KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

MASTER OF SCIENCE IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

LATE NAIROBI
Observations on death in the Kenyan capital with an eye to youths experience

Promotor: Prof. Dr. K. GRAW MASTER THESIS Second reader: Prof. Dr. S. VAN WOLPUTTE submitted to obtain the degree of Master of Science in Social and Cultural Anthropology by Francesca BRAGAGNOLO

INDEX Index Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction: Death and the city Finding death in Nairobi, Kenya 1. Home, at Last Final returns: urban-rural dynamics in death 2. Nairobis routines of death Urban morbidities: of cemeteries, mortuaries, and coffins 3. When my mum passed away Youth memories (and strategies) of death and life I II III 1

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Conclusion: You only have to die! 87 Theoretical and personal perspectives on a familiar topic, reworked on the field Bibliography Annex 1 Maps Annex 2 Extract from Dead Talk Annex 3 My name is Reagan Odwor Nyachienga Annex 4 Interview with Victor Oluoch, Kibera to Satellite 99 115 117 123 125

ABSTRACT

This research deals with funeral practices and attitudes towards death in Nairobi. It is based on a two months fieldwork experience in the Kenyan capital and should best be read as a sort of initial exploration on death in the urban context. I followed a few trajectories suggesting different readings and focuses on the phenomenon at hand. I first approached funeral practices and their relation to identity making with concern to the reality of rural-urban migration. Funerals in Kenya are, more often than not, characterised as final journeys home. The notion of (ancestral) home shapes the direction of funerals, relations between people (urban/up country), and bears political significance. However, I favour an interpretation of each funeral as a particular context of interaction in which, case by case, decisions are taken which are determined by interpersonal and intergroup dynamics. Such decisions are also influenced by personal concerns and memories. Different groups take part in the same ceremonies with different intentions; conflictual views tend to be juxtaposed rather than resolved. Despite my attempts to remain grounded, it was virtually impossible to stick to Nairobi when studying death as, especially in this circumstance, one can perceive the stop-over qualities of its origins. From the starting point of the visibility of death in the mortuary I dealt with the ways the AIDS epidemic or ethnic violence are shaping the social life of the city (and nation) and its reactions to death. Finally, I placed the perhaps confused results of my research within the discipline of anthropology mindful of my own personal understanding of death and expectations regarding the research.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing this thesis has be a long, sometimes puzzling journey. People shared with me much more than I could have expected. I feel enriched and honoured. I doubt I was really able to put down in words the experiences of those Ive met, their memories, their opinions, their emotions, their silences, but Ive tried my best. Working on death has been a deep personal experience and a trying one as a student of anthropology. Rosalitas family welcomed me in their home in Musanda in a harsh time for them. I appreciated being part of your farewell to a woman I unfortunately never met in life but grew close to during our last days with her. I also thank Reagan, his mother, and Victor for opening up to me and telling me about their lives and the deaths of their loved ones. Peter and his colleague Victor were a link with other people from Satellite and always had time to discuss with me, the funeral girl, about death or football. Pauline, Jay and Selina opened their Satellite house to me and turned out to be fun guides, worthy teachers, and great friends. With them I felt at home from the first day. I was thrilled to become part of Hot Sun Foundation, perhaps not the best place for a thesis about death but surely one where to grasp the fascinating, ambiguous reality of Kibera. I thank all these young, motivated filmmakers, especially Victor, Steve, Kevin and Mildred. Pamela and Joskey promptly helped me getting my VLIR scholarship, without which I could have not done my research. Matt, my mzungu friend, was an irreplaceable and inspiring everyday presence. I was lucky enough to end up again in Kenya six months after my research, working in Mombasa: thank you Mama Zakia and my sisters Miriam, Amina and Aisha for welcoming me into your family of strong women. I thank my promoter, prof. Knut Graw, who always had time, encouraging words and useful remarks for me regardless of how many times (or how long) I disappeared and reappeared. I was literally surrounded by friends, colleagues, and family members that shared my somewhat morbid interest and engaged in countless discussions on funerals and death. They constantly renovated my interest and challenged my positions, and for that I thank them. Finally, I dedicate this work to my grandma Rita, my uncle Sergio and my cousins Alfio and Loretta, whose funerals I could not attend.

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IV

INTRODUCTION ________ Death and the city Finding Death in Nairobi, Kenya

You know The day after you left, my dad died. Too bad, you should have been there. Do you want me to send you some pictures? These words popped out of a facebook chat a few days after my return from two months of fieldwork in Nairobi. This casual Niaji Poa (How are you? Fine) sort of conversation made Peter a little proud that my knowledge of Sheng, the slang of Nairobi, could allow me to greet and be greeted, say how I was doing and where I was. My friend, according to our chat, was fine and his father had died. Five minutes later, after offering my condolences to my friend and his family (pole, pole sana for your loss), I checked my e-mail and downloaded a file named funeral programme. Browsing through the pictures, I discover that my friend is the exact copy of his late father. I recognise him, with his dreadlocks and a pair of huge, red-framed sunglasses as he waits, along with some friends, or relatives perhaps, during the burial cerimony at Langata Cemetery, Nairobi. In a few pictures he is sitting on the ground under the sun, like many people holding bottles of water and funeral programmes, then gathering around the coffin of his father, covered in white, red, and yellow roses arranged in a composition, under a hired green tent, a common sight at any gathering Ive been to. He carries his fathers coffin, first man on the right, towards the grave while a young girl precedes them holding a framed picture of the deceased and another young man carries a brown cross. It reads RIP 1

vertically, horizontally spells out the name of the man, the Christian name followed by the Kikuyu ones Born: 1949 / Died: 4 Mar 2011. Everybody else has stood up from the chairs in the shade of the tent or from the ground. They assemble around the grave and pray, guided by three priests carrying open Bibles. A fourth man, maybe also a pastor, is reading for the crowd from the Bible he holds in one hand, the shovel in the other. A photographer, with a semiprofessional Canon camera, takes pictures of the coffin being lowered into the grave. The closest family members older to younger it seems: an elder lady first, my friend, no longer wearing his sunglasses, and his agemates, and finally some young children take handfuls of soil from the shovel and cast them onto the coffin, into the grave (mindful of Genesis 3:19 for dust you are and to dust you will return). The job is completed by some male youth who energetically return the mound of soil under their feet into the hole dug by the cemetery employees. In one of the pictures, I can see the lady who first covered the coffin with soil sitting on a plastic chair, surrounded by a cloud of floating dust. Her eyes are closed, she covers her face with a hand, in silent contemplation perhaps praying. Two ladies stand behind her. Other ladies, dressed in colourful kitenge, are now singing, reading from the last page of the eulogy leaflet. The front page carries a picture of the deceased in an orange shirt and the name seems to be written against a pink background. I imagine his biography has been reconstructed by a member of the harambee, a group of relatives and friends who assist the family with the funeral arrangements. I thank my friend again for sharing the pictures with me although, because of the distance and of my unclear ideas, we will never speak about them again. Peter knows of my research: we met exactly because of a wedding/graduation/funeral videos painted in white, small letters on the road side of his red corrugated-iron workplace, a cybercaf with piles of pirate dvds, a few old desktops next to a small room with a tv and playstation, and plenty of kids laughing at me every single time I walked in. I often stopped by the shop for a chat with him and his friends about funerals and football. From there, I walked home uphill, avoiding big potholes, smiling at amused neighbours, greeting the old mzee from which I bought tomatoes, the 2

young man selling chips who told me I looked good, getting my keys from Wanjohi, a neighbour who owns the small shop in front of our compound, greeting the old shosho, a Kikuyu grandma skillfully weaving bags that I never bought. I would finally often bang my head on the small opening in the gate and, just before the uneven steps to my flat, exchange some small talk with the guard in his small, turquoise cubicle. Research quest(ions) As easy as it was to retrace a routine made of steps, greetings, discussions, so it was hard to find direction and lately my own words into the topic of my research. There are a few questions which have guided me throughout the process and through which I attempted to narrow down a much broader interest: what happens when somebody dies? Interest in the urban dimensions of death is not new, like Droz and Maupeaus study about une capital sans cimetires for instance shows. What does it mean to die in a capital in Eastern Africa?, they ask. What happens of the bodies, what do they become? What about funerary rituals and burial practices, modernity, social status, AIDS, violence? (Droz and Maupeu 2003: 1). I landed in Nairobi overflowing with such questions and doubts, eager to find out more about the modes and the degree in which personal (individual?) identities are built in intersubjective ways. In death, that is. In absentia, as I had named my research proposal. I have always been curious to understand how this event of death shapes the understanding of the deceased person in terms of interpersonally built identity through memory, narratives, and practices of representation. What becomes of peoples identity, identities, when they die? My initial idea was to tackle such interest by trying to reconstruct the life history of a deceased person, addressing a plurality of voices and perspectives. The task promised to be complex; this was probably the only certainty. Anthropology itself seems to be built around the notions of complexity and density. In addition, I was mindful of Blochs warning: 3

when anthropologists turn to a study of what happens in the case of named people, who might have been known to them personally, we seem to be faced by very different types of analyses to the more confident characteristics of the general anthropology. They all stress ambiguity and alternative interpretations (Bloch 1988: 26).

I had, on the other hand, not much familiarity to cling on to. Much of my fieldwork research has been about finding questions that fitted with my presence on the field and my own skills, with all the risks of such an approach. Especially in the short time of my fieldwork, especially in Nairobi. As I wrote in my field notes, a few days after the start of my research, it is not normal to move to a city of millions and immediately find ones way. What I regarded as the most puzzling was the way I didnt know, as an individual, where I should fit; know as an anthropologist where my attention should be focused. It is impossible to encompass the citys complexity in one glance. [Nairobi] is a city that reveals itself when you touch it, fragment by fragment. (Charton-Bigot 2010: x) Fragmentation thus is a key concept to understand the urban dynamics of a city that was born out of colonial segregation and, like research shows, seems not to have really grown out of it (De Lame 2010: 157; 196). Transitions: moving deaths Fragmented and multiple, the identities of Nairobi are all but static: De Lame opposes as outdated the project to consider the city as a juxtaposition of residential areas. The urban culture of the Kenyan capital is influenced by movement and communication, embedded in the criss-crossing habits of various, and partly fluid, social groups (De Lame 2010: 195). Death in Nairobi seems to be a centrifugal movement. The city appears to have inherited the stop-over qualities of its origins, more inclined towards the countryside than its own urban status (ChartonBigot 2010: xi). It is common knowledge that up country is where everybody comes from and where everybody after all will go. Nairobi, as a centre, seems to be simultaneously longed for and despised: 4

Paradoxalement, Nairobi, tre enterr au cimetire est le signe de lchec dune trajectoire de vie. [] Ainsi, les Kenyans ne sont que rarement enterrs en ville. Ils repatrient les cadavres sur la terre des anctres (Droz and Maupeu 2003: 2-3).

The idea of movement is a key concept in my ethnography. It simultaneously adapts well to my own experience on the field and to the phenomena I happened to be engaging with. It also characterises the discipline of anthropology in more than one way, as I discuss in the conclusion. I use specific directions to present my research findings in all their incompleteness (see map in annex 1). I suggest particular trajectories which I followed on the field as starting points. Drawing on my own participant-observation and on existing literature, I reflect on the relevance of such paths in the analysis of urban death practices and perceptions and how they may relate to personal identities.

CHAPTER ONE ________ Home, at Last Final returns: urban-rural dynamics in death

as places begin to exist from the side you use to get there (Cilento 2006: 21) Upon waking up on a Sunday in Kinyanjui Road, Satellite, an increasingly built-up neighbourhood in Western Nairobi, one is surrounded by church songs and energetic sermons coming from the nearby churches: the Riruta Baptist Church, Christian Life Centre, African Independent Pentecostal Church, Gospel Revival Centre, Riruta All Nations Church, and a few others. The Swahili mass at the local Catholic church is always very early, later ones are in Kikuyu. My room mate Jay, who doesnt understand the Kikuyu language predominant in the area, prefers to go a little late as it is her style to the Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Adams, a relatively well-off and safe area of Nairobi. Im not religious myself but I had promised that I would accompany her at least one Sunday. Once the 7

mass is over we check the vitumba of the street vendors, imported used clothes and shoes piled up along the road. J. buys me ice-cream, then asks me to accompany her to the nearby Nairobi Womens Hospital to check if her feeling tired lately is malaria. The check-up is anyway covered by the insurance provided by her job in an international relief organisation. As we are sitting in the waiting room Jay asks me what Im going to write about. She enjoys the fact that I came back after last summer, but doesnt understand why. On hearing about the topic of my research she starts to tell me what they would do where she comes from in the Coastal province. She lived a bit everywhere in the region. Her mother, a teacher living in Voi, a town along the railway line that connects the Coast to the interior, comes from the Taita community. Her father, who died six years before, was Giriama. In brief, she goes on, should somebody die a committee of elders and relatives, maybe some friends, is set up to take care of practical arrangements. In town (Nairobi, Mombasa) news about somebodys death comes through phone, word of mouth, or newspapers and radio, whereas back in the village some old ladies shriek. You should go back to the village! Those ladies, they can shriek, she tells me. I am left to wonder about this piercing noise she refers to. The body is then taken from the morgue of the city to the village and buried close to the compound where they lived. The funeral is usually a Christian one nowadays. Her grandma, on the other hand, is apparently among the few that are not Christian. Given my experience of Kenya I can hardly believe that but we cant really discuss the topic further. Sometimes I miss him, she says about her dad. The results come, and we leave. No malaria, and a desire for fried chicken which we go to get in the city centre of Nairobi, another twenty minutes on a City Hoppa bus. I will get to know just a little more about the death of Jays father, who served in the Kenyan secret services. As I sat down in the hospital waiting hall, less than one week into my fieldwork experience, I sought a little more direction for my research. Together with Jay I tried to find questions that made sense for me and in the 8

context in which I would be working and living, if only for two months. When, some time later, I went back to Jays opinion about my idea of working on funeral videos and photos, she wished she still had the pictures taken at her fathers funeral. They were kept by her uncles, her fathers relatives, with whom she didnt have much contact after the burial for reasons I didnt quite grasp and which we never further discussed. It was Jay that sent me to the mortuary on a Thursday, maybe on a Friday, because thats when they are the busiest. Thursday morning, pointed out the florist outside Chiromo University mortuary on a Thursday afternoon after a half day of good business. To understand death in Nairobi there seemed to be a necessary direction to take, going back to the village. In a city where everybody has an up country, a place of origin however contested the notions of ancestral land and home might be in the (tribalist) politics of landownership and land grabbing of contemporary Kenya the final return can be seen as common aspiration and practice1. The land issue is central in the Kikuyu preoccupation around the destiny of the body of the deceased, death and land being indissolubly linked since the 1930s at least (Droz 2003: 39). Resting in Luoland (Piny Luo) is almost an obligation, like one is reminded by the ever cited Otieno case. The body of lawyer SM Otieno was contended between his widow and the family of origin, each based on their own understandings of home and how it related to the mans identity (see Cohen and Odhiambo 1992). The centrality of Luo and Kikuyu communities in the public discourse risks to overshadow the experience of other Nairobians. However, I second Sraphins observations about an existing largely shared Christian foundation (substrat), especially when it comes to death. According to his
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Jindra notes the influence of the colonial and postcolonial urbanisation has on African funerary practices especially because it created new urban hierarchies sometimes in conflict with older, rural ones. The rural-urban relationships are however different across the continent and have been constantly molded, so that, like he shows in the book he edited, the differentce between urban and rural funerals are great in some areas and minimal in some others (e.g. Kenya) (see Jindra 2011: 17-18).

