned and used for clothing or bedding. After the meal, Opiyo’s father would talk to his sons about Luo legends and stories of their ancestors. The discussions in his duol would dwell mainly on heroes, battles, bravery, and hunting, and in this way the oral traditions of the tribe were passed down through the generations. Like the girls, the boys too would play verbal games, asking riddles and telling stories. After their anecdote, each of the storytellers would close with the phrase Adong arom gi bao ma kanera—“May I grow as tall as the eucalyptus tree in my uncle’s homestead.”
The Luo have a long tradition of entertainment and partying, and even today, Luo are some of the best musicians and dancers in Kenya. During important ceremonies such as weddings and funerals, Obong’o would invite a musician to play the nyatiti, an eight-stringed wooden lyre. This was played either as a solo instrument or with an accompanist on the drums or some other percussion. Nyatiti sessions were great social occasions, and people would make requests or ask the player to repeat a piece. Any request had to be paid for, often with a chicken or a useful household object. Other musical instruments included the ohangla (a drum made from the skin of a monitor lizard), horns, and flutes.
Beer drinking was also an important part of these social events. The best Luo beer is called otia, and it is brewed from sorghum flour that has been fermented, dried in the sun, cooked and fermented again, and finally strained. The men drink the beer warm, sipping from a large communal pot with a long wooden straw called an oseke, sometimes up to ten feet long. The men always use their right hand to hold the straw, because this is the hand that represents strength and integrity. (Left-handedness is viewed with suspicion by the Luo, and left-handed children are forced to use their right hand for eating and to greet people.) Another type of beer is mbare, which is made from brown finger millet flour, called kal. This is not cooked but, like otia, is dried and refermented. (The fermented grain left over from beer making is a useful by-product that the Luo leave outside for wild guinea fowl to eat. The residue, which is still potent, intoxicates the birds and makes them much easier to catch.)
Often the adults also smoked tobacco or took snuff during these social events, and they smoked bhang (marijuana) from calabashes. Opiyo would have played games with his siblings and neighbors at these parties. One popular game that is still played in Luoland is ajua, which uses small pebbles on a board with two rows of eight holes; adhula, a form of hockey, was also popular; and sometimes the young men would play a type of soccer using a ball made from rolled banana leaves. Another sport was olengo (wrestling), which gave the young men a golden opportunity to show off their strength and physique to the girls from neighboring villages.
When he was around fifteen, Opiyo faced one of the most important ordeals of his life: the traditional removal of his six lower teeth. Both boys and girls underwent this ceremony known as nak, which was performed by specialists in the community called janak. By tradition, Opiyo’s parents were not given advance notice that their son was being prepared for his initiation into adulthood. The practice was widespread in Luoland until the middle of the twentieth century, when both the government and missionaries tried to discourage it. Despite this, nak is still performed today in some rural villages in Luoland, and even in certain churches in the main city of Kisumu.
It is still very common to see older men with their lower teeth removed. Joseph Otieno, a retired farmer in his late sixties, lives in a remote community in Gangu in western Kenya. He still remembers with total clarity the day of his nak:
The ceremony was usually done during the summer in August. The night before the ceremony, I crept into my mother’s granary and stole a basket full of millet. This was my reward.
My sister came to my hut, and she escorted me the next morning to the ceremony. That morning when I went, I felt brave because it was my initiation into manhood … because all the Luos go through the same thing. I had to kneel down, my sister held my shoulders, and I opened my mouth. The way they did it was to use a thin, flattened nail to remove my teeth. They forced the flattened nail into my gums to loosen each tooth. You can’t be afraid—you must be strong.
You could not reach the age of twenty without your teeth being removed. There were some people there who were afraid, so they put a stick in their mouth to keep it open. If you are too fearful, which some people were, then a group of boys would come and hold you down.
I asked Joseph what the significance was to the Luo of having their front six teeth removed:
Number one, the reason why they were removing this is that sometimes people can get sick, and this would be a gap where they could feed you food or drink.
Number two, if you die anywhere [away from home], then people would know you were a Luo.
The third one, it was an initiation into adulthood, and it shows that you are now no longer a child. Luos are not circumcised, so this was our initiation. If you didn’t do it, then your agemates would not walk with you. If it wasn’t done, I would have to stay in the house all day. It was painful, but we had to go through it.
Afterward, my mouth bled for eight days.
Joseph made the whole experience sound straightforward and perfectly normal, but I knew that the nak ceremonies didn’t always go quite so smoothly. Leo Odera Omolo is a Luo journalist who lives in Kisumu. He too had his lower teeth removed, but against his will:
When I was young, I lived away from home a lot of the time, and I did not want my teeth removed. When I was about eighteen, I returned to my parents’ house one day for a short visit. That night I was grabbed by several young men from the village and they dragged me from my bed. My parents insisted that I should have my teeth removed, otherwise it would bring shame to my family. It was done forcibly. The boys held me down and the janak pulled out my six lower teeth with pliers.
