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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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Kuhaara, a funeral rite.

Now there is a funeral rite called 'kuhaara.' This is where a widow takes a funeral message to her people, her fatherland. It is part of the death and burial ceremony. 

Mukana wanga vandu leaves the home early morning, escorted, her husband on the death mat, dead. She chokes with cry breaths as she is cooled down by one of the people she is with. These people could be varikwa or in-law relatives. They carry nothing but cries in their hearts. They weakly respond to greetings by the paths and reveal their agony to those who should know. At the entrance of her paternal home she sprawls with a loud cry.

This cry is so painful than the one she split while her husband was dying. She looks at her mother, father and wishes she were still a little girl by their arms. But no, life had weaned her to womanhood, exposing her to vulnerability. She is finally without a partner. Sad it is when the lady comes back to a home of graves, no family to console and condole with her. Sad to the core is when she was in her mid marriage life, not too young to remarry nor too old to be having grown children.

The home receives her with joined cries. You would hear a home mourn when the deceased is not of that family. They cry for a while and take her in, calming her brokenness. A widow is chosen for her, to take her back. She is not encouraged to sleep. This widow could be of her blood or one in her immediate family. Others would want to follow. Message delivered, they take off again. Our poor lady who has no appetite for anything goes again for another long mileage to find her sprawled husband half asleep, half dead. Dead, painful. She takes her rightful sit by the cold head of her husband.

As her family follows in a day or two they do not come empty handed. They carry with them something. Meat, flower, something. This is as they come to witness the greatest of the sadness. To bury him who had made the two families relate, the one they had regarded a son, the one who would make their daughter die with loneliness.

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