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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...

Sweet Memories


There are moments in one’s thought lapses that he slows to say ‘I shall tell you when I remember.’ There are disturbed stammers whose telling of a thing is cut short by their inability to articulate. How chocking it is! There is pleasure in telling something. There is pleasure in communication. Especially when the stories are reminiscences.
Today my friend saluted ‘good morning’ and I jumped to ‘Did you dream?’ She had dreamt of a person bringing her a necklace. Interesting. I am not into dream speculation. I am into how the memory serves as parcel to our interaction. I like listening to people’s stories. Every of my dream gets into the diary.
A man who is well experienced and read finds it easier to contribute in a stock of issues. To keep off a conversation because ‘you are not knowledge’ and you do not see the need to makes you a kindred to ignorance. Talking exhibits your mental stamina, it is a show of your intellectual investments, it is a trigger of better thinking flow. You have heard a person speak and you told him ‘you brought it out the way it needed be.’
In my own solitude moments have I stopped in my walks to recall what I was thinking a second ago. What was I thinking before I thought of that? What made me start thinking that way? It could be a building, a sound, a car, a path, a movie, a word, a person, a mood and many others. Theroux agrees that our past is saved in images. With a well packaged imagery one can walk for long without looking at the position of the sun. There could be moments of smiling to self or feeling a teardrop come.
There can also be future memories…where the mind takes you to a future situation (or past), like in a dream. I have imagined my parents dead and felt how lonely it shall be. I am not married yet I have a memory of me and my spouse, an intelligent submissive female. More often this world looks familiar; like I was here before, a time I can’t specifically recall. There are people who in reality live our dreams.
There are people who run away from their memories. A person who remembers the past with a shrill can also use that opportunity to speak strongly about an issue. Rape victims, abuse survivors, accident affected people could all bring about a better society through recollection of ‘nasty’ memories. In whichever way memory here serves as the mind’s granary.
I have used memory and dream here interchangeably where memory takes a present form while a dream could indicate the past or the future. It only becomes a memory when you can think about it, when you can speak it. It is a dream when it happened, when it shall happen.

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