As a young boy, Opiyo spent most of his days tending his father’s growing herd of cattle, taking them out to the pastures in the morning and returning with them every evening. But once he had undergone nak, Opiyo became an adult and an important member of his clan. As he grew older, his father, Obong’o, and his uncle Ogola taught him to hunt. Wildlife was still very common around Kendu Bay during the middle part of the nineteenth century, and the animals—antelope, buffalo, warthog—were an essential food source for the family. Opiyo learned how to throw a spear and shoot a bow and arrow, and he went off on regular hunting trips with his brothers. These hunting expeditions were not without danger; the African or Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer), for example, is one of the most unpredictable and thereby dangerous animals in Africa, often turning and attacking with little provocation. (Today, only the hippo and the crocodile kill more humans in Africa.) Lions, leopards, hyenas, and poisonous snakes also made Opiyo’s hunting forays risky affairs.
Opiyo now also had the opportunity to really make a name for himself as a warrior. One of the reasons the young men did not marry until they were nearly thirty was because of their responsibilities as fighters; the defense of the clan was a priority, and being a warrior was a form of “national service” expected of all young men. (Only sons whose family lineage depended on them to produce an heir were exempted; such boys might be married as young as fifteen and would not be expected to fight.) The young Luo were always prepared for war, and frequently skirmished with other clans and tribes over land, cows, resources (such as grazing rights for cattle), and sometimes women. Disagreements also arose during social gatherings, such as the succession fight between Owiny Sigoma and his older brothers at their father’s funeral.
Platoons of warriors were organized for battle along family lines, based on the principle that kinship strengthens the bond between combatants. The clan leaders called the fighters by blowing a small sheep’s horn called a tung’, which made a high-pitched wailing sound that could be heard a long distance away. Once the warriors were assembled and ready to fight, the oporo was blown; this was a low-pitched booming horn from a bull or buffalo. This sounded the attack, and the young men of the clan, often high from smoking bhang, would advance on the enemy. The fighters were armed with spears (tong’), war clubs (arungu), and arrows (asere). For protection, the men carried a shield (okumba). The kuot, an even larger, body-sized shield, was made from three layers of African buffalo skin and would deflect even the most powerful spear or arrow. A village elder would select a spear and fold its blade in on itself; this was the first missile to be thrown at the enemy, in the belief that this act would render the enemy’s spears ineffectual.
The battles could be bloody affairs, and in the aftermath the job of recovering the dead and wounded fell to the women, who remained safe from attack by the enemy under widely accepted rules of warfare. The women carried the dead and injured back to the homestead, where they were greeted with loud wailing. If the clan had been victorious in battle, the returning warriors would stomp their way back to the compound in elation, thrusting their spears skyward and chanting the agoro—the victory song. It was taboo for those fighters who had killed in battle to enter the homestead through the main gate; instead, they waited outside the compound until a new opening was made in the thick euphorbia hedge for them to enter. Inside, their wives and mothers waited for them, smeared with dust, to celebrate their safe return. The fighters then underwent a cleansing ceremony that involved swallowing tough strips of raw lung from a billy goat; the goat skin was also cut into strips, which were tied to the wrist of the successful warrior and around his spear, one strip for every man he had killed in battle. The goat’s heart was then removed and the warriors also ate this raw before their heads were symbolically shaved as a mark of victory.
The next major episode in Opiyo’s life was his marriage. Every member of the Luo community is expected to marry, and anybody who remains unwed is viewed with suspicion. Usually Luo men take their first wife in their late twenties, and very few men are unmarried by the time they reach thirty-five. As with all Luo ceremonies, Opiyo’s marriage followed a strict protocol that was designed to strengthen family ties. A suitable girl was selected by an aunt or a marriage maker, called a jagam or “pathfinder.” The Luo are strict about this selection and do not allow marriage with any relative, however distant. Opiyo’s first wife, who was called Auko Nyakadiang’a, came from the Kardiang’ clan several miles away. Opiyo visited the family and met the chosen girl; either one of them could refuse the union at this stage. Traditionally the girl is coy about the approach and is expected to play hard to get. After several refusals, she eventually agrees to the marriage.
The lineage of a prospective partner is keenly scrutinized by both the family and the village elders. If, for example, the prospective bride’s father was a known liar or practitioner of witchcraft, then a marriage into that family would be considered unwise. Likewise, any hereditary conditions such as epilepsy would have negative connotations for the union. As with all Luo betrothals, final approval for Opiyo and Auko’s union rested with the village elders.
The next stage is the negotiation of the bride-price, which would have been paid by Opiyo’s father to Auko’s family, and which can take up to three years to organize. It is often paid in installments, but the total typically involves twelve cows or more, and at least one goat (for ceremonial purposes). Once the bride-price was paid, Opiyo could claim his bride in yet another elaborate ritual. One day he stole off to Auko’s village with his two brothers, Obama and Aguk; their intention was to kidnap his intended in a ritual known as “pulling the bride.” Having moved out of her mother’s hut when she reached puberty, Auko was now living in her grandmother’s siwindhe in preparation for her marriage. Opiyo most likely bribed Auko’s grandmother to be conveniently away from her hut when the crucial time came for him to claim his bride. As part of the ritual the girl must always resist the attempt to be taken, and there is every chance that her screams will be heard by her brothers, in which case a fight will ensue. This was no token skirmish—the young men in the girl’s village are determined to prove their mettle by putting up a serious resistance to the kidnapping, and in return, the kidnappers are expected to show their determination to take the girl.
