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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...
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MOON 05/09/2015 (Traditions)


The time was between sleep.


The only tradition I know of is that I exist. Coming and going seems to be a tradition. But that is from a complex perspective. What happens in between is the tradition maybe. Like to marry- the event we were in attendance. 

As the cold blew, far in the Eastern horizon there was an embryo. The sun was at its conception stage. How marvelous. Scientists say it is fixed and ever blowing. But I saw it young in age, move like a toddler, gaining shine and later it could not be seen by naked eyes.

I climbed on a shrubby tree to get the best picture of it. Each step I made on the road my eyes were sideways looking for the rising sun. From violet to Yellow to less yellow to sunny. The horizon clouds outsmarted it. It was weak to melt them. And I wonder why such glimpses aren’t in Nairobi. The altitude?

As my eyes complained of sleep, old women danced to kilumi. I had no words for them but to think of life as a comedy- enjoy or die. They still clung to dear life when I think of it as vanity. They look forward to more children when I think we are many. They are hopeful and contended with their dry smallness of land- they are good.

When the event was taking too long, the sun was at its horizon. People from the groom side- my uncle- who had spent the night there cooking for people who are attending, as the tradition requires- were taking too long to solicit back what they spent. The camera could not host more power.

On the way back, the sun was greeting bye to the eyes that were looking at it. As it was in the morning, so it was in the evening. A yellow turned violet upper part of the circle was fading away in the hill on the West horizon. I saw it as a relief. There was hope that the moon will take its position before it welcomed the sun back in resurrection. I breathed in the wind and forgot my pains though my phone had lost in the ceremony.

As I looked back for the second night to see the heavens again, the bug in me had died and I waited for the late moon show. I woke up in the night a midst sleep to greet its face with a camera.

 Oh what a beauty!

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