research, despite some existing differences that relate to ethnic identity and/or socio-economical backgrounds of the family, le christianisme, fortement implant, a impos son imaginaire et ses valeurs. La mort, comme le pratiques qui la grent, est aujourdhui chrtienne. Different Christian confessions share similar rituals although their religious commentary may vary; they are yet often in accord in opposing what they call lavish funerals, characterised by great expenses, hardly sustainable for the majority of the families of the capital (Sraphin 2003: 106-109). Perhaps because of this largely shared Christian experience of death, the microcosmic Indo Kenyan minority or the marginalised Muslim population of Nairobi are not as visible and could in fact suggest different trajectories. My own research pragmatically followed the ways of friends, acquaintances, and neighbours. I lived in Riruta Satellite, a Kikuyu dominated yet increasingly cosmopolitan area, at the border between the city and its rural surroundings. At some point I chose to concentrate on the perspective of youth both out of a personal interest but also because it turned out to be easier, linguistically and practically, to engage with youth rather than adults and elders. My three housemates, (unmarried) women in their thirties who moved to Nairobi from different areas of Kenya to study and work, hosted me, shared with me their views, and guided me. Fieldwork meant expenses which I covered thanks to a scholarship from VLIR, the Flemish Interuniversitary Council. Such financial support asked for a link with a local institution: Hot Sun Foundation, an organisation interested in the stories of Kibera slum told through the eyes of young filmmakers, provided that link. It is from their red sofa that much of my work begins. From a sofa in Kibera to Paradise: reconstructing a funeral with words Following numerous suggestions, I asked my acquaintances to inform me in case they knew of any funeral taking place. Funeral arrangement gatherings are very common in Nairobi. National and local newspapers daily publish dozens of obituaries. Many are also announced over the radios, at noon and at dinner time, so that the 10

news easily reach around large areas. Information about plenty more deaths is spread through other personal networks of relatives, friends, neighbours. Meetings are held to decide how to proceed and to gather the money necessary to provide for the many expenses. Rodriguez-Torres describes the origin of these meetings, called harambee, or committee, in connection to colonial and postcolonial urban politics and the changes in mortuary rituals they induced. Harambee, Swahili for lets pull together, implies the ideal of selfhelp and collective contribution2.
Les groupes sociaux pauvres, les classes moyennes et aises sinscrivent dans la nouvelle tradition des enterrements qui a permis lapparition dun march de la mort florissant, o les entrepreneurs de la mort dveloppent lindustrie des enterrements Nairobi direction la campagne (Rodriguez-Torres 2004 : 175).

The death of a person triggers a routine, a sequence of practical arrangements, meetings, gatherings, of movements around the city and, eventually, from the city. Reciprocity in support to the bereaved seems to be a moral obligation that materialises in form of monetary donations, food offers, time, company It traces and retraces personal affiliations and offers a nuanced image of Nairobi city life. Each step of the process of making the dead should deserve its own separate treatment which would definitely offer several perspectives
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Harambee, Swahili for lets pull together, was a core ideological element of the first Kenyan presidency (Jomo Kenyatta) and oriented practices of development based on the idea self-help and collective contribution. Mutongi offers an interesting account of the harambee days shortly after the Kenyan independence. The rural population, which eagerly accepted these ideas, was instead neglected in the simultaneous campaign of land registrations so that the positive reception of harambee gradually decreased associated as it was government malfunctioning and corruption (Mutongi 2007: 165-166). The concept of harambee contributed to the shaping of a structure of peasant-state relationships imbued with clientelism (Barkan and Holmquist 1989: 361). It finally lost all its ideological value during Moi regime and became a mere tool of political control, where conspicuous personal donations assured re-elections (Sabar 2002: 253; Widner: 1992: 34).

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and stories. On the other hand, my aim for the moment is to work on one particular funeral, that of Rosalita, on a trajectory that goes from Nairobi to Musanda, Western Kenya. The experience of such a Westbound journey is a common one among the inhabitants of Kibera, Nairobis biggest slum where I mostly worked, the majority of which originates from the Western part of the country (Luo, Luhya, Kisii). Such journeys, along with the events, rituals, ties they entail, shape the memories and understandings of death of many urban people with which I worked; this direction wasnt therefore minor or trivial. Moreover, in the urban economy of ethnic (tribal) stereotypes it is virtually impossible not to consider these events: Luo flamboyant funerals are systematically compared with the more sober and less expensive Kikuyu ones, metonymically in relation to cultural identities and the relations between them. With regards to the Luhyas, they are known to love two things the most: their funerals, and chicken (kuku). Rosalita I never met Rosalita. I learnt about her death from a friend. While I was waiting to go visit a young man who had lent me the video of his cousins funeral, my friend Steve walked into the Hot Sun Foundation office asking for me. The sister of a friend, one of his Luhya neighbours living in Kibera, had died the previous day. They had been informed about my interest and the brother was waiting for us at home. People were already gathering, offering their help and condolences to the bereaved family. I was offered a sit on the bed where Rosalita would stay when in town to visit her husband. Duncan had been living in Nairobi for years, earning a living in the jua kali (informal) sector. Victor, Rosalitas brother, passed me a small, worn out notebook. A photo picturing Rosalita was glued to the cover under her name written in pencil. I wrote down my name and the sum I offered the few hundreds shillings I could find in my pockets as other people did before me. The corpse had already been taken to the Chiromo Mortuary from the hospital where she died of rabies. I will learn, during the funeral service upcountry, that she had been bitten by a dog a few weeks earlier, over the Christmas holidays, but didnt 12

take medication despite the small sum she had been given by the dogs owner. Rosalita left three young children she had from her husband, and two daughters in the late teens from a previous union. We left the tiny room, giving space to other visitors. On the way back to a more familiar area of Kibera we decided that Victor would keep me updated on the next steps. To keep company In Kibera, and elsewhere, it is common to hold night wakes, organised in proximity of the house of the deceased: with the displacement of the body to the mortuary, these wakes are meant to keep company to the family and raise money. They can go on for several days and are a very common source of entertainment for young people of the area. My friend Steve offered to attend the one they were organising for Rosalita. He took my camera with him as a substitute for my own eyes3. A few days later, Steve brought back the camera and we watched together some of the videos. A DJ sits in front of some hired loudspeakers: he changes track according to the audiences requests and counter-requests, followed by small donations. A young man carries a plate to collect the coins.

Size and popularity of these events depend on the person that died, how well known s/he was as well as gender, age, family of provenance, job, wealth According to my informants, young men wakes in Kibera are usually very crowded and hectic, sometimes violent (and drunk): people pay some shillings for a song, possibly one that reminds them of the deceased, others will pay just as much
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Kibera at night was inaccessible to me because of safety issues. On top of that, I would have been asked to donate big amounts of money, which I didnt have, because of the colour of my skin.

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to play a song they like better or to dance with a girl until somebody else offers yet more money and gets a different song, or the same girl. In this particular case, very few people came and the offers looked very low. The family also attended, I was able to see Victor, Rosalitas brother, together with one of her kids sitting on a bench next to him, although they were not as light hearted as other people around them. Most of the money is usually gathered at more formal meetings, harambee (see above), where people from the community gather to donate money according to their capacities. Sraphin notes that Nairobians, nowadays, are always part of a group, many groups in fact (community, family, religious groups, work colleagues, friends) The committee resembles the social complexity of the deceaseds life, revealing the groups which have helped this person build her identity (Sraphin 2003: 119). The family held another meeting about one week after I met them, at an aunts home (Mama Agneta, widow of the husbands uncle) in a better area of Kibera. I could not attend as it had been delayed to after sunset because of bad weather conditions. Mortuary visit The family, a few days later, invited me to go visit the body at Chiromo mortuary with them. On the way to the city centre, a 50 KSH ride by matatu which I covered for both of us 0,50 being still quite a sum for an unemployed man Victor explained that the funeral would take place as soon as they could gather enough money. The sum had to cover coffin and transportation, provide food for all the guests, the mortuary and hospital fees, dresses for the children, their school fees Rodriguez-Torres estimates that the costs for a funeral for a person from a poor backgrounds Kibera can be compared to the areas in Eastern Nairobi she considers can amount to 63000 KSH (between 500 and 600 ), the average monthly income being around 1500 KSH (Rodriguez-Torres 2003: 152). Many people were waiting to pick up their dead or to see them, dress them, keep them company: like us they were sitting in the shade outside the mortuary. Once let into the room, Rosalitas family 14

husband, the two older daughters, Victor and three other relatives walked around the table where the corpse lied, covered from the neck down with a blue sheet bearing the name of the University Mortuary. I was asked to take a picture of them standing in semicircle around the corpse of their relative: a friend later confirmed that such pictures are not rare4. They spoke Swahili and Luhya together; they asked a few questions about me, where I came from, why I was in Kenya and didnt really question (openly, at least) my interest in funerals. While still waiting outside, the daughters seemed to be joking and laughing. The only thing I understood was a rather undecipherable: I am not sober today. I am going to get my mother.

Husband, young female relative, daughter, brother, daughter, daughters caretakers around the corpse.

Instead, I had the feeling that they were asking for it thinking it could help me with my research. I hardly knew any of them and it felt innatural, as well as ethnically questionable to be there with them despite feeling welcome. De Witte also writes about the normality of taking such pictures and the opportunity it opens for the anthropologist, usually owning a camera (De Witte 2001: 23).

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Returns In the upcoming weeks final decisions had been taken by the closest family, the committee, and the elders. They decided to hire only one matatu, good for 14 people and the coffin on top covered in black plastic bags, common sight on the streets leaving Nairobi. The places in the minivan were reserved for the closer members of the family so I provided for the trip myself and headed Western on a coach accompanied by my friend Steve. We left early enough to reach the village at around the same time of the group. The family picked up the corpse on Thursday morning. Usually the body should have been brought home to Kibera the night before the trip but they decided otherwise because of the heavy rains. Despite our efforts, we reached Musanda a couple of hours and an overpriced motorbike after sunset, several hours after the group. Victor, Rosalitas brother, picked us up at a small intersection together with his cousins, some friends and one of his sisters: the men were visibly drunk on changa (strong locally produced brew) and were definitely more talkative than when I last met them in Nairobi, happy to welcome me to their village. On the way to the compound, we stole some sugarcane from a lorry that was carrying it to the sugar factories. I knew now how to interpret why my housemate Selina, herself of Luhya origins like my hosts, laughed at me when I suggested the idea of buying the mouth-watering sugarcane of her home area which she so often praised: at home, she said, no-one buys sugarcane, you will see. Her own mum originates from this village and she was amused by the fact that I would be going back. Unlike for Geissler and Prince, whose ethnographic fieldwork in Uhero, Western Kenya marginal place marked by departures and returns was a long term commitment, the trip was nothing like a return for me: no familiar sign at every turn of the road, no scents of foods to mark the route of the matatu, no faces or language to mark the feeling of home (see Geissler and Prince 2010b: 37-40). My friend Steve came himself from Western Kenya, although he lived most of his life in Nairobi, and studied for a couple of years in Kisumu: when we reached the town he started showing me familiar places from the bus. Having experienced before 16

the smell of home after long periods abroad, I could at least try and imagine. The homestead where the funeral was held once belonged to Duncans father, Rosalita father-in-law. There were just two small cow dung huts about a hundred meters from each other, a few plants and some cultivated fields. The neighbouring compound, on the other hand, consisted of several brick houses in a circle, electricity and running water, animals feeding on a very well kept garden. It belonged to a famous football player and showed his wealth. Several tombstones were lined up along the perimetral fence, also a sign of wealth. Most graves I had seen until then were either unmarked or signed by small crosses, wooden or cement, self-fabricated or bought on the streets of Nairobi or other towns; or again marked by a tree, planted over the grave, like in the case of Victors father whose grave lied under a big mango tree. The first thing we heard on the small street that took us to the compound was the noise of a generator mixed to famous gospel and reggae songs. They came from two big loudspeakers piled on top of each other which, on a side, had written Paradise in big, white letters. A very old green canopy covered the electrical material and some of the people keeping company to the family. It proved useless during the strong nightly rain, ending the wake before time and causing dissent the following morning with the relative who was to take care of that aspect of the funeral. The coffin had been placed outside the hut where Rosalita lived with her three children when not in Nairobi, next to a banner of the Church bearing the same colours of the Kenyan flag to which the family is affiliated. Rosalita lied in it in a white gown. Her children and siblings sat close to her at the light of a petroleum lamp, intermittently opening the cover to clean the mist that formed on the small window above her face. Breaking the local custom I now suppose I greeted the daughters first, then all those that were sitting around, old women and men, ladies, youth, kids. They asked me to take a picture of them around the coffin where their mother lied. 17

We danced reggae and gospel songs that were a little familiar to me until it started to rain. The family decided that, unlike them, I should rest. I was allowed to sleep in the older hut, on the ground with my own blanket next to not less than fifteen ladies. I woke up the next morning: by the few words I understood they were clearly speaking about me, the mzungu. Throughout the four days in Musanda I often felt object of curiosity as if my inquiring gaze had been, rightfully, reversed upon me. Upon leaving the day after the burial, many a person thanked me for coming, honoured by my presence, or so they said. You should go and sit down with those ladies, and hear how they gossip, suggested my friend Selina before I left Nairobi. A persons identity, at death, is also reconstructed through that gossip, statements and memories voiced from many angles around a body that is however not quite dead, not yet. Unlike most of the people present there, not only did I not understand a word of Luhya, but I couldnt recall Rosalitas life either; I couldnt comment on why a certain person was not there and why others were actually showing up; I didnt really know if someone was a good mourner or if things were going smoothly. Observing and digressions But how can you participate in something you dont know yet without observing?, asks De Witte (De Witte 2001: 18). The very set-up of my research, its brevity first of all, deprived my observation skills of the very possibility of familiarity. I tried from time to time to adopt the focus of other ethnographers before me, or other peoples points of view that could show me some important aspects 18

of what I was witnessing without, perhaps, seeing it. My videos, shot by Steve, follow for instance the practical arrangements and show his attempts to understand how a Luhya funeral differs from one from his own community, Luo5. Sitting next to these women I thought back to other discussions. Just a few weeks before, while cooking lentils in our kitchen in Satellite, Selina told me about the funeral of her eldest sister. Obviously the dead, they see, she said, they see more than we do. Her late sister Claire was present during her own burial, she admitted with a mixture of doubt and certainty. While Selina was washing dishes, Claire appeared to her dressed in a yellow skirt, a red t-shirt, a black
5

He was interested in finding similarities, which he did to a certain extent, concerning the preparation of the grave site, the sacrificial offers, the weeping and shaving of hair Although Luhya and Luo are not related the first, of Bantu origins, arrived in the area they inhabit about 500 years ago; the other, of Nilotic origins, arrived here around the 19th century they have occupied the same areas and intermarriages were not rare. Luhya history, as summarised by Cattell, is also characterised by several migrations and interethnic contacts, which account for many similarities but also many cultural differences between the various Luhya (dialects) speaking groups (Cattell 2003: 257). Moreover, in the more recent urban diaspora they are often associated one to ther other; the funeral rituals are one of such instances when their similarity is evoked, if only because of their visibility and elaborate rituals (see, for instance, Okech 2009 about the possibilities of developing a funeral cultural tourism among Luhya and Luo in Western Kenya which also discusses notions of cultural staging in the postmodern setting in relation to the funeral celebrations). Gwakos analysis of the changing perspectives and practices of widow inheritance among Maragoli (a Luhya subgroup) in Western Kenya bears on the other hands many resemblances with discussions over similar practices among neighbouring Luo (Gwako 1998). In my analysis Im often using material on Luo funerals in my argumentation (especially the work of Geissler and Prince) but that is mostly aimed as a commentary for similar urban-rural connections or to describe and comment anthropological observation of funerals, much more common for the Luo than the Luhya community. The Otieno case which Ill mention further on is instead to be considered for its importance in shaping national legislation and influencing gender perspectives on burial rights.