Opiyo was successful in “pulling” his bride, and he took Auko back to his simba, inside his father’s compound. That night they consummated their marriage, again according to ritual, as Aloyce Achayo explained:
The very day the lady is brought back, they are married. What will happen now is that a group of girls [from the bride’s village] will come at night, maybe forty or fifty girls, following this girl who was pulled. And that is called omo wer. If those girls don’t come, there is no sex.
The bride and the bridegroom come into the house for their first experience, and the consummation has to be witnessed by two or three girls who are almost the same age as the one who is being married. Outside, the other girls are singing all night. They don’t sleep. If this particular girl is found to be a virgin, there is very big joy from the girl’s side. A big, big joy.
Very early in the morning, these girls will go back [to their village] with the news that she was or wasn’t a virgin. During our olden times the majority used to be virgins. On their first meeting, the blood will show. She will sit on a stool, which will then be carried back to the girl’s home to be shown to the mother.
The third stage of the wedding ceremony occurs on the morning after the consummation. As the omo wer girls return to the village, they meet the older women coming in the opposite direction to celebrate the marriage. This is called the diero, the wedding celebration of the women. The next day the men—including those who forcibly resisted the pulling of the bride—have a diero of their own at the husband’s home.
The final ceremony occurs a few weeks after the wedding day. After the marriage has been consummated, the bride asks a handful of her friends to remain behind in the village to keep her company in her new home; they stay for as long as a month. Then the bride’s girlfriends return to their village for a final celebration, the jodong. Opiyo and Auko returned to her home to visit her family, with Auko leading a goat behind her. Once they reached her parents’ home, the animal was slaughtered, its neck cut from behind in the traditional Luo manner, to mark the beginning of the jodong. As many as sixty people would have gathered for much eating, drinking, dancing, and singing.
The homestead where Opiyo grew up in Kendu Bay was laid out in exactly the same way as that of all the neighboring clans. The huts were ringed with a thick euphorbia thorn hedge to keep out enemies and wild animals. A typical Luo compound had two entrances through the hedge: a formal, main gate that was always used by visitors, and a smaller gap at the rear of the compound that allowed people to take a shortcut to their fields. The largest hut in the compound, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter, belonged to Opiyo’s father’s first wife, and the door to this hut faced the main entrance to the compound. Any visitors to the homestead were directed to introduce themselves at this hut, for it was the first wife who always ran the compound. To the left of the big hut was the house of Obong’o’s second wife, identical in every way to that of his first wife, but slightly smaller. To the right of the big hut was the home of Obong’o’s third wife, again slightly smaller still. In this way, the huts of all the wives were built on alternate sides of the first wife’s hut, each slightly smaller in size. Each wife also had her own granary or dero next to her hut, but generally they would work together to cook meals for the whole family.
Obong’o’s hut was smaller even than that of his youngest wife, but as he spent most nights elsewhere, there was little point in having anything too grand. As head of the homestead, he used his hut for holding council with his fellow elders and for discussing family business with his three sons. Women never came to Obong’o’s hut unless they were summoned or to bring food to the men.
Once Obong’o’s sons reached puberty, they moved out of their mother’s hut and built their own shelter inside the compound. Obama was Obong’o’s eldest son, and he built his simba first, close to the main gate to the compound and just to the left of the entrance. When Opiyo came of age, he too built his own simba, but this time to the right of the main gate; his younger brother Aguk built his simba to the left of the entrance to the homestead, thus following the same pattern as the women’s huts. In this way, the young men of the family guarded the entrance to the family compound. The wives’ huts in the upper part of the compound and the sons’ houses near the entrance to the compound were deliberately arranged to be a respectable distance apart.
Before he was married, Opiyo enticed local girls into his simba. This was expected of him, and periodically Obong’o would pass quietly by his son’s simba at night to check that his son’s social (and sexual) development was on course. Although both boy and girl gained sexual experience in this way, the girl would almost always draw the line at full penetrative sex, for virginity was, and still is today, expected of all brides.
The sons also had to get married in order of seniority, and once Obama took a wife, she moved into his simba. In time, each of the sons would marry, and their respective wives would move in to start a family of their own. Only when Opiyo had a son could he leave his father’s compound and establish a homestead of his own.
Opiyo’s hut, just like all the others in the compound, was circular, with thick mud walls and a pointed, thatched roof. Visitors had to stoop low to enter the doorway, and the inside was cool and very dark, as the huts had no windows. There was no furniture to speak of: a raised mud platform served as a bed, and scattered animal skins and blankets gave a little comfort for sleeping. A small fire gave some warmth, and the smoke rose into the rafters and helped to fumigate the thatch.
The reaction to an article in one of Kenya’s leading national papers in early 2008 shows the lasting significance of the simba among the Luo. At the time, Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination. The Standard ran a front-page special, with the headline “Exclusive: Obama’s One-Day Visit to Kenya”:
Senator Barack Obama, the man who has caused a sensation in the presidential nomination race in the U.S., is in Kenya for a one-day visit.… Obama will make a public appearance at KICC [Kenya International Conference Centre] where he will sign autographs and speak on peace.
He is later scheduled to leave for his father’s home in Kogelo, Siaya District shortly after midday.
Within minutes of the paper hitting the news stands, crowds were flocking to the conference center in Nairobi to hear the great man speak, and hundreds of callers jammed the switchboards of the local radio talk shows. The rumor soon spread that Obama had been advised that he could greatly increase his chances of success in the election by returning to Kenya and building himself a simba. This, people claimed, would show that he was a true Luo, and somehow impress the American voters. What nobody seemed to notice was the date on the top of the paper: April 1.
