Skip to main content

Featured

The struggle with many a rigid Logooli cultural practices

  The Logooli community is one of the deeply cultured societies – with near everything supposed to have been done as per custom – to allow another custom to follow. One example is that for a mature man (with a child or more) to be buried, there must be a house structure at home. Another is that a boy must be circumcised and nursed in father land. If maternal family decides to, the boy will have a hard time reconnecting with father people - a dent on his masculinity. There were two children who got burnt to death in a house in Nairobi. The single mother had left for night work. Elders were told that one of the children was Logooli. The other, the woman had sired with someone else. The Logooli family wanted to burry their little one and long discussed the do’s and don’ts. Of a man who died childless and the grave was placed as if he had died as a man with children. It should have been dug on the sides, the grave. A real thorn should have been thrust in his buttocks, his name go...

WHEN THE MISSIONARY ARRIVES

The group leader rushes
To take his bag
And lead him in

Participants stand
Breaking from a social talk
To show respect
To the entering luggage.

He greets the women around
Wondering where men went to
Knowing not
They most attend important meetings.

He sits by the window
Praying for more Oxygen
For he knows the face of the air inside
Is that of the faces around.

From their gazes
He reads tiredness
Yet he would still want to say it in a different way
What other Organizations have spoken to them
Before giving out the bread.

Half a century past independence
He thinks not of a reason
Why these very people
Will  get out of poverty.

He is a missionary
From Europe
And he loves his job
Working with the vulnerable

He knows they are sick
Lazy and pretentious
Beggars and barterers
 Yet benefactors from cardinal sources.

And he never learns
With such simple thoughts
That there are a people
That would better be desperate
Than be fortunate.


Picture Source: www.ezluxe.com


Comments