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scarf. She asked her to go to their dad and apologise on her behalf for having ruined her chances in college by leaving before writing the final exam; Selina was to beg the father to let go of the issues with the family of Claires husband. Selinas family held the right to take the body and give it burial in their homestead since the husband never paid the dowry. The sister instead wished to be buried at the husbands place, whom she loved despite his poverty. They had been friends since childhood, later fell in love and married, despite her fathers disapproval. Eventually Claires husband died too, one week after her. AIDS killed them both though she was apparently not aware of it. Selina called her father and was telling him about her vision, when he also saw his dead daughter and decided to accept the funeral arrangements of the in-laws. Selina recalled seeing her sister once more during burial. She fainted at the same time as her brother and they both had the same conversation with their late sister who urged them to let go of any issue and make the best of their lives. Claires burial wasnt smooth for another reason: her sister refused to be buried by not allowing the coffin be put into the grave. Her mother soon realised that a mistake had been made: the family had forgotten to remove the underwear. The elastic band, most probably knotted, would prevent her to go to heaven. Knots are believed to prevent going to heaven: thats why peoples hair needs to be unbraided before they are put in the coffin and given burial6. According to custom, one of the aunties was to dress the deceased but Claire disliked that aunt and clenched her fists in refusal. Selina doubted about these facts while she was telling me, still stirring the lentils. At the same time she still seemed to be seeing it with her own eyes. How could she believe something like this, a PhD student who lived in America and doesnt really care about God either, she asked herself. It was her, however, to talk her sister into being undressed and redressed. Their mother tried, unsuccessfully: you have to sweet-talk them into doing things, like babies, you know. Come on, darling, we all love you, you have to let it go, be peaceful, let us take
6

Elsewhere the habit to bury women without underwear (and with open zippers at the waists) is linked to preventing barrenness in her progeny; for the same reason, the zipper of men trousers is to be left open (Standard online, 14/02/2010, The mishmash of traditions at a Luhya funeral).

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care of you Selina felt stupid talking to a dead body its dead, you know but she was asked to do it, just like she was the last one to feed her and take care of her. She recalls talking to the corpse of her sister, showing her how to open her fists. Her sister obeyed, thus they managed to solve the issue and proceed with the burial. Mourning and ritual work Ligi and Favole stress the ambiguity and ambivalence of death as it oscillates between a crisis of the meaning and an impulse to search for meaning and strengthen it. They build on De Martinos understanding of death as a phenomenon that raises a painful crisis caused by the disappearance of a Being in the world (Favole and Ligi 2002: 5; 8, my translation). Such critical juncture shakes at the same time society and the individual7. A similar position is that of Hallam and Hockney, for whom death is a life crisis, a conjecture of changes and transformations of the physical body, social relations and cultural configurations. Death is a phase of transition involving loss and adjustment [] (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 1). The analysis suggested by Van Gennep of mortuary rituals as rites de passage, structured into the three phases of separation/transition/reintegration, as well as Turners emphasis on the liminal period (Turner 1972), still offer a widely shared framework for the understanding of mortuary practices. Such characterization of the mortuary ritual holds ground, whether the liminal phase is considered functional to maintaining the structure or is rather seen as locus of renegotiations. Funerals, for instance, prove to be a focal point of youth contestation as Vangu Ngimbi seeks to demonstrate in his study of death practices in Kinshasa, Congo (Vangu Ngimbi 1997). De Boeck instead extends the notion of liminality well beyond the ritual moment. Death is actually omnipresent in the city of Kinshasa and its imaginary: the interstitial, ultimately the coexistence of salvation and doom, is central to the Congolese experience (De Boeck 2005).

Fabian, in his essay on death, also reminds that social reality and subjective partecipation are irreduceable conceptual poles of social inquiry (Fabian 2004: 57).

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While at Musanda, restless activities went on around me: cooking for the guests, welcoming, greeting, discussing, fetching water, building. Mourning. Analia! She cries! commented a man half laughingly while building, with wooden sticks and bags, Rosalitas hut which Duncan never built while she was still alive. She was brought into it during the second night and people went into the hut to cry over her coffin during some night prayers. On the burial day, the coffin was taken out again, next to this new hut, and Rosalitas family and me with them could watch the religious service under shade of the small building. Funerals are punctuated by outbursts of weeping. People, women especially, mourn outside the mortuary. When the car carrying the coffin and the bereaved is close enough to the home of the deceased, the whole group explodes in a loud, emotional crying. I didnt see that during this funeral but it had been described to me beforehand. During the second day of the funeral I was passing by the nearby village of Butere famous to be the end of the railway line coming from Nairobi when many cars and a truck arrived at once. The crowd, mostly young people, were visibly mourning their friend, a matatu driver, who died in a car accident. Dozens of people occupied the street of the village, blocking its main street with the cars: young men got hold of the coffin and walked it, at a very high pace, towards the compound where it would have been buried in a day or two. The poem A Luhya funeral by David Yobbie puts into verses the experience of the days preceding the burial:
Wailing. / Crying, but no tears flow, / It is only the sound, / And painful words 'Wanga, you have not, / Paid my debt'. / 'Wanga, why have you gone, / without telling me? ' / 'Wanga, we had agreed, / to meet on the market day, / why are you being rude? ' Osundwa the drunkard, / Is pulling out all the grass in the boma, / With his bare hands, / Atsango paces the compound, / Chanting Wanga's name / And incomprehensible words. / SCREAM! / Akatsa has arrived. / She rushes to the coffin, / She rolls on the ground, / She cannot be controlled, / She hears that tea is ready, / To

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be served, / Then she stands up calmly, / And makes her way to the kitchen, / Greeting fellow mourners, / With a bright smile (found on http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-luhya-funeral/)

Every new female arrival to Rosalitas compound was usually announced by the sound of their loud weeping, before they could even be seen entering by the main path into the front yard. Death seems to have its own acoustics, a clamour that marks participation. Seremetakis suggests a similar idea: in rural Greece, the acoustics of death embodied in screaming and lamenting and the presence or appearance of kin construct the good death (Seremetakis 1991: 101). Any such comparison, bringing close two cultural realities that are in fact distant, is as readily available as it is problematic. The issue of the universality of death is the point of departure for Huntington and Metcalfs Celebrations of Death. The two scholars work on existing anthropological research of mortuary rituals (until 1979, when they published their work): they discern a universality of mortuary practices (with regards, for instance, to colour symbolism, symbolism of the corpse and of rotting, of the mourners hair, and to a purposeful noisiness) which however does not imply a universality of the meaning of such ritual practices (Huntington and Metcalf 1979: 46). On the other hand, I recognize the relevance of Seremetakiss sensorial approach to the ritual experience. You will have to cry commented many persons upon hearing I was going to attend a funeral up country: most of them accompanied the words by holding their head in their hands, lightly bending their trunk and flexing their legs, mimicking the posture of the female ritual mourning which they had either performed or witnessed many times before. Mourning, in Luhya funerals, seems to be more dependant on the bodily performance than on the linguistic elaboration, which is the yet the primary focus of mourning practice for Seremetakis and De Martino (Greece and Southern Italy respectively) (Seremetakis 1991; De Martino 2008). Ritual weeping seems to evoke a bodily memory associated to participation to the event: not adhering to the expected performance is instead sanctioned so that, people warned me, those who do not cry, are hiding something. The mother of the deceased most frequently and most loudly initiated the weeping. Nervously holding a white handkerchief with which she dried her 23

own tears and wiped the picture of her daughter, she would from time to time stand up, lean over the open coffin and start to cry. She shook her body, curving her back as if in pain. Loud one-secondlong, high-pitch screams were followed by a low-pitch, nasal breath release. Few sentences were repeated, in one breath: Mama watoto, mama watoto, mama watoto (Woman, woman, woman, literally meaning mother).

Death rituals are oral, melodic, and mimetic units, a language that is part of mans strategy against the crisis of being (De Martino 2008: 125). Mourning is in light of his very detailed, so to speak thick ethnographic analysis of funeral mourning in Southern Italy which considers linguistic, ethnomusicological, historical aspects a knowing how to cry (saper piangere): it is cultural, ritual work that re-establishes the historical presence in the world undermined by death (De Martino 2008: 55-56) 8.
8

De Martino distinguishes mourning from grieving which is, instead, absence of history, an expression of the universal crisis of culture opposite nature. This naturalism has been criticised at a later stage, yet the idea of crisis, which I mentioned earlier on in this paragraph, still remains topical. I share Clementis critique of the concept of natural grief (natural cordoglio): grief has, just as mourning, social and cultural connotations and cant be manifested as precultural (a-cultural) bare crisis (in Gallini 2008: xix). A similar approach to the nature/culture dyad vis--vis the phenomenon of death is to be found, in Aris 2004: 41 and Bowlby 1981, in Robben 2004 among others.

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As I said above, the days preceding the day of burial were hectic and people were constantly busy in different activities. Women, directed by Beatrice, Rosalitas sister-in-law who also came from Nairobi where she lived with her young sons, were mostly dedicated to cooking (tea, beans and maize, ugali dough made of maize flour and vegetables) and fetching water and, in turns, keeping company to the deceased. The elders were sitting in front of one of the two huts, the one belonging to Rosalitas late father-in-law. Duncan was often to be seen discussing with other men or women, greeting relatives, sending youth to buy bread for the guests or oil for the lamps that we would use during the night, negotiating the price money in hand of a calf which the elders insisted he should sacrifice during the night preceding the burial... The morning after our arrival to Musanda, we sat close to the loudspeakers that kept us awake all night: visibly tired, Duncan shared with me some of his thoughts on the whole process. He would have been happy to bury his wife in Nairobi, he said, and save the little money he had to pay school fees of his children, buy them food and clothes. The elders of the village, which he didnt want to offend, insisted that the funeral should be conducted back home, the traditional way: that implied travelling back home, building the hut, sacrificing a cow, some chicken, feeding the guests

Seremetakis wrote about her experience on the field:

During fieldwork, there was always a nagging feeling that the beginning of the death ritual eluded me. My sense of the beginning was more a function of methodological expectation than a cultural

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reality. The ethnographic narration of ritual is assumed to be contingent on the insertion of the observer into the performance as a participant, coextensive with the sequencing and duration of the event (Seremetakis 1991: 49).

Similarly, Geissler and Prince lamented a lack of ritual at the beginning of their research into death among JoUhero in Western Kenya. Funerals take on a central role in the contemporary negotiations of Luo identity (the same process is somehow true for the Luhya community) and, much like the Luo traditions and laws, they are increasingly subject to codification into fixed bodies of knowledge and lists of required steps animal sacrifice, food preparation, grave digging rather than shaving of hair, widow inheritance (Luo), widows dream of intercourse with the husband (Luhya) etc. However, some of these activities seemed to the two scholars closer to banal, everyday activities than to the important ritual steps like they were intended. With time they developed a deeper understanding of the everyday life of the village and came to realise that rituals need not be announced and performed in public, because all everyday action is ritual in this vital sense (Geissler and Prince 2010b: 104). There is not much written material on Luhya funeral. On a local website, a Luhya man provided the account of the funeral of an elder man who died at the end of 2010, following all the traditional ritual steps that are taken in such occasion (Barasa, in abeingo.org, 11/01/2011) 9.
9

I insert here a detailed summary of the ritual procedings listed in the article I mentioned. They refer, as said above, to the funeral of a male elder. The body was accompanied to the morgue (after death in a hospital) by fellow elders in respect and news of his death were not given until late afternoon, when the man would have normally come home from the fields. The family divided the material possessions of the deceased when picking him up from the morgue but clothes were not to be touched. No new clothes were bought either: doing so would be like accusing him of nakedness in life. The vehicle transporting the body could not be stopped for any reason on the way back, nor was his body to be continously replaced around the compound (each displacement would bring one death into the household).

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Funeral arrangements have gender and age specificities: the funeral for an elder man is the most elaborate and important for the community, all other people are less important and deserve less attention. During Rosalitas funeral, hardly anything similar to what I have indicated in the note happened (and most of it, given that Rosalita was a woman, was not actually supposed to happen). On my side, I did not have enough background knowledge to recognise some of the steps and activities that are associated to a funeral, even if they had taken place. On the other hand, the account in note focuses on prescribed behaviours which might or might not take place and it does away with all other activities that are part of the contemporary experience of the burial (daily activities as well as Christian burial, intergenerational changes in uses of music etc). Especially with reference to the post-mortem grief period, it is not clear whether all the steps did take place especially with regards to the widow. For sure, with more and more people living in the urban
The man was buried next to the house of his first wife, where he stayed until death, as it was his wish. Cattle was brought to the grave of the late man and guided around in circles; people did the same, singing Luhya circumcision songs. The next day, the family was to go to the river to wash and once back to the household they danced around the grave. The widow, if faithful to her husband in life, is supposed to dance on the grave. On the third day, the closest relatives were shaved to get rid of the death pollution and to start anew (Barasa, in abeingo.org, 11/01/2011). The account has a second part which refers to the post-burial rituals. On burial night the elders, sitting around the fire, can decide to strangle and roast a cock, symbolizing the head of the house. The cock is roasted with its feathers are still on and only elders are allowed to eat from it, while offering traditional prayers. The other symbols of the head of the house, a pointing stick on the house and one of the cooking stones are to be removed during the night when nobody is around by a grandson or a widow or a non-relative in their absence. All tools used during the funeral (to dig the grave for instance) are cleansed by sprinkling them with fermented porridge on the third day. When everybody is gone home, the widow would have to travel to a far place and find a man willing to have sexual intercourse with her without knowing about her widow state, although she should run before the sexual act, screaming. After that she is offered roasted bananas and a chicken is slaughtered on the place where the sexual encounter was supposed to happen (Barasa, in abeingo.org, 24/01/2011)

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setting, the traditional period of grief after the burial is being cut shorter and shorter and traditional practices are supplanted. Going back to my observation, the sacrifice of the calf, contrary to my expectations, had nothing of the ritual aura I had expected, not explicitly at least. Some men got together after the praying session and the subsequent wave of mourning and dancing by the youth had stopped. In the dark, asking my friend Steve for his electric torch, they tied the legs of the cow and cut its throat while the male elders were sitting around the fire and most of the women were dozing off on the grass around the hut while some inebriated youth were still dancing to the latest reggae successes. At sunrise, they gathered some banana leaves on which another drunken man skinned the animal, surrounded by hilarious comments and laughs about his persistent, comical dialogue with the carcass of the animal: by this time the elders had left the fire place to kids and youth and were getting ready for the third day of the burial. The meat was then given to the women to be prepared for all the guests while some dogs licked the ground imbued with the blood of the animal. We would eat the family of the deceased woman, I was invited to join them the meat of the sacrificed animal straight after burial. Most of the people coming from Nairobi or further needed to hurry to catch a bus back to the city so we were dragged with them into Rosalitas newly built hut to eat the meat and ugali as we were supposed to do before leaving the village. Outside just next to that same hut they were still shovelling ground into the grave that had been dug the previous evening.