For almost every young male Luo, there comes a time when he moves out of his father’s homestead and establishes his own compound. The young men leave their father’s compound in strict order of seniority, so Obama had to move out first before Opiyo could do the same. The youngest son in the family, in this case Aguk, never leaves. Instead, he stays behind to look after his aging parents, and in time he inherits his father’s compound.
Certain other young men also did not qualify to start their own compounds. A man without a family of his own could never move out; nor could he if he had only daughters, as some of the complex rituals involved in establishing a new homestead require both a son and a wife. Nor can a left-handed person set up his own home; the Luo believe that if a left-hander were to establish his own compound, it would lead to the death of his siblings. (Traditionally, left-handed people were also thought to be easy prey for their enemies, and they were vulnerable to magic and witchcraft. According to strict Luo tradition, then, President Obama would never be allowed to establish his own homestead in Luoland on two accounts: he has only daughters, and he is left-handed.)
For several weeks before setting out to build his own compound in Kendu Bay, Opiyo surreptitiously looked around for a suitable location, but he had to be careful not to be seen to be too interested, in case others moved there first or put a curse on the site. The area to the south of Winam Gulf was still relatively sparsely populated in the mid-nineteenth century. In those days, thick tropical forest still covered most of the land; wild animals too were common, and encounters with leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas were frequent.
On the eve before he set out to build his new home, Opiyo had ritual sex with Auko, his first wife. The next morning, he rose before dawn and walked out of the family compound, accompanied by his father, Obong’o; his uncle Ogola; his wife, Auko; and Obilo, his eldest son. Everyone had his or her own specific roles to play that day. Opiyo carried a large cockerel; Obilo a new axe; Auko had a small fire smoldering in an earthenware pot. Upon arriving at the chosen place, his uncle Ogola selected the precise location for the new home, then drove a forked pole into the ground where the very center of Opiyo’s hut would be. Ogola hung a birdcage on one branch of the forked pole, and at the base of the post he carefully placed a piece of soil taken from an anthill they had passed on the way. The bird cage contained a selection of items to bring good fortune to the homestead: a rotten egg to dispel sorcery, stargrass for prosperity, and stalks of millet and maize to attract wealth. Finally, Opiyo’s uncle took blades of modhno grass, tied them into a knot, and cast them down on to the ground; the grass symbolizes a blessing for a new home, and protects against evil forces.
Now the real work could begin on the new hut. First Obilo, Opiyo’s eldest son, cut a pole using his father’s new axe. Opiyo then cleared the site of undergrowth and dug the first hole, into which he placed the pole which his young son had cut; this first hole in the ground always coincides with the sleeping side of the house. Next, Opiyo marked out the outline of his circular duol, and the rest of the party joined in to dig holes for the remaining poles; these would form the main reinforcement for the mud walls. Opiyo took care to put cow dung, modhno, and bware (a medicinal plant) into the holes for the door poles. For the door post, he cut down a powo tree and removed the bark, leaving a smooth surface that would protect the family from the evil effects of witchcraft; negative forces would simply roll off the post to the ground and never enter the house.
With the door pillars in place, the rest of the family and the neighbors joined in to help Opiyo complete his house before nightfall. All day there was a steady supply of help. Women carried water and cooked food for the men, and they also helped carry some of the lighter building materials, such as reeds. The men did all the heavy construction work, such as softening mud to build the walls; they also climbed up and thatched the roof. The house had to be finished by the end of the first day, and when it was completed, Opiyo lit a fire and placed the cockerel inside the duol to crow the next morning. Meanwhile, the family returned to the old home, leaving Opiyo and his son to spend the first night together in their new hut. Opiyo spent four nights in his new duol with his young son, Obilo, which gave him time to build a grander hut for Auko. On the fifth day, his wife moved in and the couple consummated the new hut by having sex that night.
In time, Opiyo took a second wife; her name was Saoke from the Wasake clan and she came from a village fifty-five miles away, on the border between Kenya and Tanzania. Saoke’s home was a long way from Kendu Bay, which suggests not only that Opiyo was wealthy enough to take a second wife but also that his good reputation must have been widespread throughout south Nyanza. When Opiyo married Saoke, he built a hut for her in the family compound. In time, Opiyo fathered three sons, Obilo, Obama, and Agina, and at least two daughters. His middle son, Obama, was born around 1860 and he became the great-grandfather of President Obama.
Living as we do in the twenty-first century, it is difficult to fully appreciate just how independent and self-sufficient Opiyo and his family had to be to survive. They lived in a remote part of western Kenya during the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, a full fifty years before white colonists introduced any form of modern technology. Opiyo and his family grew all their own food, built their own houses, and made their own clothes (such as they were), as well as many of their farming implements and weapons.
Opiyo’s family cultivated two plots of land. The kitchen garden or orundu was usually located behind the family compound and was accessible through the secondary opening in the hedge. The orundu was fenced off to keep animals away from the produce, and Opiyo’s two wives, Auko and Saoke, grew vegetables here, as well as legumes (peas and beans), peanuts, simsim (the Arabic word for sesame), maize, millet, cassava, and African sweet potatoes. The food grown here was usually for immediate consumption. Further away from the compound was their main farm. This was the preserve of Opiyo himself, and here he grew cereals and pulses for long-term storage, creating a strategic reserve for his family to use during times of drought and famine.
