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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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Izava Walk : Which Direction Ahead?

The first day (time) for any activity is usually anxious. What the mind had preconceived could turn be inferior or superior to actuality. Knowing where North is was part of the confusion. While facing East, Where is North? Since grade three I have had this unknowing. It gets unclear when you are in a new place whose moon is spotted in the wrong direction!

Mr. Levi said that Egypt is always North! You'd see the peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro there on a clear day. He pointed. The sun was rising and a spring bore the first stream by the valley bottom of Seremi market. Only the tallest eucalyptus shined golden at the peak. If the tree is cut, suggested Levi, the spring would have more water. 8 gallons to the air before the sun sets in West!

'Now the dew is reduced. You came very early,' he said. He'd loved woodwork while a student at Technical High School (now Friends School Chavakali Boys). Then I did beat a path ahead leaving the carpenter sandpaping a kiti moto. Business brought me here, he had argued.

The first stream could have sourced its water further beneath had the place not turned a maize farm. Soil loosely dropped in the trench as a woman weeded. Presence of uncountable eucalyptus in the first five hundred metres showed the trenches fitly deep, heel to thigh depth, with little water yet. Nappier grass, sugarcane and Tea came close when eucalyptus excused them.

When side soil succumbs in and the water is effortless, a pathway beneath the lump is necessitated. Observing that, a Tiriki woman who had suggested we go home for tea narrated some clans in Tiriki... Vigina, Vadimburi, Vaguga, vasaria, vakhuvera, vasaina, varokhova...

Kalahari being South, we had run from Pharaoh's enslavement/upheavals in Sahara. Had we not put on a breastplate of pride while in Canaan, laughing at the lame instead of dirt, we could be still one with the creator. So where is Canaan? I asked. It is this Land. It used to be productive.  But now!!

A road crossing the river goes to Kapsotik on the left and Mungavo on the right. Jumba is the common name around. Whether the river leads West wasn't conversant because the sun did change its forward direction.

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