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Christian burial Rosalitas burial took place after a religious service guided by a pastor from the local PEFA (Pentecostal Evangelical Fellowship of Africa). The closest family members (husband, children, mother, uncles) found place under the shade of the green tent. Together with them was the choir of the Church dressed in their pink robes. Other ladies from the Church wore white robes and a head scarf bearing the name of the Church; they accompanied the whole celebration with their songs. All other people, probably around a hundred by this point, surrounded the tent wherever they could find some repair from the burning sun. Some women went around the compound fetching water, cleaning and cooking: some chickens were still being brought by neighbours during the service and prepared on the back of the huts. As I said above, Sraphin talks about shared Christian attitudes towards death, which he observes in Nairobi but I reckon can be true for most areas of Kenya. Christianity has influenced the treatment of death whether we consider its understanding (as passage to an afterlife: separation of the soul from the body and its journey to heaven or hell), the moral values that are associated to death (distinctions between good and bad deaths, such as suicide or AIDS deaths for instance, stigmatised and systematically hidden, replaced by less problematic deaths; at the same time, the Churches are more and more shaping the discourse on witchcraft in the direction of Satanism), or the ritual framework (Sraphin 2003: 104; 123). Although I havent been able to find good accounts of traditional Luhya funerary rites from the past for a more informed comparison, 29

the Christian burial ritual seems to have replaced previous traditional ways. The wooden coffin has supplanted all previous arrangements and increasingly funerary merchandises come from the city. Mutongi however shows how this process of Christianisation of the burial practices and rituals dates back to 1940s (in Mutongi 2007)10. Outside the mortuaries one can buy when having the money, which wasnt the case for Rosalitas family standard flower compositions that are sold in sets of three: flowers are arranged as a cross (to be brought on the grave by the brothers), as a heart (donated to the deceased by his/her wife/husband), and a circle, symbol of unity, is brought by the kids. Outside the mortuary, street hawkers also sell sprays to cover the smell of the corpses and mass produced white veils which are used to cover the coffin before it is put into the grave. Such products are used in most burial celebrations, regardless of the different Christian or ethnic affiliation. Burial celebrations were conducted by a pastor and a master of ceremony. After some initial prayers and songs (either in Swahili or vernacular languages, Luhya in this case), somebody from the committee is in charge of pronouncing the eulogy, a biography of the deceased. Often the eulogy is printed, along with some photos, and offered to the guests in the funeral programme. A number of people is asked to give their oral contribution in memory of the deceased. In many cases, especially at male and elders funerals local or national politicians attend the burial cerimony, practically turning it into a political rally11. Although I was very interested in this part of
10

The use of coffins and cement on the men graves prolonged the material existence of the latter, with consequences for widows ability to exchange their lands soon after the Kenyan independence: whereas previously graves would disappear in a couple of years, with the burial changes many feared that the spirits of the dead were still present in the intact graves and that to leave them was to abandon the ancestors (Mutongi 2007: 170). 11 The use of burial cerimonies as political arenas is, in Kenya, a phenomenon that dates back at least to soon after the independence when politicians from the opposition not allowed to hold public rallies would use these events for political propaganda (Gertzel 1970: 174, in Haugerud 1995: 17). The same phenomenon proliferated during the 1980s, during Mois rule, and throughout the 1990s, when the clergy, local chiefs, and

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the funeral, I could hardly follow what first the husband, then some uncles followed by the mother and finally the pastor said about Rosalitas life: it was first of all in a mix of languages I did not understand and I found, in such short notice, nobody so skilful a translator to help me; it was also impossible to record it because of the great noise of the generator they used to let everybody around hear it; thirdly, quite venial an excuse, because of the great heat I was in no condition to concentrate on this part of the ceremony; finally, it seemed nobody around, with the exception of the people under the tent, were doing any effort to listen to what was being said. After this the choir guided an offertory to which the people participated with money offers, songs and dances.

Rosalita was then taken on a sort of final journey. The body was, in fact, constantly replaced until it reached its final resting place: hospital, mortuary, bus, outside the home, in and outside the hut. From there it was positioned in the middle of the compounds yard: the kids and closest friends covered the coffin with the white veils brought from Nairobi, the multiple layers being a visible proof of their love for the deceased. One of the daughters carried the portrait
others continued to hold politicised sermons in such occasions (Haugerud 1995: 17). In the last years, politicians were more and more denied the possibility to hold speeches at funerals, especially after causing violent riots to burst during some celebrations in the early 2000s (Maupeau 2003: 248249).

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of her dead mother, just behind the coffin carried by four male relatives. The whole congregation, organised in two lines, followed the pastor who stood before the coffin, guiding towards the grave. The choir intermittently stopped the song and the procession, so the pastor could read some verses of the Bible. The coffin was then helped into the grave, covered with branches and leaves to protect the glass frame over the face from big stones, while the pastor recited the passage from Genesis 3:19 for dust you are and to dust you will return, in Swahili. Men took turns in shovelling the earth into the grave while as I said above the family of the deceased was called into the hut to consume their food before they rushed towards Nairobi. We were done eating when the closest family and friends, accompanied by the choir and prayers from the pastor, formed a circle around the mound of earth and together put one pink flower each of the tomb, forming a cross. Later, when most guests started to go eat their share of the food, they continued walking in a circle around the grave until the end of the song. Urban-rural transitions The description until now is not as deep and complete as the one I had initially wished to produce: as I mentioned several times already my observation of the funerary rituals as they took place in Musanda lacks the everyday knowledge of the village, of its habits as well as of its stories. On top of that, I didnt get the chance to gather the in depth history of the family I worked with, both because of time issues and the momentous period the death of Rosalita represented for her family. I attended a few other funerals and/or funeral preparations but this was the only funeral I managed to follow entirely, if only that could be possible. On the other hand, attending this celebration and subsequently writing about it despite all the missing pieces of information and lack of insight that came with it meant having a first hand experience of what my informants in Nairobi were talking about when telling me about (funerals in) up country. The trajectory I took, Nairobi-Musanda intended as city to village a return home, it seems is fundamental if we consider that, in a reality of persistent urban migration, this is the habitual direction experienced by mourners and bereaved families from the 32

urban area. Such direction, together with the decisions that determine it, contributes in defining the post-mortem identity of the deceased and reciprocally shaping the identity of the survivors. Nairobi is fundamentally cosmopolitan and the everyday experience, especially that of youth born in the city, is one of friendships, romance and business that cuts across the ethnic communities. People are simultaneously part of many different groups, be it ethnic, religious, political ones, as well as informal communities based on shared jobs and business, hobbies, studies or friendships. According to Sraphin, who considers the universal reach of the Christian affiliation within the urban area, death becomes an identity marker that completes the lifelong construction of identity of the deceased (Sraphin 2003: 123). The sociologist tries to capture the identitary dilemmas of Nairobians that accompany death arrangements and orient the debate on current changes (e.g. resistance to big funerals up country, discussions on cremation and cemetery burials etc). His thesis is that in a framework of multiple reference groups, perhaps we can aujourdhui mettre lhypothse que le Nairobian, un individu situ lintersection de plusieurs aires dinfluence, se construit une identit propre qui saffranchit de lassignation communautaire. Within a shared Christian experience of death, Nairobians have the right to some sort personalised arrangements with ethnic, class, and personal details (Sraphin 2003). Such individual approach might be increasingly occuring given that it proves more economically and practically sustainable for the urban population (i.e. less expenses and not as time consuming). This might be especially true in a situation of high mortality rates due to, as Njue reminds, AIDS epidemic, rise of traffic accidents, and urban violence: la mort devient chose commune (Njue 2003: 75). However, studies exist that show the strength of ethnic and enlarged family ties within the urban areas, for instance Njue considering the community of urban Luos in Nairobi. Again, for many youth coming from the Kikuyu diaspora, certain neighbourhoods of Nairobi such as the one I lived in represents a rediscovery of their Kikuyu roots

33

and language for instance12. Moreover, the transitions to multipartyism of the early 90s has lead to increased ethnic polarization of the political sphere. Maupeaus analysis of the famous Otieno case and other judiciary cases concerning burial rights sets the corpses of so called big men against a political background characterised by the gradual transition from Mois dictatorship to the current political system. According to Maupeau, the urban bourgeoisie to which SM Otieno belonged occupies a powerful place in the Kenyan political system as it is able, unlike rural and urban impoverished masses, to escape the ethnic set up and the practices of clientelism on which the national politics thrive; their role is fundamental and exemplary in the process of constructing Kenyan citizenship based on individual participation rather than community belonging (Maupeau 2003: 254). Silvanus Melea Otieno was a Kenyan lawyer who, in the December of 1986 fell sick in his farm in the suburbs of Nairobi and died in Nairobi Hospital. The case deals with the struggle of his widow, Virginia Wambui (of Kikuyu origins), over the control of his remains. On the other side her opponents, the family of origin of S.M. Otieno, wanted to give him a Luo burial in his ancestral home in Siaya, Western Kenya. The case was a complex train of legal activities () giving a new dimension and force to the struggle for the corpse, whose ultimate object was
This is the case, for instance, for the Mungiki sect, a neo-traditionalist Kikuyu based religious and political movement widespread among the disenfranchised Kikuyu youth coming coming to Nairobi from the diaspora (more about this can be found in Rasmussen 2010 and Maupeau 2002). However, the rediscovery of the Kikuyu community and language does not always result in adherence to extremist groups such as the Mungiki, as happened to a friend of mine who moved to Nairobi from Western Kenya, where she grew up ending up learning more about the Kikuyu community to which she belonged in Riruta, Nairobi. As said before, Kikuyu and Luo almost monopolise public debate on ethnicity, because of their relative size as well as for being the only groups to have created a tradition of ethnic nationalism which has systematically shaped the Kenyan political systems. Other groups, however, also rely on parental and clan networks and community belonging which constantly links them to the rural areas, whether we are considering the average citizen or the big men and politicians.
12

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the repossession of the whole of SM: body, memory, history (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992: 4). For Cohen and Odhiambo the contest for SMs body became the site and the moment for a great national debate over the meaning of culture, and over the place of national and customary law within the intimate lives of Kenyans (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992: 16)13. Maupeau wishes to show how the trial should actually be interpreted within a context of encadrement communautaire fitting the strategy of the governants (Moi regime) who at that time were looking for the Luo support in view of the changes that would be brought by the multiparty system (Maupeau 2003: 257). Indeed, the corpse of SM Otieno was eventually assigned to his Luo relatives for a burial up country. Burial rights were thus interpreted as rights of the community to the detriment of the individual: such jurisdiction, partial and politically oriented, influenced other cases that followed as well as public opinion on burial matters. City, and back As in the title of this chapter, the corpses journey back from the urban area be it Nairobi or elsewhere is intended as a final and definitive return. Such come-back presupposes an opposite movement towards the city, although it is not self-evident for youth that were born in the urban diaspora.
13

The transition from colonialism signed the redefinition of practices of succession and inheritance based on citizens rights. Mutongi criticises, in her work, the way in which the national jurisprudence did not correctly define, or rather did not define at all, marital and extramarital relationships therefore creating a number of issues which the National Assembly did not address. As more men moved into the cities, customary laws with regards to widows rights became less applicable: changes in the nature of commodities (land vs modern possessions) and urban interethnic marriages or cohabitations, for instance, challenged traditional notions of legitimacy. Moreover, trials were more influenced by the litigants performances in the case we are considering urban women tended to win cases agains rural widows because of their familiarity with the urban setting in which they were judged than the ambiguous or even non existant laws that were to guide the litigation (see Mutongi 2007: 187-191). Maupeaus interpretation of the Otieno case seems to fit into this ambiguous legal system.

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Ngugi wa Thiongo, in the novel Wizard of the Crow, suggests a complex and vivid reading of African realities through the portrait of fictional country Aburiria and its political vicissitudes under its Ruler. The second book of the six that make up the novel is entitled Queueing Daemons: in it, poor and rich citizens start queueing in two separate but similar queues outside the office of the chairman of the Marching to Heaven project a Babel-like tower celebrating the Rulers greatness to be funded by the Global Bank with the hope to gain easy money or an occupation. The secretary of the chairman gives notice of his absence but the queues keep growing, becoming substantially infinite:
And now a sight even more amazing unfolded. When those at the head of the queue read the notice and broke the news, those immediately behind them refused to believe their ears and insisted on seeing the notice for themselves. In the end those who read it did not even bother informing those behind them and simply went away in silence, the others imagining that they had simply met with bad luck or did not want to show elation for fear of exciting envy. Those at the back of the queue thought the lines were moving and were joined by others. Even those who had already left, on seeing this apparent movement, would rejoin the queues at the rear. This game of attrition at the front and replacement at the rear continued. Queues without an end (wa Thiongo 2007: 141)

The queues will later be reinterpreted by the rebels and by the rulers according to their interests, as Ugwanyi points out in discussing Ngugis depiction and ideas of resistance in the postcolonial context (Ugwanyi 2011: 236); this does not concern me now. These queues are a strong image and one that could well describe, in my opinion, practices and hopes of the migration: despite the movement towards the cities turns out to be, more often than not, difficult and unsuccessful a broken promise it is yet continuously repeated and it constantly renovates and/or renegotiate the links between the rural and the urban sphere. Pieterse, on the other hand, stresses the fact that although the city can become a funnel delivering most poor youth across Africa towards contexts of violence, excess and terror, as well as of deprivation, we cannot neglect the creativity in terms of new sociabilities and active agencies or, Id add, cultural products 36

and innovations that such movement entails and produces (Pieterse 2009: 7). Youth identity is increasingly defined by their urban lifestyles and sociabilities which are both admired and contested in the rural areas. Sheng, a youth slang born in Nairobi, is perhaps the most evident contemporary Kenyan cultural creation which is rapidly spreading from the cities towards the rural areas and imposing a new youthful cultural hegemony. Burials, on the other hand, seem to conserve the power and hegemony of the rural elders. Schwartz talks about Western Kenya in terms of periphery of the periphery. As people of these areas are forced to delocalise to Kenyan or foreign towns and cities, burial at home is the one way to relocalise (Schwartz 2000: 434)14. Given the great distances between the major centres of migration, Nairobi and Mombasa (although migration to closer, smaller towns is also common), trips back to the rural areas are both expensive and time consuming, not readily available for the urban residents. Burial cerimonies are, therefore, occasions to travel back home and reunite with close and distant relatives. Ive already described resistances, especially by Christian churches and urban residents, to funerals upcountry because of the efforts they entail as well as for being linked to a traditional past that is often times associated to sin. Geissler and Prince describe the centrality for the Luo in JoUhero of the concept of home (dala): even in times of mobility, the focus seems to remain on a particular, named place of belonging and of a community of people attached to this place, part of the Luo nation. The rural and urban dychotomy is, in this instance, to be interpreted less as a matter of geographical places but rather in terms of moral places. The two scholars are interested to understand how a shared sense of loss is approached through conflicting yet coexistenting discourses of Luo traditionalism vs discourses of Salvation. These conflicting visions which determine practices of the present, they state, are expressions of different understandings of temporality continuity or break with the past which are themselves often
14

This practice is seen in many places and especially in the presence of big diasporic movements, like one can for instance read in Cassimans study of Kasenas funeral practices (Cassiman 2006).