In addition to the crops, the family reared cattle, goats, sheep, and chickens. Cattle were, and still are, considered to be the most important livestock for an East African and the main measure of a man’s wealth. The head of the family has to accumulate cattle to pay the bride-price for his sons, although he also receives animals when his daughters are married off. The importance of cattle to an East African can never be underestimated; apart from their prestige value, they also represent an invaluable resource for the family, for they provide milk, meat, skins, and fuel. Sheep are also prized by the Luo and are used mostly as food or as gifts for friends. Responsibility for looking after the livestock falls on the young males in the family, and Opiyo’s sons took turns caring for the animals, usually for three days at a time. (President Obama’s father, Barack senior, is often referred to as having been a “goatherd” during his youth. In fact, he looked after all of his father’s livestock.) The women always looked after the chickens and other fowl, and they would take cone-shaped fishing baskets down to the nearest river to catch what they could.
Opiyo traded surplus food for items he could not produce himself, such as knives and salt. Money would not be introduced until the early twentieth century (by the British); instead, the Luo economy functioned on a sophisticated system of bartering. Not only were there specific exchange rates between commodities such as grain and meat, but when an owner slaughtered a bull to exchange for cereals, each part of the animal was valued differently. The Luo also had a special form of barter called singo, which was a form of promissory note. If a man needed to slaughter a bull for a specific ceremony such as a funeral but did not have one of his own available, he would strike a deal with a neighbor to exchange one of his cows for a bull. Under the singo system the neighbor would keep the cow until it produced a calf, which the neighbor then kept for himself.
One important area of expertise in the Luo community was traditional herbal medicine, which was used to treat both physical and psychological illnesses. Common medical problems included fractures and other physical injuries from accidents or battles; parasites; snakebite; eye infections; and tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), and bilharzia. Snakes are very common in the region and the Luo have a wide variety of treatments, which include mystical therapies as well as concoctions made from as many as twenty-four different herbaceous plants. The most common treatment involves cutting, sucking, and binding the injury, followed by the application of a poultice made from leaves or roots and held in place with strips of cloth or tree bark.
Before the coming of the Christian missionaries at the start of the twentieth century, the Luo believed in a supreme God or life force called Nyasaye, the creator. Nyasaye is all powerful, and he intervenes directly in the daily activities of humans, bringing disease and disaster when displeased. The mystery of Nyasaye is all-encompassing, and he can be found not only in the sun and moon but also in rivers, lakes, mountains, large rock structures, trees, and even snakes (especially the python)—all of which are natural conduits for his divinity. Some devotees even kept a large goat in their house as a living embodiment of Nyasaye. In this sense, the Luo are traditional animists.
The Luo believed that the sun could appear to people in dreams. When this happened, the sleeping individual would become very agitated and might have to be physically restrained as he or she reached out to ask for the sun’s blessing. The individual might also dream of throwing cow dung, human excrement, or seeds toward the sun, and in return he or she would be blessed with wealth in the form of a good harvest or many cattle. Believers also invoked the power of the moon: old men prayed for more wives, young men for a bride, young women for a husband, and married women for satisfaction. Many consulted celestial bodies to help forecast the weather and to predict the future. A ring appearing around the sun signified that an important person had just died, and solar or lunar eclipses were viewed with awe as harbingers of a major event. When these portentous signs appeared, the village elders would gather and deliberate over the most appropriate action to take to avoid disaster.
Belief in the power of Nyasaye is still common among the Luo. In 2003, the appearance of a twenty-foot-long python in a village on the banks of Lake Victoria exposed rifts in the community, pitting traditionalists against modernists. The snake was found by a thirty-five-year-old mother of five called Benta Atieno, who considered it her divine duty to ensure that the female python safely hatched its dozens of eggs. When she first discovered the snake, she ran to tell other people in the village about her find. The elders and other locals considered this to be a special snake, an omieri. If the omieri was cared for, they claimed, good things—healthy livestock, bountiful harvests—would ensue, but if it was harmed, then bad luck would befall the village. They recalled that seven years previously another large python had been killed in the village and a severe drought subsequently struck the area. However, some people, including senior church leaders, called for the snake to be destroyed, fearing that it would take livestock or even harm small children. The appearance of large pythons in Kenyan villages is a common enough event, especially during the rainy season, and so the Kenya Wildlife Service removed Benta Atieno’s snake and released it well away from human habitation.
The Luo also worship their ancestral spirits, both male and female. They believe that man is made up of visible and invisible parts; the invisible part, known as tipo or shadow, combines with the visible part (the human body) to create life. When an individual dies, their body becomes dust and the tipo becomes a spirit, which retains the individual’s mortal identity but becomes even more powerful and more intelligent in the afterlife. Thus the most potent spirits were those of important people, and powerful male ancestors were usually the most respected and the most feared. Spirits can haunt only the living members of their own clan, and the Luo believe that an ancestral spirit continues to exist for as long as those who recognize it are still alive. People perceive these spirits to be agents of both good and evil, and they might claim to see, hear, or smell them when awake, or encounter them in their dreams.