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materialised in spatial trajectories of movement (Geissler and Prince 2010b: 3-4) 15. I will save a discussion on the ways and strategies through which urban youth accepts and negotiates funerals in contemporary Kenya for the third chapter of my thesis. Sophia Kharaka affirms that Funerals drive Kenyans crazy! (The Standard online 11/12/2011). Her critique is directed to the way funerals evolved from being solemn occasions to mourn the dead into occasions to show off and gossip and grief is relegated to the past. Whatever ones position is on the issue, funerals do represent occasions in which, time after time, coexisting visions to be found within the same society are juxtaposed, often without a real resolution to the conflict as the next passage shows. An uncited columnist of Kenyan newspaper standard describes such conflicting discourses by means of a short yet interesting portrait of a Luhya funeral a mishmash of traditions according to him. Such traditions are brought about by divergent camps can be observed at the funeral, as Munenes cartoon portrays.

15

De Boeck also criticizes distinctions of rural and urban (especially if in terms of traditional and modern) and warns about the ways in which in the postcolony [] categories such as centre and periphery, or city and village, and the string of qualities attached to them, have often themselves become states of mind rather than objective qualities of space (De Boeck 2002: 265). Geissler and Prince trace back such moral dychotomy to the colonial past but note how in the last decades it has grown more ambiguous: whereas presents are still imagined as movement they are yet accompanied by an equal feeling of stagnation and immobility or lack of direction (past/future) (Geissler 2010b: 5).

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Illustration for The mishmash of traditions at a Luhya funeral (The Standard Online, 14/02/2010, Munene)

There was the usual drunkard, so inebriated he could hardly stay on his feet. He cracked ribald jokes, danced and wailed. No one knew whether to fling him off the premises or laugh at his antics. We kept vigil at night and quickly discovered many divergent camps at the funeral. First, the local choir was hymning along when the sombre evening was shattered by the real stakeholders. These were a band of inebriated villagers who arrived with a stampede under the surge of rippling isukuti drums16. People who had been sitting gamely rushed to their feet, hips and shoulders rippling, demonstrating the age-old fact that an African warrior is only truly sent off in the song and dance of his forbearers. The church choir screamed "Riswa!" and tried to keep up to no

16

Traditional Luhya drums.

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avail17. The little band of sinners kept up the tempo till the wee hours of the morning when, I suspect, the illicit brew in their heads and whatever they had smoked evaporated. Not far off, however, was another team of young men with a noisy stereo playing hip-hop and reggae music. They swayed and staggered clutching water bottles with very questionable contents. Meanwhile, we, the city crowd, huddled in cars, sipping fiery liquids that are equally lethal, only that they are legally accepted because they are not hopefully brewed on the banks of a dirty river. In between the sips, we pontificated about what we knew of our culture and what we didnt (The Standard online, 14/02/2010).

17

Riswa is a Luhya expression used by followers of the Roho churches and indicates the activity of chasing away the bad spirits (Harries 2007: 275). Roho churches are independent spiritual churches (Roho meaning Holy Spirit) which appeared throughout East Africa between the 1920s and the 1960s tracing back their origins to youth groups within the Anglian church following some charismatic leaders (Mwaura 2004: 164-166).

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CHAPTER TWO ________ Nairobis routines of death Urban morbidities: of cemeteries, mortuaries, and coffins

PACO: How do you manage to eat in this place man? NOAH: Hunger is not very choosy about where you eat. PACO: Thats morbid man. This is a morgue. NOAH: That may be so, but its also my workplace. PACO: Fine, but can't you at least have some respect for the dead? NOAH: Respect? It's hard enough to get that when you are living, nobody is going to give it to you when you are dead. Extract from Dead Talk, Cajetan Boy 2010

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Dead talk Daily deaths at the mortuary On 23rd July 2011 the Kenyan theatre company Et Cetera presented at Alliance Franaise, one of the most active cultural centres of Nairobi, the show Dead Talk, written by Kenyan playwright Cajetan Boy. In Mombasa for a summer job, I received the invitation when I was already planning a visit back to the capital and I quickly made sure to get two tickets: several characters bearing cheaply photoshopped zombie eyes looked at me from those 500 shillings tickets as I headed towards Kibera to visit some friends. A pice set in a mortuary was a natural stopover given my research interests. Few people were in the audience, on a quiet Saturday morning. Both my friend Mildred and I were intrigued by the curious set-up of the stage. What the (missing) permits could not show me during the period of my research, was now before us even if in a theatrical way. A dimly lit, run down morgue. The setting is thus described in the script provided to me by the playwright:
there is a slab for laying out the bodies. There is a sheet and under lies Miles, a 38 year old man. There are several drawers presumably containing the bodies of more dead. Noah is seated in the room and is warmly dressed, evidence of the cold temperature of the room. He is also busy eating goat ribs or some form of bloody meat. The door bursts open and Paco enters. He looks around quickly and is startled by the sight of Noah and the bloody meat and stands at the open door (Cajetan Boy 2010: 1).

The two morticians started a conversation on the reasons why they worked there and more generally on the topic of death, especially in contemporary Nairobi/Kenya. A young, hopeful man (Paco) was introduced to the job on his first day at City Mortuary by an old, broken drunkard (Noah). People that work in the mortuary are often said, among people in Nairobi at least, to be drunkards and drug addicts: this character is no exception. Githinji, in an article on mchongoano, a popular verbal duel among youth, describes the cultural background of a series of insults that refer to the popular 42

image of morgue workers. Unafanya part time job City Mortuary (you work part time at the City Mortuary), notes Githinji, capitalized on stereotypical attitudes, and rumors associated with the City Mortuary (Githinji 2007: 90). The insult to the sanity of the person to whom it is adressed, therefore, works as a social commentary and summarizes all the attitudes and beliefs that the society associates with death and morticians: it seems to evoke horrifying images of badly mutilated bodies, smell of death and decay, and sorrowful cries of the people who have just seen the bodies of their departed loved ones (Githinji 2007: 90). My several visits to the mortuaries or to the cemetery were always met with a mixture of curiousity and revulsion by my friends, who often summed up their opinion on the matter shaking their head and laughing, along with a disgusted shrug of the shoulders. Just as the character of Noah seems to represent the popular, stereotypical image of those working in this particular environment, so does the dialogue between the two characters combine the many possible and contradicting perceptions on the phenomenon of death, juxtaposing common sensical statements that can be part of any conversation on death in town, perhaps any town: - death is morbid but is also a banal job (and potentially good for business) - need to respect for the dead and lack thereof - equality in death (that is, death as the great equalizer: no rich, poor educated or illiterate. Here they are all the same, p. 2) - working with the dead requires dignity and is an important service vs the concept that dead is dead (These are no longer people, human beings; this is garbage, waiting to be disposed, p. 2) - Fear of the dead/corpses and of spirits, p. 3 - Being constantly confronted with ones own mortality can bring insanity (When you have to confront your mortality everyday, in the harshest terms, you have to drink . . . just to stay sane, p. 4) - Existential questions: what is the purpose of life: to live or to die? (p. 4) 43

One after the other, the dead characters wake up to a different status in the cold morgue room and start a dialogue of their own unheard by the living. They discuss the predicaments of their lives, the conditions of their deaths and the moralities that these events entail. Miles died of AIDS. Baraka, a thief with a rough background of poverty who had been sexually abused by his own step-father (whom he killed), died in a shoot out, repetively shot by the police. Nayla, a young lady, had an illegal abortion after being sexually raped at a party and died after the operation. Their personal stories intertwine with the last character, Lucilla, killed by a car. This death allows their encounter to be a moment of redemption and revelation: Lucilla had criminal business with Baraka and set him up; Nayla was raped (by Baraka) at a party organised by Lucillas and died in the operation that the latter cheaply procured; Miles and Lucilla were once engaged but she couldnt accept his HIV+ status. As a true morality play, eventually they discover that Lucilla the bad character not only hasnt learnt any lesson from her own experience but is not really dead, unlike the others, and she will have to face the next day her name being printed in a list of potentially HIV+ people that Miles planned to publish next to his own funeral announcement. Likewise, the older mortician will find out through the discovery of a birthmark that Baraka was the son he abandoned before he was even born. Cajetan Boy, the author of the play, confirmed that he wrote Dead Talk after being contacted by a local church group with the intention of having a script about choices and consequences for their congregation. The script has indeed a strong Christian moral, which is however at times challenged by some of the characters, their choices and their opinions. I included a longer extract from the play (see annex 2) which describes the tone of the dialogues and the topics the play deals with. The points made by the characters have nothing too original about them. So-called dead talk is always about to take an obvious turn, or so it seems. My own research is sprinkled with such conversation and exchanges of opinions on death, with and between informants, acquaintances, friends, family, colleagues in Kenya or elsewhere Whereas it is necessary, though 44

sometimes hardly achievable especially, as in my case, in the short run to go beyond such positions, they are however habitual and reoccurring. The play is perhaps neither the most well developed nor the most original work on death, it is nevertheless an example of a re-elaboration of popular concepts and themes, worries and hopes on death, and one with strong references to contemporary Nairobi. It is, for one thing, not a case that the first dead to speak should have suffered the stigma related to AIDS and eventually died of it. The death of today: routine deaths, stigma and possibility Beneduce, in an overview of ethnographies on death in the SubSaharan African context, lists at least three anthropological approaches to death (Beneduce 2002). The first type is concerned with traditional ways of conceptualising death as a dialogue between the living and the dead and resembles the approach of Bloch which might suggest different destinies for the individual other than her total annihilation (Bloch 1988: 24). Favoles work on the social life of corpses also builds upon this continuity, on what he calls the porous characteristics of the boundary between the living and the dead, although his is a transversal and transcultural enquiry on the body as a threshold and locus of construction of humanity, whether in life or in death (Favole 2003: 6; 16). The sudden absentia that I postulated as a condition of the deceased did not quite fit the corpses I encountered in the stories of one of my Kenyan housemates or those told outside the mortuaries. Those dead were not exactly voiceless like I could have expected. A second approach considers death in the postcolonial context (the why now? Lamont refers to in question the growing visibility of anthropological research of death in the African context, see Lamont 2009). Such investigations raise issues of power: the funeral is a stage for strategies of power negotiation, informed by on-going generational shifts in the concept of person and individual. Changes in funeral organization, expressions of mourning, generational struggles between youth and elders, changed patterns of accusation etc seem to have their basis in the continents generalized political and economic crisis, but also in a more acute moral and spiritual one (de Boeck 1998; 2005 in Lamont 2009: 456). Lamont, drawing 45

on francophone anthropological research on Congo and Kenya, goes on to point out how such shifts follow dissimilar directions in different African contexts and compares emerging practices in Kinshasa, Congo and Nairobi, Kenya (Lamont 2009). Finally, anthropology has to come to terms with a third way to deal with the topic at hand, when death is no longer the experience of an individual but a collective one of violence and terror (as in civil wars, ethnic clashes as well as the AIDS pandemic etc). Thornton talks of a time before AIDS, the time of AIDS, and a time that might perhaps never come the time after AIDS (Thornton 2008: 25). Whereas Thornton is concerned with the epidemic itself, HIV/AIDS was and still is to a certain extent automatically associated to death and dying. The disease of today, although slowly decreasing since the peak of the early 90s, by 2008 still accounted for around 80,000 yearly deaths in Kenya18. Its impact is visible at the level of everyday life: coffins become common household commodities, death acquires a weekly routine (Saturday is for funerals states Kenyan judge Unity Dow in her own book on the impact of AIDS in local communities in Botswana, see Dow and Essex 2010). Thornton also stresses this daily visual impact by observing how burials within the compound, as it is the case in Uganda (and in Kenya too), have an visceral impact on the behaviour change of the living who are forced to look at the graves of family members who had died of AIDS (Thornton 2008: 89-90). This is actually not the case if we consider the urban practices to send off their dead to the rural up country: yet the sense of loss is probably as strong despite not being permanently visible. Yet, the high mortality rates are visible in the lines outside the mortuaries and the routine collections of money, or the recurrent pictures of late people hanging

The figure is indicative and relates to a 2008 survey by UNAIDS (http://www.unaids.org/en/dataanalysis/tools/aidsinfo/countryfactsheets/). Statistics about mortality in Nairobi present, on the other hand, huge analytical problems due to an insufficient geographical coverage and incomplete data as well as because of the great migratory phenomenon that involves the majority of the Nairobian population (Boucquier 2003: 8).

18

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from the matatus or in the homes. As Beneduce reminds, AIDS but not only raises issues of collective memory (Beneduce 2002). Many authors mention a connection between HIV/AIDS and modernity, or rather the ills of modernity. Haram, working on mourning among the Meru in Northern Tanzania, writes about the changes of mourning and funerary rituals and how they are partly influenced by an increased mortality rate. HIV/AIDS, as well as traffice accidents, account for a good number of the deaths: maendeleo (Swahili for progress) as a dangerous mixing of people (socially and/or sexually) increasingly becomes associated with death. AIDS, the unnameable disease, is the disease of these days (ugonjwa wa kisasa) (Haram 2010: 222). Geissler and Prince instead analyse sickness and death in Uhero, a Luo village in Western Kenya. This context is also one of increased mortality in which they observe similar symptoms being identified with two different sicknesses, chira19 or ayaki (AIDS). Both caused by
Chira among the Luo indicates the consequence of breaking the rules, whether we consider prohibitions or prescriptions. Chira is the bodily manifestation of the blockage of growth, as child-death or (increasingly commonly) as wasting illness, diarrhoea and death (Prince 2007: 131). According to Parkin, the term entered the Nylotic Luo language a few centuries back and derives from the Bantu root kira, with the meaning of pass over therefore suggesting a concern with connections and touch (in the areas of food, drinking and sociability, unions and sexuality). The same author suggested that the concept has undergone some changes, especially in the 1970s when it became a popular idiom of misfortune among the Luo urban migrants: in that context it grew beyond the context of childbearing and infant care accomodating to city life, especially along gender and intergenerational lines (Parkin 1978: 151-153, in Prince 2010b: 201). After these changes the term made it recently back to the rural area: a strong discourse in the moralist-Traditionalist discourse about female chastity, led by elderly men who often became Traditionalists after a long modern life in the city, replaces an idiom of mutual respect, interdependence and gender complementarity. Thereby it shifts the emphasis towards individual responsibility and morality, and to sex (Prince 2007: 133). Moreover, the new understanding of chira has to be set in a context of coexisting discourses such as the increasingly codified Luo Traditionalism, Saved Christians moral interpretation of sexuality as well as against the backdrop
19

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intercourse and substantial relatedness, they have similar symptoms and prognosis. However, the two scholars note that the the two illnesses carry different, if not opposed connotations, and these become evident when the death of today is discussed in Uhero: chira is the illness of long ago (tuo machon), of home (mar dala), of the land (mag piny), associated with Luo identity and an expression of the crisis of Luo life. Ayaki is the new illness (tuo manien), from outside (mar oko), from town (mar taun), of wandering (mar bayo), i.e. excessive, undirected movement (Geissler and Prince 2010b: 244; 2010: 249-250). It is such knowledge that influences the ways in which AIDS is talked of rather than neglected, in any case locally understood and reinterpreted: in Uhero the ambiguity of the death of today is negotiation territory between Luo traditionalists on the one hand calling for stricter adherence to an increasingly codified body of Luo traditions and laws among which tero, or widow inheritance, seems to be of great importance and Saved Christians, who focus on the individual rupture with the traditional past and rejection of sin (see Prince 2007)20. Comaroff also notes how AIDS has been
of a political discourse on AIDS and youth sexual practices and reception of (locally or global) pornographic material (Prince 2007: 143-144). 20 Tero, widow inheritance as stated above, takes on a central place in the negotiation of Luo identity: it brings about regeneration after that and is therefore considered a sacred practice. Widows are expected to be cleansed by a sexual encounter with a jater (levir): this man would usually come from within the family, but as Prince notes, in the past decades due to the AIDS threat these men started to be recruted from outside (Prince 2007: 88). Whereas the practice of tero finds fundament in ideas about growth and regeneration and symbolic of the Luo culture, it is also a means or strategy to gain access over land titles and other assets: on the one hand widows and their children continue in this way to be part of the husbands lineage, on the other hand men who take the widow have easy access to her title deeds (Geissler and Prince 2010b: 273-274; the same point is made by Njue 2003: 85-86). Opposers of tero have often shaped their discourse in terms of health risk of such sexual contacts given the very high AIDS rates of the region although such discussions are strong even within its supporters. Contrary to existing practices that tacticly combine different perspectives to determine an important life choice, the public discourse has

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appropriated within the Pentecostal Churches that have burgeoned across the global South in neoliberal times: the discovery of HIV+ status can symbolise a rebirth to a life without sin, expressed through narratives of self-transformation (Comaroff 2010: 28). Still, Prince herself rejects a view of AIDS and its social context in Africa which opposes, once again, modern and traditional. Rather, peoples disagreements about the death of today are part of a long conversation between Luo people themselves about morality, personhood, social relations and the source of growth. By exploring the complex relations between Salvation, tradition and AIDS, we better understand not only AIDS in this East African society but the fundamental tensions that shape peoples experience of this modernity (Prince 2007: 110)21. Kruger analyses two examples of Kenyan womens literature dealing with narratives of AIDS. On the one hand, the novel Chira by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (1997) follows the life of a young Luo man in Nairobi against a context of suffering and moral doubts caused by or rather marked by chira (and AIDS): framed in multiple epistemologies that privilege a religious idiom of sin and transgression, redemption and faith, AIDS-cum-chira testifies to a devastating moral corruption that spreads from top to bottom, from the political leaders to the ordinary people. The individual body is only as contaminated or healthy as the body politic (Kruger 2004: 122). The novel Confessions of an AIDS victim by Carolyne Adalla, instead, presents the narrative of a young lady who discovered her HIV+ status and writes about the social exclusion that such a diagnosis means. Through an epistolary exchange with a friend, the main character presents AIDS both as a source of blame (to be confessed) and as the cause of victimhood (and lack of agency). Yet
instead been polarised and interpreted within the framework of gender antagonism and regressive tradition (Geissler and Prince 2010b: 281). 21 The AIDS pandemic has been a major focus of studies in the anthropology of death: how it has been interpreted at the local level, triggered generational shifts, stirred the development of innovative ideas and rituals coping with the pain of such collective loss (see e.g. Klaits 2010, about Botswana; Njue 2003 and Geissler and Prince 2010b about Kenya).

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the written narrative permits to gain a different sort of agency which builds on a collective experience:
Her story, so she claims, is not one of personal but of collective suffering and the collectivized experience effectively serves to legitimize Catherine's narrative. In a society caught at the crossroads of different modernities, morally weak and destructive, her story exemplifies many of the social ills that need to be addressed before positive change can take place. As she reviews her past trials and tribulations, she claims that her confession has the educational quality that might help prepare such social change. Gradually, a moment of personal catharsis extends through Catherine's narrative to society per se (Kruger 2004: 110; 112).

Comaroff calls for attention to local histories and sociologies of the disease which risk to be obscured by grand allegories of exclusion, crisis and apocalypse (Comaroff 2010: 33). AIDS, as a lived reality in the postcolony, represented a basis for the blame and, at the same time, has contributed to creating a vibrant civil society and opportunities of social transformation: the past decades have seen the development of new strategies for positive and future-oriented life with the deadly and stigmatised disease which also rely on transnationalised citizenship based on a shared therapeutic predicament (Dilger and Luig 2010: 11). Mama Agneta, widow of Rosalitas husbands uncle (see previous chapter), invited me to her place once back to Nairobi, a few days after the funeral. She took me for a visit at Stawi Academy, a very small school for poor HIV+ children in Kibera. She opened the school after her husbands death years before. He died of AIDS leaving her to deal with three orphaned children and the stigma of being HIV+ positive. The school, with all its economic problems and its hopeful outlook, stood almost like a symbol of her own life. Like many other women and men across Kenya, she accepted her situation her husbands relatives were instead only waiting for her death and made it the starting point of a renewed, active presence in an enlarged community focused on prevention and education. For Comaroff, AIDS, which imposes a chronotope of its own, is both a sign and a vehicle of late-modernity: of the promises and risks of bold new freedoms; of the unruly conflation of love and death, creation and 50

destruction and, to return to Agamben of the paradoxical coexistence of inclusion and banishment, human emancipation and inhuman neglect (Comaroff 2010: 21; 38). The AIDS epidemic, due its influence on the mortality rate, has certainly determined changes in perceptions of death and funeral practices whether we consider econonomical perspectives or emotional reactions and strategies of coping. Haram recognises this catalyst role of AIDS in the recent development concerning the organisation of death among Meru in Tanzania. However she also rightfully points out that it is not the only factor: a process of individualisation of economy, a context of land scarcity in which burial choices are influenced by strategies of land ownership, as well as the rationalisation of death at all levels of society are equally determining the speed and directions of the changes (Haram 2010: 222). Proper funerals are the same is true for Kenya economically unsustainable and time consuming for the majority of the urban population. At the same time proper grief is becoming emotionally unmbearable for Meru women who have to cope with the pain of loss and the practicalities of assisting the sick and mourning the deceased: as in the title of the article, they are tired of mourning (Haram 2010: 237)22. At the same time, certain traditional rites associated to funerals, as for instance widow inheritance I discussed above, are challenged by the presence of the disease. Although common, AIDS deaths are mostly not accepted. Nzioka gives an account of how death from AIDS, in Kenya, is morally judged through stereotyped beliefs, regardless of the real circumstances: it is seen as a form of punishment for behaviours
22

This notion reminds of Scheper Hughes work on the routinisation and acceptance of child death in Brazilian shantytowns which is described in the work Death without weeping (1992). Haram herself reminds of the above in discussing how changes in funeral traditions are influenced by womens negotiations of social priorities and relationships although she cannot clearly state whether the same process of emotional distancing is in act here. For another interesting rereading of Death without weeping from an African perspective, I signal Einarsdttirs ethnography Tired of weeping on infant mortality among Papel in Guinea-Bissau (see Einarsdttir 2005 or Wills 2006 for a review).

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against the social rules (associated to adultery, and eventually it leads to bareness and discontinuation of the family). According to him, it is generally considered a permanent death, the negative judgement will be as bad in the after-life as it was in this world, and it threatens both the biological and the social regeneration of the group (Nzioka 2000: 5;7). As Ive shown, HIV/AIDS is often reinterpreted as a sign of moral corruption and not easily talked about. One of the main characters of wa Thiongos Wizard of the crow pronounces the following words when trying to describe an illness that is affecting him:
Some things are hard to talk about because, as I told you the last time we went over this, these things, even diseases, are embarassing to the one who is talking about them. When gonorrhea and syphilis were deadly menaces, people suffering from them were often described as having fallen victim to a sever strand of flu. It is the same today with the virus of death. Every victim of the virus is said to have died of a kidney problem (wa Thiongo 2007: 337).

AIDS deaths but the same is true of suicides, like Nzioka shows are often denied in the sense that they are attributed other, more natural or more neutral causes or to the extreme conclusion that the sick person is abandoned to be buried in common graves by government workers (Nzioka 2000: 11). One of my informants showed me the video of a cousins funeral and told me that potentially everybody knew he committed suicide: during the burial, on the other hand, his death was attributed to celebral malaria and at least another sickness. The same is often true of AIDS deaths although one can never be sure about what the real cause was. Nevertheless in the recent years, especially in the cities, people affected by the disease have started self-help groups that can also take care of transportations and burials, as well as the writing of wills which is otherwise considered by many a controversial practice (Njue 2003: 93). Mama Agnetas choice to open a school for people with HIV as I mentioned above was a confirmation of her status in the face of existing stigma. So too, going back to the play from which I started, is Miles decision to publish a list of potential HIV+ people inspired by real events: it recalls AIDS victims engagement and efforts to change societal ideas about the disease and is a 52

confirmation of the role of the latter in creating civil society participation. The volume of ethnicity and violence The lives and deaths of the four dead characters mentioned above offer in my opinion a rather simplistic yet somehow representative outlook on Nairobi city life (in terms, for instance, of socioeconomical and educational background, gender etc). The play admittedly has a moralistic inclination (though not an obvious one: AIDS is definitely not stigmatised and so are all the other choices given valid explanations) which should explain the themes that are treated: violence, abuse, sexual behaviour, criminality, friendship, love. There is, however, at least one great absent and that is, as far as Im concerned, ethnic affiliation. All references to the various Kenyan communities have been removed following an explicit choice of the writer. Commissioned by a Christian congregation, the play was meant to relate to any audience independently from their cultural background. Their names, as well as their behaviour, do not bear any recognizable ethnic characteristic. There is no hint to their families or to the ritual steps they will go through after leaving the morgue: the dead are isolated from the world of the living cannot hear it, touch it, influence it and their destiny will remain unknown to the audience. This elaboration of an immediate after-life, a sort of limbo in which the dead wake up able to observe their lives and drag some conclusions, is a theatrical trick that masks a reality in which dead talk is in fact predominantly a talk on, about, for the dead. Who is producing such commentary on the lives and identities of the dead, and how? In Droz and Maupeaus publication on death in Nairobi, nearly every article notes how somehow individuals, especially at the moment of death, belong to their relatives (Droz 2003). As Whyte suggests, in her analysis of death in Western Kenya, the process of dealing with death is informed by a concept of personhood, intended as peoples notion of what a human being is and ought to be, in which the bodies and social identities are intimately connected (Whyte 1990). These notions are, as much of anthropological literature shows, essentially hybrid and constantly negotiated. De Witte, for instance, offers a thorough ethnographic analysis of Akan death and funerals in Ghana. Opting for a dynamic 53

approach to death, she focuses on conflicting (i.e. coexisting) practices, cultural products, and beliefs, associated with traditional, Christian and popular culture. She discusses Asante funerals not as an institution present in society to be studied and described, but as a field of interaction, in which tensions arise, discussions and negotiations take place and imaginations are turned into images. Whose imaginations these are and by what means this happens is a question of power (De Witte 2001: 13). Funerals can be considered events in which the networks in which a person was present interact and give rise to borrowing from Cliffords definition of culture an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions (Clifford 1988: 46). Conducting a research on death in the urban sphere, although the same can be said of rural areas, needs to deal with such interactions which are both internal and external to the cultural communities; they also mark intergenerational changes, negotiations of gender roles and relations, economical and political strategies, interfaith dialogue or conflict. I have already partially dealt with the role of ethnic communities in the previous chapter, showing how burial up country can be understood in some instances as a strategy aimed at recentering rural belonging as well as determined by government interest (as in the Otieno case, for instance); again, funerals seem to reconfirm the cultural hegemony of the rural elders and the importance of the ethnic ties over those developed in the urban area. The choice of leaving out any reference to the ethnicity of the characters in the play is however indicative of an increased reluctancy, especially after the post-election violence of 2007-2008 and especially among youth, to publicly determine personal identities along ethnic lines. Soon after the elections in December 2007, violent episodes burst in urban areas all around the country protesting against the reconfirmation of Mwai Kibaki at the presidency: many voters of Raila Odinga, the Luo leader from ODM (Orange Democratic Movement) felt that the results had been rigged. Kenyan citizens from the Luo and other communities, especially Kalenjin in the Rift Valley, started to attack their Kikuyu neighbours whom they thought were going to (continue) enjoy the privilege of belonging to the tribe of the 54

president23. The attacked became attackers as well, especially through the involvement of the Kikuyu youth from the Mungiki
The national politics in Kenya thrive on local patron-client relations: Klopp points out the continuity between colonial and post-colonial provincial administrations and their hierarchies of centrally appointed chiefs and assistants; she also aims to show the anti-democratisation role of such decentralized despotism (Klopp 2001: 478-480; also in Haugerud 1995: 40-42). With the first President, Jomo Kenyatta, Kikuyu lites entered the government in bigger numbers than any other group in Kenya with huge economic benefits. Mois coup in 1982 signed instead the mass exclusion of Kikuyu members from the places of power and from the economic system to the benefit of the less numerous Kalenjin group and some other allies (Maupeau 2003b: 152). The return to multipartyism, especially in the 2002 elections, saw a refusal of Mois political tribalism through the alliance of Kibaki (Kikuyu voters) and Raila Odinga (Luo voters). Violence has actually characterised every election since the 1990s creating thousands of IDPs across the country (Brown 2012: 247). Moreover, Kibaki and Odinga were again opponents in 2007. In particular, Odingas party ODM brought back the notion of majimbo into the national politics. Majimbo is a recurrent theme in Kenyan political history, strongly connected to the land issue and was the promise of some sort of regional political system; it means province and could be translated into English as devolution or federalism. It has been part of a very heated, highly controversial constitutional debate between the two main parties KANU/KADU since independence and was for instance opposed by Jomo Kenyatta (Kagwanja 2001; Manners 1962: 9). As in Klopp, this notion actually bears the marks of British political control of Kenya in that it delineates the provinces along practically invented ethnic boundaries. With advent of multi-party politics it was first contrasted, then approved and substained by former President Moi. Indeed, creating ethnic aligned political voters in the different constituencies was a means for patronage bosses to keep the control and the benefits of power in certain areas even if they lost at national level (Klopp 2001: 483-484). In 2007 and before, in certain parts of the country (and especially the Rift Valley), it created anxiety because of its association with balkanization, ethnic cleansing, insiders and outsiders, us and them (Njogo 2009: 7). In 2010, the International Court of Justice confirmed charges against six Kenyan citizens after the Kenyan government failed to set up a Reconciliation tribunal as had been decided during the negotiations. According to Brown, this is because the same people that are to be indicted are in fact the ones that are asked to create the tribunal
23

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group, a religious fundamentalist group with political wings. Youth were mainly involved in the attacks although narratives of the conflict recall the guiding positions of some elders, who had planned the attacks in accordance with local politicians (see Njogu 2009: 274 for an account of how Kalenjin elders used their role of power to convince youth take up the arms). In the Nairobi slums youths were paid by local politicians to take part in rallies during the campaign and were involved in violence against people (even neighbours and friends) from different communities. The police was also responsible of shootings on unarmed protesters. In the course of two months, over 1,000 people died (cut, stabbed, burnt) and hundres of thousands were left homeless and economically vulnerable as properties were evicted, burnt down, destroyed, looted. The matters are obviously more complicated than in the brief description I have provided above. My interest is however on the effects that such death toll, caused by the political abuse of ethnic ties, has had at the level of public opinion. On a bus from Kibera to the Nairobi centre, I once was asked by a lady about the reasons of my stay in Kenya. Her suggestion, although it came too late, was that I should have focused on how the deaths caused by the post-election violences had been dealt with. Not that there was one way, clearly. I would expect as Im sure it is the case sometimes such deaths to be appropriated and elaborated by the ethnic communities in even a stronger way than in other circumstances. On the other hand media, cultural and religious organisations tend to focus on forgiveness, although the violences have not been forgotten and people are still suffering in many ways the consequences of the events. Njogu has edited, for instance, a publication collecting interviews with people across the country aiming at Healing the wound (Njogu 2009). Boniface Mwangi, a Kenyan photo journalist started showing his pictures on the streets across the country through a project called Picha mtaani (Swahili for street gallery). The initiative is directed
(Brown 2012: 245-246). Five politicians/officers and a radio broadcaster were listed with the accuse of serious crimes against humanity during the post-election violence period (ICC website: http://www.icccpi.int/NR/exeres/BA2041D8-3F30-4531-8850-431B5B2F4416.htm).