A spirit can become a demon, jachien, when the circumstances of his death and burial are not honored correctly. For this reason, the strict rituals and customs of the tribe must always be followed to avoid the creation of a jachien. The Luo sacrificial ritual involves the consecration of an animal before killing it and sharing the meat among the members of the clan. If the spirits are offended, the head of the family must seek expert help from someone who can best advise what course of action to take.
Within Luo society, there are both sorcerers and healers who claim to have unique spiritual powers and who can call upon juok—a supernatural force—to use in their spells. It is a battle between good and evil, between the jajuok or witch doctor who uses juok against the good of society, and the ajuoga, a diviner or healer, who can offer protection against these evil spells. Opiyo knew that if he needed advice about the future or had worries about his ancestral spirits, he should turn to an ajuoga for help: he is an expert in dispensing medicine and magic for positive reasons; he can diagnose illnesses, prescribe cures, and appease the spirits using sacrifice or other cleansing rituals. Whenever Opiyo visited an ajuoga, he took with him a present, or chiwo. The diviner might contact the ancestral spirits using a number of different techniques, including gagi—literally, “casting pebbles”—or mbofwa, meaning “the board.” This last method involves rubbing two flat wooden blocks together, one of which is much bigger than the other, and summoning the spirits by name. The ajuoga knows that he has contacted the spirit when the smaller piece of wood begins to stick to the bigger piece. For gagi, the diviner tosses wild beans or cowry shells onto the ground and interprets the message according to the pattern they make. These methods help the ajuoga to identify the rebellious spirit that is causing the problem. Most diviners rely on the ancestral spirits for their knowledge, and any consultation with the dead is done in darkness; only the ajuoga can see and talk to the spirits.
However, Opiyo not only feared ancestral spirits; his neighbors could pay a jajuok to use witchcraft and sorcery to bring harm or death to him and his family. (In witchcraft, practitioners use mystical powers to harm or kill others, whereas sorcery achieves the same objective through the use of material objects.) Throughout his whole life, Opiyo lived under the constant fear that a curse could be cast on his family, and he took elaborate precautions to guard against evil. A neighbor might engage a jajuok for a number of reasons; for example, rivalry over land or a woman, or resentment toward a successful neighbor. The Luo believed that by cursing and killing a successful neighbor, you could benefit from their death. Whatever the reason for the dispute, the jajuok acted as a hired hand who could bring death or pestilence, for a fee (usually three cows). An individual could also protect themselves against a jajuok by finding a practitioner at least as powerful as the protagonist, who (for another fee) would conjure up an antidote to the spell.
Jajuok inherited their powers from their fathers and grandfathers, and their techniques varied; some could simply stare at or point the dried forearm of a gorilla at a person to bestow a fatal curse. Others could summon lightning to strike an individual, or slaughter a black sheep or a cockerel to produce a curse to strike morbid fear into their target. Some would mix the blood of a sheep with secret ingredients and leave the concoction in front of the hut of the targeted individual, or alongside a path where they would be sure to pass. In many respects, these techniques are similar to those used in other African societies, and also in Haitian vodou; when they work, it is because people believe in the power of the magic.
Unsurprisingly, practitioners of magic and sorcery were the most feared individuals in Luo society, for they literally had the power of life and death over ordinary people. (The fees they received for their services also made them among the wealthiest.) However, they were also considered to be outside the normal social structure of the Luo tribe and could not live a normal family life.
Belief in witchcraft persists today. Roy Samo is a local councilor in Kajulu, a sprawling village north of Kisumu. He told me how people in the village feared witchcraft and how only recently somebody had directed a bolt of lightning onto a neighbor’s house. I know Roy well, and I asked him almost jokingly what he thought about these traditional beliefs. I was astonished at his response. “Oh, I fully believe in them—they have the power of good as well as evil.” “But Roy,” I said, “you’re an educated man, a devout Christian and a pastor at your local church!” “Yes,” he laughed, “but I am also an African!”
As recently as May 2008 in Kisii district, south Nyanza, eleven elderly people—eight women and three men between eighty and ninety-six—were accused of being witches and burned to death by a mob. Villagers told reporters that they had proof the victims were witches: they claimed to have found an exercise book that contained the minutes of a “witches’ meeting,” including details of who was going to be targeted next. In 2009 Kenya’s Daily Nation claimed that on average, six people are lynched in Kisii district every month on suspicion of witchcraft.
Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, Opiyo Obong’o died. Like many Luo men, he reached a good age due to a combination of a high-protein fish diet and a lifetime of physical labor that kept him lean and fit. Indeed, it is not unusual for men in this part of Africa to live to be a hundred years or more. For the Luo, there is no such thing as a natural death; there must always be a cause. An old man dies not of old age, but because he has been called by his ancestors to join them for further duties in the afterlife.
Opiyo’s death marked the beginning of his last ritual on earth, an elaborate rite of passage for both the deceased and the family who survived him. Even in death, Opiyo was expected to conform to certain traditions. First, it was considered a very bad omen to die at any time other than between two o’clock and seven o’clock in the morning. Today it is possible to preserve a body with formalin; failing that, the body is placed on a bed of sand covered in banana leaves to keep it cool. But in the past, a corpse had to be buried very quickly, and certainly on the day of death before the midday heat emerged. If Opiyo died in the evening and his body lay in his hut overnight, then three goats had to be sacrificed to dispel the bad omen and the evil spirits that would otherwise haunt the family. The goats would be provided by close members of his family, either his brothers or his cousins, and they would be brutally bludgeoned to death instead of having their throats cut. Only by killing the goats in this gruesome way could the evil influences that had caused the man to die be dispelled.