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by youth who train other young people to become agents of reconciliation. Their aim is too to heal the nation, like the subtitle of their project states (www.pichamtaani.org). Another group of Kenyans (CKW Concerned Kenyan Writers) published two volumes through the literary magazine Kwani? in which they give space victims voices, political concerns and accusations, narratives building on this shared experience of terror. The writers, almost all university educated Kenyans, attended a workshop in which they discussed how to portray the violence: through a literature-meetsjournalism perspective, they produced interviews, articles, pieces of creative writing, poems to cover the time before and after the events. Coffins are a recurring image throughout the volumes, and so are the butchered bodies of the Kenyan citizens. What comes out of it is a nationalistic position against the ethnic belonging, taken by a socalled Generation X who grew up under Mois rule and its nationalistic rhethoric (covering his strategic alliances with one or the other group):
sandwiched between entitled dreams comfortable with dual identities (I am a Kikuyu and a businessman, period; I am a Luo and a doctor); and anarchists (I am a DJ and I come from Langa, Nakuruu, Buru, and my shags is Coast. Im also in Strath). Xs identity struggles waver between my primo, my high school and the estate, mtaa; tribe is but a third concern [] They grew up in a time of drugs, economic strain, HIV/AIDS, rural-urban migration, matatus, fracturing family networks and urban class divides [] And though there is always an argument for regionalism in literature as a model for capturing the universal, this seems indulgent at a time when the volume of ethnicity has been turned up to the max. Yes, our greats went a long way towards illuminating particular ethnic spaces, and all we contemporary writers are indebted to them24; but we are now at a point where we need to question whether all those lights can possibly make a collective vision (Kahora 2008: 8-12).
24

Great forefathers. They talked about Ngugi wa Thiongo as well as Macgoye as examples of great writers writing about the Kenyan experience from the start point of localised ethnic communities (Kikuyu for the first, Luo for the second). Again, we see the polarization of the discourse on ethnicity around the two communities.

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Ethnicity, exploited by the political ruling class, becomes a source of blame and death and is therefore criticized through the language of death, as in the poem Divide and Misrule by Stephen Derwent Partington:
What does dug earth care at all about ethnicity? / A Mwangi fits a six-foot hole / as snugly as Owuor25. // And tell me, where's the corpse that anyone / can teargas with success? / Or did you do it to augment the tears of mourners, / out of kindness? // Can you tell a foe from how he skins a cow / or peels a spud / or guts a fish? / Are these enough to skin his hide? / Perhaps it's speech, the way she shrubs? / And who's the carrier, his mother or his dad? / Can we locate the gene for Enemy? / Today, can we condone the fact / Kikamba's only got one word for 'enemy', / 'Masai'? // Reflect: that family you killed, / it had as little land as you. / Or did you see the old machete used to cut you? / Dented, rusty, cheap, like yours. / Reflect on this. // This warped deflection of your anger / isn't justice: / it's a coffinful of shit (Partington 2008: 140).

In another poem, Politicised Funerals published on the website of the magazine, people become meat for the leaders to feast on them: In death, we all are meat: / come see our leaders / rip and spit and tear and eat. // The mourners see it, take a peek: / the bored-stiff chap inside the coffins / gone and voted with his feet (Partington, Kwani.org). Simiyu Barasa, a film maker and writer, instead goes as far as writing his own obituary. Although a little cinematographic, I found it an interesting example of how the Nairobian geographies are described as they were pervaded by fear and terror alongside violence and by images of death awaiting at every corner. Real Kenyan citizenship comes to mean death, although this obituary and the fact that it was published on a literary magazine rather than a newspaper stands as a hopeful sign:

25

Mwangi is a Kikuyu name whereas Owuor indicates a Luo man.

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[] That is why friends, I have decided to write this obituary. I know not my tribe, I have only known myself as Kenyan, and others as fellow Kenyans. In these times, belonging or not belonging means not being dead or being seriously dead. What chances does a person like me have? My friends have their tribes mates to protect them. The cosmopolitan Nairobi has now been balkanized with residential estates being exclusive reserves of certain tribes. Complete with murderous gangs imported from up-country to protect their own. Mungiki for the Gikuyu, Chingororo for the Gusii, and the Baghdad Boys and Taliban for the Luo [] I used to laugh at tourists buying maps of Nairobi. I bought one recently. It is stuck in the wall of my bedroom where small pencil marks indicate all the escape routes I will try to walk in to get out of town once the mayhem knocks on my door. Unfortunately, to the west are roadblocks where my Luhya name will mean instant death. If I go to Mombasa Road I might run into a roadblock where Kambas and all coast people are being cubed. To the North I cant even dare. To the south I might pass, coz I can speak Gikuyu, but my name would be my passport to the grave yard. That map, my friend, directed me to writing this obituary [] I have nowhere to go. No tribe to run to. No tribes men to protect me. Except the grave [] I loved without thinking of your parental lineage. I loved Kenya. But looked what this country has done to me: sodomised my sense of humanity and pride (Barasa 2008: 203-205).

Death mass produced by the (democratic?) political system and its imagery seem to become a starting point for a rewriting of the Kenyan nation and citizenship. This is not the case only for the educated writers that Ive mentioned until now, but more and more the idiom of tribalism popular opinion blamed all events on vague notions of negative tribalism is redefined to describe the split between the Kenyan nation as one tribe against the tribe of the politicians, responsible for the killing of innocents. This is even more true if we consider, for instance, the high mortality rate of the slums caused by extra-judiciary killings and police shootings to civilianzs or petty thieves. Pomerolle has described the birth of the practice, lead by human rights groups, of manifestations against the police which take the funeral caskets of the victims from the mortuary to the general quarters of the police, passing in front of the Parliament. She states that this porte de cercueil has grown in popularity since 59

1997, becoming common if not regular (Pomerolle 2003: 220)26. I quote the words of one of the many citizens interviewed by Njogo, Let us have one ethnic group called Kenya and the other group called politicians (Njogo 2009: 257). Places of death in the city Mortuary As I mentioned in the introduction, death seen from the city acquires a centrifugal movement. As much as I envisioned this chapter as dealing with death in the city of Nairobi, I quickly fell prey to that very centrifugal movement suggested by he mortuary from which I departed. I headed off to understanding how AIDS and ethnic conflict have influenced mortality rates and the organisation of death itself. The mortuary is at least in my experience one of the places where the toll of death is most visible for the urban citizens although not the only one27. Each visit to the mortuary represents an encounter with numerous other people in the same situation of loss. Moreover, on Thursdays or Fridays the mortuary becomes a crowded, noisy place where corpses and coffins are rhythmically, ceaselessly assigned to the groups of mourners waiting outside and start the final part of their journey after having waited in this impersonal environment sometimes for long periods. In Nairobi, the main
26

I do not know of this practice myself but Im aware of the situation Pomerolle describes in her article as many of my informants told me about the death of relatives or friends by the hand of the police. In some cases, the police goes as far as capturing youth and killing them in front of their parents knowing that, especially for the poor slum dwellers, formal protesting is often times not an option. 27 There are for instance a few hotels in Nairobis city centre where harambee meetings are usually held: in these places networks of people, whether they know each other or not, constitute themselves to take decisions and gather money. These are also places in which some women or men go to take information on new widowers/widows, or about job positions that are left open by some death etc Unfortunately, though, I dont think I have enough information about these meetings to be able to write about them.

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mortuaries are concentrated in between the city centre and the Kenyatta hospital: City Mortuary for the poorest people or people involved in police investigations is one street away from Lee Funeral House or Montezuma Monalisa Funeral Home where richer and more important people are handled with all the (most recent and modern funerary) care. Along these streets, it is common to see vans carrying coffins on top, buses with weeping women leaving towards up-country, big SUVs following the hearses. Outside of City Mortuary, street hawkers sell veils and sprays, ribbons, and flower vendors daily arrange their flower compositions. Like everyone that is waiting there, they listen to stories about deceased who do not want to head home and interrupt the rituals; they laugh about some bus that lost the coffin from the top and try to trace it back on the street; they know that some dead person will never be claimed and will be buried in a common grave at the cemetery; they hear bits and pieces of sermons and songs; they console relatives complaining for the state of their loved ones and observe families crying, women fainting; they comment on the last traffic accidents that will bring them, perhaps, some more work. It seems to me that in a way but I might be wrong the mortuaries replicate the inwards and outwards movements of the city; they also show the coexistence of the many groups that form the city through which the identities of its inhabitants are shaped; busy as they are, they cant but visualise the forfeit of the violent and poor city going on next-door to the politically important deaths discussed in more luxurious parlours. Langata Cemetery urban up-country and/or place of transition According to Maupeau and Droz, Nairobi is a capital without cemeteries (2003). There is yet one, even growing cemetery Langata and many of the articles in their book state that being buried there is becoming more and more accepted, at least for some of the urban inhabitants: it is cheaper but it also neutral ground chosen in case of disputes regarding ethnic belonging etc. The cemetery is also the burial place of the relatively small Muslim community of Nairobi as well as that of expatriates, for instance, and a place for cremation. Moreover, in the visits I paid to the place, one could see that it is used by Christians as well, whether they are buried in the permanent part or in the temporary section where 61

graves are emptied after 25 years; other, unclaimed corpses are buried in a common grave at the far end of the plot. It is common that children that die in their first days/weeks, even years, are buried here28. An informant also told me that some street children, especially orphans, bury their friends in Langata (often walking carrying the dead body for kilometers from the other side of town where they might live). The corpses of the children are buried for small sums of money by the workers of the cemetery or abandoned by the children in front of the cemetery. Droz described great changes in the the Kikuyu costumes regarding death, although some terms and concepts are maintained, despite some shifts: the Kikuyu term for cemetery is kbrra which used to be the place where agonizing bodies were laid down outside the compound to die and indicates nowadays that place where the corpses that had a bad death are abandoned. Victims of AIDS or people that commit suicide are more likely to be buried at the cemetery than others. On the other hand, some men and women ask to be buried in cemeteries to prove their modernity or their Christianity (also the case for the clergy)29. Some Kikuyu families also started to bury their relatives in the urban cemeteries as a consequence of the land pressure, their plots being too small to be both a graveyard and a productive garden (Droz 2003: 50). This must be the case also for IDPs and landless squatters from the Central Province who came to live in Nairobi, usually employed in the informal sector (jua kali). Many people from Riruta Satellite, the area where I lived, are also buried in Langata, which I found quite curious: Nairobis youth often refer to this neighbourhood as shags (Sheng for shamba, countryside) yet they are the most likely to undergo an urban burial. In fact, Riruta Satellite and the whole Dagoretti division used to be a rural area at
This is also described in an article by McConnell for GlobalPost.com, covering the 2010 corruption scandal which invested Nairobis City Council as they bought an overpriced piece of land at the far end of the city where they would further enlarge the cemetery (McConnel, in globalpost.com, 23/07/2010). 29 The cemetery in this case seems to become a real place of transition where the Christian Kenyans will wait indeterminately for their souls and bodies to be reunited at the end of times.
28

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the borders of the colonial city and was incorporated by Nairobi in 1963 (see Chege 1981: 84)30. For many inhabitants of the area, this is their up country; the plots have become smaller and are constantly transformed into housing units, so that bodies are to buried at the cemetery. The urban development of the area not yet complete was hardly a choice given the location of Riruta and so is urban burial not really a choice for people originating from here. I could guess that such a situation calls for a more positive reconsideration of the cemetery as a burial place which might influence future orientations for other urban inhabitants as Nairobi is increasingly conceptualised as home rather than house. Throughout my research, the Langata cemetery continued being, like for many of the people I knew, a relatively mysterious place. I couldnt concentrate on the burials going on there during my research, although in retrospective it would have been relatively easier and perhaps more relevant. For the time being I do not have enough data to treat these topic in depth. I fear that Nairobi, with concerns to death, remained in my thesis regrettably quite an abstract place or merely a counterpart to the rural up country. I did not manage to work on other places of death either, such as the hospitals and health centres, where death is definitely discussed and experienced. I appreciated Le Marcis work on Johannesburg, which reads the city through the journeys of the sick and the deadly: their experience constitute the urban environment, in Johannesburg though, as a sign of the harshness of the world but also, occasionally, as one of compassion (Le Marcis 2004: 454). Irving offers another example of how death could be tackled in the urban environment rather than focusing on stereotypical, yet controversial places of death, such as the cemetery in Nairobi. His ethnography, Ethnography, art, and death (2007), sets the experiences of the informants in the fabric of the city: their memories concerning death are produced as the informants make their way round the city and as
A photographer living in Satellite explained to me that Riruta, according to him, comes from a mispronounciation of rural town, as this area was called before it became part of Nairobi. Anyway, I havent found any further information, whether confirming or dismissing this opinion.
30

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events and episodes are drawn out of the citys streets, buildings, and market-places and turned into public narratives: their past, their memories are therefore brought out against the backdrop of the actual locations where the original events took place (Irving 2007: 186-187). There is a hint to this approach in Barasas obituary presented in this chapter, where Nairobi is experience as sometimes it has been and still is as a deadly threat because of the urban geographies of ethnic conflict.