The first that the villagers heard of Opiyo’s death was when his first wife, Auko, began wailing—a high-pitched howling cry called nduru. By tradition, she stripped naked and ran from her hut to the entrance of her compound and back again. Auko then dressed in her husband’s clothes, which she would continue to wear throughout the protracted mourning period. This was the first ritual, which only the first wife could perform. Opiyo’s other wife, Saoke, also showed respect toward her dead husband by wearing his old clothes. Saoke joined Auko in nduru; alerted by the noise, people soon began to congregate outside Opiyo’s hut. Meanwhile, Opiyo’s two married daughters had been told about their father’s death, and they came to the family compound as quickly as possible. By tradition, the eldest daughter had to arrive first; her younger sister could not enter the compound until after the older daughter had arrived.
Long before his death, Opiyo had prepared the skin of his biggest bull for his funeral. He had not only killed the bull himself but also lavished great care in curing the skin, readying it for the day when it would be wrapped around his naked body as a burial shroud. A man never used the skin of a cow—that would only ever be used for a woman. (This practice largely died out over the years from the influence of European missionaries, and most Luo are today buried in wooden coffins.) Opiyo’s body lay inside his duol to the right of the door until later that morning, when he was buried within the confines of his homestead.
On the day of Opiyo’s burial, his relatives built a bonfire next to his grave to honor the deceased. The fire was called magenga, and the big logs burned for several days as friends and relatives came to pay their respects. The magenga always has to be lit by a cousin and the eldest son of the dead man. Like the skin of the bull, Opiyo kept an old cockerel in his hut ready for the day of his burial. During the lighting of the magenga, the cockerel would be killed and then roasted on the flames to signify that the man has now gone and can no longer offer the household his protection. Along with the bird, Auko also prepared a traditional dish of ugali for the visitors.
By the evening, all Opiyo’s relatives and his two married daughters had congregated by his grave, and for the next four days neighbors brought food to the house to help feed the visitors. The morning after the burial his family brought out Opiyo’s three-legged stool, his fly whisk, and his clothes and placed them on his grave to accompany him to the next life. During the four-day mourning period, the women wailed and danced to chase away the “death spirits.” They left the houses in the compound uncleaned until the last day, when his two wives performed yweyo liel—the “cleansing of the grave.” This marked the start of a spring clean throughout the whole compound. On the fourth day, Opiyo’s three sons, their wives, and his daughters also had their heads shaved in a symbolic act called kwer, which indicates to others that a person is bereaved. Opiyo’s wives too had their heads shaved, and they continued to wear his clothes for several more months.
On the fourth day the mourners prepared to leave. As with other ceremonial functions with the Luo, seniority and sexual consummation were all part of the ritual; Opiyo’s eldest son, Obilo, returned to his homestead and had sex with his wife before his two younger brothers could leave their father’s compound; the other brothers also had to consummate the mourning period by having sex with their respective wives. If this is not done correctly, the Luo believe, you might become sick or bear a child with physical or mental problems. (Most Luo Christians, even those living in the cities, still practice this custom today.) Meanwhile, Opiyo’s two wives continued to mourn their dead husband, rising early in the morning at dawn to sing and praise him, extolling his virtues to anyone who was listening.
Opiyo’s widows, Auko and Saoke, were now restricted in what they could do and where they could go. After his death they were considered to be unclean—tainted by his death and capable of putting a curse on people. They could not enter another’s hut for fear of bringing bad luck to the owner, nor could they shake hands with their friends, eat with them, or pick up their children. They could not stroll by a river for fear of it drying up, nor walk through a field of maize for risk of it shriveling. These women were in chola, and they could be released from this restriction only once they were “inherited.”
During the first four days of mourning after Opiyo’s death, his two brothers and his male cousins gathered in the family compound to decide which of them would inherit his wives. Inheritance is a process by which a dead man’s wives are literally shared among his immediate relatives. It might be several weeks or even months before the women are finally inherited, but on the day of the inheritance, it is essential for the man to consummate the event with his new wife. Sometimes a man might inherit more than one wife, or even all of them, and he would be obliged to have sex with all of the women on that first night, in strict order of seniority. Any woman toward whom the man failed in his obligation on that first night was required to remain confined to her hut until another husband could be found to rise to the occasion.
If her married sons had not already established their own homestead before their father’s death, then they could not do so until after their mother had been inherited. This rule placed pressure on women to agree to inheritance, no matter how much they might prefer otherwise. There are some restrictions over who can inherit a woman; for example, a woman could not be inherited by a man with whom she had previously had an extramarital affair. The woman might also object if she considered the man to be “of bad character,” so there has always been some element of choice. However, in the past, the women would always be inherited by somebody. This tradition of wife inheritance might seem bizarre, but in a society or environment where survival is tough and tenuous, it does guarantee that any widowed woman and her children will be looked after and not abandoned.
In rural areas wife inheritance is still the norm and its modern-day practice is partly responsible for the high incidence of HIV/AIDS among the Luo population. Due to the great social stigma attached to being HIV positive, a man will often keep his illness hidden from his family and take his medication only at his place of work. When he dies, his wife might be quite oblivious to the fact that she is carrying the virus, and when she is inherited, she can pass it on to her new husband, and thence to his other wives.
Sometimes a woman will resist inheritance: Hawa Auma, aunt to President Obama, told me that when her husband died she refused to be inherited. Auma is a practicing Muslim, and many people in her mosque supported her firm stand. In the end, she agreed to a token inheritance but refused to allow the union to be consummated. Auma is a very strong-willed woman, but others are not quite so fortunate. In the village of Kajulu on the outskirts of Kisumu, there was recently a case of a widow, devoutly Christian, who spurned all attempts to be inherited. Her own son then died quite suddenly, leaving the woman’s daughter-in-law widowed as well. Luo tradition forbids two widows from living in the same compound, so in order to bring pressure on the woman to be inherited, the village elders refused to bury her son. Within a matter of weeks, the woman relented.
On the day that Auko and Saoke were inherited, the family slaughtered a bull in celebration and the women discarded their dead husband’s apparel for new clothes. They were now free from the taboo of Opiyo’s death. The restrictions placed on other members of the family were now also lifted. Within a few months of Opiyo’s death, all of the huts of his wives were destroyed and new ones built in a ceremony called loko ot, literally “changing hut.”
Today, most Luo are Christians, and their families have been so for more than a century. Nevertheless, traditional rituals still play an important part when a Luo dies. Although most people are now buried in a shroud or a suit and their body is placed in a coffin rather than a bull’s hide, every Luo insists on being buried in his or her own homestead. In 1987 the Nairobi courts heard a landmark case to determine the final resting place of a prominent Luo lawyer, S. M. Otieno. The trial held the attention of the nation for months. Otieno’s widow, Virginia Wambui Otieno, was a member of the Kikuyu tribe, and their marriage in 1963—one of the first between a Kikuyu and a Luo—was considered to be shameful at the time. Mrs. Otieno argued that because her husband had led a modern life and had no regard for tribal customs, she had the right to bury him in a place of her own choosing; in this case, she wanted a nontribal burial on their farm near the Ngong Hills on the outskirts of Nairobi. The lawyer for Otieno’s Luo clan argued that without a proper tribal burial in his homestead in Luoland, the ghost of Otieno would haunt and torment his surviving relatives.
Otieno’s body lay in a Nairobi mortuary for more than four months while the dispute worked its way through the courts. Finally, the Nairobi Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Luo tribe, arguing that it was impossible for a Kenyan citizen to disassociate himself from his tribe and its customs, especially those of a tribe such as the Luo, who still retain such strong traditions. The court ordered that Otieno’s body be given to his fellow tribesmen for a traditional committal in his homeland near Lake Victoria. Although the judges said that tribal elders owed it to “themselves and their communities to ensure that customary laws keep abreast of positive modern trends,” this significant legal ruling highlighted the power that tribalism still exerts in Kenya. To this day, neither Otieno’s widow nor his children have visited his grave in Nyanza.
Otieno was an exceptional case; nearly every Luo wants and expects to be buried in his homestead. Even if an individual dies overseas after living abroad for many years, he or she would still want the body returned to the family compound. Many Luo now live and work in other parts of Kenya, especially Nairobi, so when there is a death in the family, relatives and friends can sometimes take several days to return to the family homestead. It has therefore become customary to preserve the body, either in a hospital mortuary or at home, to allow people time to pay their last respects.
Leo Odera Omolo said that as a boy, he always looked forward to a death in the village. “We would look at the old people, waiting for them to die. That way there was lots of singing and dancing, and plenty for people to eat and drink. It was a good excuse for a party, and we enjoyed ourselves!”
I have been to several Luo funerals, and it is clear that people attend them for many different reasons. The immediate family is grief-stricken, while others are in tears because the deceased owed them money and they know that now they will never be repaid. Local politicians use the events as an opportunity to press the flesh and make promises to the electorate that they are likely never to keep, and most of the rest of the company are there to eat, drink, and dance, or maybe just to pick a fight with somebody. After more than a hundred years of Christianity, the indigenous Luo traditions have been absorbed and integrated into Christian rituals, and the tribal influence still colors these major life events.
Many other strong Luo traditions persist to this day, even among modern city dwellers. Husbands and wives have to respect rigid taboos when visiting the compound of their in-laws. For example, when one of a Luo’s in-laws dies, the person cannot visit the in-law’s homestead until after the burial; to view the corpse would effectively be “to see them naked.” If a man visits the house of his wife’s parents, he must never look at the ceiling. If a man’s in-laws come to visit him, they must never sit opposite the door leading to the marital bedroom. Nor would someone ever accept (or be offered) food in an in-law’s homestead, or sleep there. To do so would break an indissoluble taboo.
Recently in Kajulu, a bad tropical storm prevented a couple from returning home after visiting their daughter and son-in-law. They had no option but to stay the night; this was quite acceptable providing the parents-in-law sat upright and stayed awake all night. Unfortunately it was a long night, nature took its course, and both parents fell asleep. This serious breach of protocol had only one possible solution: the house had to be destroyed completely.
This rule raises serious problems, of course, for the president of the United States. When he moved to Washington, D.C., with his family in January 2008, he invited his wife’s mother, Marian Robinson, to live with them and help raise their two daughters. By Luo tradition, there is only one way to break the taboo created by such a rash decision—and that is to knock down the White House.