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CHAPTER THREE ________ When my mum passed away Youth memories (and strategies) of death and life

Personal attitudes towards death Things do happen but how you take it matters a lot I met Reagan at the cyber caf down the road. Peter, the owner of the shop, edited the video for the funeral of the mother of one of Reagans friends, about half a year before. I went home with this 25year-old guy whose family moved from Western Kenya to Satellite when he was a baby and now lived one small dirt path away from my own place. He found my interest was a little strange all Peters customers did but agreed to show me the videos. He had some unedited footage of his own from two funerals, of a cousin and of one of his fathers (his fathers elder brother). Reagans parents died too his father passed in 2002 followed one year later by his mother but they didnt take any videos back then. He used to have some 65

pictures but they were gone, taken one after the other by visiting relatives. We got to know each other over a funeral video: the coffin being taken from the morgue (dates and names came on like a rap music title with cool fonts and some reggae music Peter liked); many relatives, friends, Church people attending the function in Langata cemetery; long sermons in Swahili and English for the Ugandan relatives of the deceased, although not many knew she was indeed Ugandan and many Church songs, in Swahili or Kikuyu, the community she had married into in Satellite, Nairobi. Painful part, when they throw the soil, Reagan said, Gone. You realize shell never come back. He knew this lady as he was good friend of her first born, his colleague in a centre for street children, and used to visit her often. Reagan had been asked to be part of the funeral committee while they waited the return of the first born, in Italy for work; he was in charge to write the eulogy and thus he discovered the Ugandan origins of his friends mum. He too had different origins from most of the people involved in the ceremony and felt strange about helping organise a funeral very different from those he was used to. Nobody knew my tribe, who are you? The only time they knew was when I had to write down my name at the committee meeting, then they knew I was Luo even if I could speak Kikuyu. Funerals, for him, are also moments of contact, of creating friendships: he met Peter through a funeral, for example. When his parents died, many people around him showed their support: people will get in touch with you even if they dont know the deceased very well. If youre open to people I was very surprised, I was walking around in Satellite and people I didnt know came up to me saying Sorry Throughout the video Reagan translated some bits of the sermons, commented (on a pastor who would keep promoting his church like a business venture) and gave explanations to the images. We mainly tended to drift off to other topics though, like it is normal when meeting somebody for the first time: his passion for drums and mine for traveling, his experiences working as a percussionist in tourist resorts in Tunisia where he bought the camera we were using, memories of his parents death, common friends from Kibera, his work with the kids, the Seventh Day Adventist Church and their 66

beautiful hymns or any other church he might attend when not free on Sabbath, Bob Marley whose face was on his shirt, his own dreadlocks, life in Satellite peaceful even during the 2007/2008 violences etc We then took a brief look at his fathers funeral video. He pointed and named fathers and uncles, elders, brothers and sisters seeing a family that I obviously couldnt see. He laughed: even here at home people were inquiring about his identity.
This uncle was saying that he never knew me because I was really changed, I had dreadlocks and, when I was capturing (filming), everyone was like Youve hired this guy to come with you!? They really didnt know me. I was laughing and people were like, What is this guy laughing? So when my sister called me inside they knew, they saw the face(interview with Reagan 09/02/2011)

Thus he became Nyachienga again, his name in up country. The group in the video sings we have really loved you but you could not do anything about it. God took you because it was time for it. Reagan shows appreciation for his family, a cool family where everybody helps each other, pray for each other They even accepted his dreadlocks which he didnt want to shave off because of his job. All of a sudden the images from the funeral stop, overwritten by a group of dancers in a park in Nairobi just before, like often, the power went off and I left towards Kibera. A few days later, I asked him if I could borrow some of the footage from his fathers funeral only to discover he had deleted it. He needed space to film one of his performances and got rid of the footage, the future counting more than the past (it seemed to me). I asked if he could be interested to tell me more about his life and, seeing our struggle to fit our schedules, came a few days later with a couple of pages, hoping that it could help me (see annex 3). Reagan knew about my interest in death so I can read in his words the questions I could have asked (or he thought I might ask). Capps and Ochs remind of the co-authorship of the listener whereby narratives are tales that tellers and listeners map onto tellings of personal experience. In this sense, even the most silent of listeners is an author of an emergent narrative (Capps and Ochs 1996: 20). I still 67

appreciated his efforts and I found two things the most noteworthy: his narration, like that of many other people Ive met, is forward looking, a continuous quest for survival and betterment into whom the past hardships are incorporated. One day, Reagan and I visited his stepmother (also his mothers sister); she showed us some pictures from the funeral and, with watery eyes, told us about the last days of her late husband. For me its different he said as we thanked his (step)mother to share so much with us:
at times when I sit and I look down, I say: life at times is just not that streamline as we think it is, at times life is really unfair to those we love and maybe count on them. But you find that person youre really in need of, their life is ending, you see? I really didnt expect that at a certain moment my father or my mother could really pass. Through that at least Ive learnt Im not the only person and it was at least not first with me. Other people passed through there but they are still people that can be counted in the society, they have achieved a lot. So at times life is very painful but all in all life should continue even when one of the best people in your family has passed away. So for me I can just say all in all how you take it Things do happen but how you take it matters a lot (interview with Reagan, 02/03/2011).

Secondly, Reagan interpreted the fact that his father was a polygamous man married to two sisters from the same family as a sign of Gods plans which made it easier to accept living with his stepmother, despite the difficulties. He was not as positive about other aspects of the Luo culture, though, which he deemed as very expensive and restrictive in that it requires to always consult somebody (its based on fathers) before doing something; boys and men are also often expected, at the death of their fathers, to take care of specific activities (building houses, establishing a new homestead and other cerimonies and rituals) especially if the late father didnt get to do it in life. All this has to be done in the proper way least something bad will follow the person.
Its a culture that restrict some things, you are locked. You think you are free but you are locked. With everything you do you have to consult. If first born doesnt allow you to do this, this, this and this... The first born has to take care of this for your family to

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continue live [] And its very hectic, you feel at time your head is blowing (interview with Reagan 09/02/2011).

So Reagan, who grew up in the suburbs of the city, commuting between the increasingly urbanised area of Riruta Satellite in western Nairobi and the Mathare slum in the east where he trains acrobatics and drums with his group, has his own way to go about life. As for me, I feel that my culture is what I feel is right for me. Situated concerns, shared decisions Whyte suggests that African subjectivity could be approached from a position of situated concern. Her own work seeks to understand how people in Eastern Uganda, as subjects, deal with problems such as seeking health care and coping with AIDS (Whyte 2002). Through fieldwork, she states, people should be followed as intentional subjects engaging each other and the contingencies of their lives in a mood that is often more subjunctive than indicative or imperative (Whyte 2002: 172). Whyte considers subjunctivity the mood of doubt, hope, will and potential to be related to specific uncertainties experienced by particular actors as they undertake to deal with a problem and care about things (Whyte 2002: 175). Her notion of subjunctivity however differs from other approaches to the ambiguities of life in the postcolony, for instance what Mbembe and Roitman call the profoundly provisional and revisable character of things of the postcolony (Mbembe and Roitman 1995: 342, in Whyte 2002: 175). Subjunctivity is not merely about uncertainty but implies a directionality experienced by the subjects in their efforts (Whyte 2002: 186). Although Whyte is mainly concerned with ideas about health and health-seeking, and how subjects cope with such concerns, I found her study enlightening for my own research for at least a couple of reasons. First of all, she puts a necessary emphasis on intersubjectivity through the notion of civility by which she means a sense of interdependence concerning common goals in a shared future. It entails a recognition of others with their interests, and of your implication with them (Whyte 2002: 187). Death too is, for the bereaved at least, an experience of implication with other peoples 69

concerns whatever they might be, even the (imagined or not) preoccupations and desires of the deceased and a moment in which several potential ways forward are debated and negotiated but (more often than not) respected. Solutions are sought that try to combine different perspectives which imply, as Whyte herself reminds, a practical wisdom about the intertwining of concerns (Whyte 2002: 183). Elsewhere the same author provides an interesting reading of women burial in Eastern Uganda (in a time of AIDS). The context is one in which women movements between homes (in life and in death) has increased: her work is focused towards understanding people practices and narratives of female belonging which are objectified by the material presence of graves31. The mobility of female patients and/or corpses is determined by the men who own the homes where women are wives/mothers ( at theirs husbands homestead) or daughters (at mine); the decisions that are taken with regards to the burden of taking care of the sickly or to give them burial largely depend on the relations established between (groups of) people which imply sympathy and support and belongingness sometimes in congruence with and sometimes in contrast to the arguments of rules (Whyte 2005: 157). Burial is, case by case, determined by what Whyte calls arguments of culture, which recognise male rights to bridewealth and children, and arguments of affection, which rely on sympathy and the interconnectedness of shared experience and struggle32. The complex redefinition of
31

For her, the location of the grave is the most obvious side of the complexities which determine the way in which home is made to mean in situations of vulnerability and death (Whyte 2005: 155). Belonging and the sense of home which suggest both ownership and identification are fluid notions in life that need a redefinition in death: they are reified as a corpse is put into the earth at one home and not another (Whyte 2005: 158). 32 Women are sometimes buried at their husbands place even if, like it is increasingly the case, no bridewealth had been paid (therefore considered unmarried) or they had separated and bridewealth had been returned on the account of their motherhood, as their children belong to the husbands home; at the same time, it might happen that women still officially married are taken care of and/or buried at their fathers home, contrary to cultural prescription, out of affection, pity, and love (Whyte 2005).

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concepts of home and practices of belonging through funerary ceremonies occurs along gender lines, as Whyte shows, but also along religious lines for instance. Prince uses the opposition culture/affection elaborated by Whyte in discussing negotiations between Saved Christians and Luo traditionalists in Uhero (see Prince 2007)33. Naturally, intergenerational changes matter too. In the second part of this chapter I will try to understand how urban youth negotiate their participation in death rituals. On top of that I found Whytes phenomenological approach quite fitting. A focus on the (situated) individual can better cast light on the complexities which determine the lives and deaths of men and women as they pragmatically engage with coexisting/conflicting systems of thought, unpredictable events, personal expectations and dreams, bodily memories and experiences34. The death of an individual entails some sort of disruption of an existing order35.
33

The author, for instance, describes the ways in which Saved women negotiate with tradition in a mode that is pragmatic rather than dogmatic: rules are sometimes followed out of convenience (strategies which insure access to land, continuation of their household as well peaceful cohabitation for instance) or out of respect for their role of mothers and wives (Prince 2007: 107-108). 34 As Whyte herself mentions, the way she deals with the experience of health seeking in Eastern Uganda is mindful of Jacksons approach to intersubjectivity according to which inter-existence is to be given analytical precedence over individual essence (Jackson 1998: 3). Not unlike Whyte, Jackson stresses the utility of a notion such intersubjectivity in that it simultaneously refers to two different but vitally connected senses of the word subject: it links the empirical subject, with its consciousness, to abstract generalities (e.g. society, class, structure, culture, traditions), themselves subjects of our thinking but not possessed of life (Jackson 1998: 7). 35 The parallel with illness the starting point for Whyte is here admissible, I reckon, although the relation between the two is more complex than I could explain here. In her own article, illness often leads to death, especially when it comes to AIDS in rural areas situated far away from functioning health facilities (Whyte 2002: 183). At the same time, deaths are investigated through a variety of methods which have consequences in

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Individuals elaborate expectations about their lives which are linked to individual imaginations and agencies while they also bear cultural specificity. Becker, in Disrupted Lives, discusses the ways in which individuals, through metaphors and narratives, create meaning in a chaotic world (his focus is, in this book, on chronic illness, infertility, post-stroke survival and late-life transitions, in an American setting) (Becker 1999). Although he admits that the type of life continuity mentioned in his work can be considered an American (or Western) concern, Becker contends that anthropological analysis shows that each culture has some sort of expected cultural life course (Becker 2002: 80; Becker 1999: 26). So, death, in some cultures and religious beliefs, can be seen as continuity rather than disruption. In any case, still, real lives are more unpredictable than their cultural ideal (Becker 2002: 80)36. De Boeck, Cassiman and Van Wolputte remind that, especially in the context of contemporary African cities, ones life rarely is a straigh line forward: individual biographies are spontaneous and improvised more than they are planned and are modified by their interactions with other networks of people and discourses, whether physical or mental (De Boeck, Cassiman, Van Wolputte 2009: viii). Going back to Reagans experience, he clearly recognised the importance within his Luo community, although it wasnt clear how important it was for his relatives of certain rituals and practical arrangements which have to be taken care of for life to continue. However, it is not self-evident that such continuity is a priority for him: he judged most of the ritual activities as expensive and restrictive, especially as he had to face economical troubles following his parents deaths which lead him to quit school and look for other ways to survive; his life was shaped more by his talent and his friends than by the prescriptions of the elders of his community
further interpretations of illness and in the formation of new, tentative ways forward. 36 His research on transnational contemplations of death among elder Cambodian Americans and Filipino Americans departs from phenomenological considerations and is largely based on their experiential, bodily knowledge of death and migration (Becker 2002: 92).

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who couldnt even recognise him at the burial of one of his fathers. Still, he feels attached to his family whose members support and pray for each other and doesnt mind attending funerals. Again his father polygamous union with two sisters was at the same time traditional and funny and is understood as a divine plan for his family. Reagan didnt remember in details his fathers burial, he was just present, and didnt own any picture of it (but his stepmother did, we discovered). One of the only objects that he kept and reminded him of his late father was a pair of trousers he was given when the family, after the burial, divided the material possessions of the deceased: they were good trousers which he wore from time to time, especially in formal occasions. I interviewed another young lady, a writer; I had read in Kwani? her Brave New Worlds (Mboya 2010), the narration of her fathers burial observed through the eyes of the child she used to be and wanted to ask her a few questions. She chose the perspective of a child to lament the passive role of children in such events. As she herself told me, she resents the cultural process which she find false, staged, opportunistic, peppered up with so much custom and considered her story as an attempt to consolidate in her mind those very valid observations that I made as a child but had no way of interpreting in their larger context and meaning, being just a child. She also provided me with a list of things she found particularly screwed up about her fathers funeral, the only she ever attended. One of these was the division of all the personal belongings of the deceased who had to return with him to the place of burial, which Reagan appreciated instead:
I remember my mother having to root around our house for every single belonging of my fathers, even single socks and an old t-shirt she had made into a duster. I think that the emotional impact of such an upheaval is devastating to the family left behind, they have nothing to remember their loved one by. Also I remember my uncles being very happy for all the possessions they took over and wearing my fathers clothes to his funeral, so I feel their is a falseness in such over zealous displays of grief (personal communication with Renee Mboya, february 2011).

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In Brave New Worlds her words reconstruct the way she was (not) given the news of this death or her experience as a child brought up in Nairobi of the funeral up country:
My dead is dead. Thats what the note said. Everybodys at our home today and Miss Valeria has brought Mama a glass of gold coloured drink thats really bitter and burns your nose when you sniff it. It was Miss Valeria who brought the note to Mama as well. She says that someone called the office from far away where my dad works and thats the message they gave her over the phone. Its a sticky green note with bad handwriting all over it. Mama made me read it for myself but she wont say to me that my dad is dead. She just squeezed my hand and made me sit with Mama Asia. Aunty took Baby away and the house is really quiet. I wish Baby was here; I dont know where she is. Sometimes when you dont know where people are they might be dead as well (Mboya 2010: 360). Everybody here is crying. They are all very messy and Im sure Mama would be irritated if I cried anything like they do. Its hot and loud and at the door of the kitchen theres a cows head. It smells rotten and there are blue flies everywhere around it. The house were all in has two main doors, one in the front and another one in the back. Smack in the middle of the house is a coffin with my dad lying on his back inside it. Hes wearing a really good suit but his face is grey and it has beard on it. His big hands are crossed over his chest. My dad is still really tall but he isnt handsome anymore and he doesnt smell like himself. When people walk past him in the house they cry louder. At lunchtime everybody leaves and goes outside [] Mama makes me touch my dad. Im scared because he doesnt look like himself. Mama said before that we have to be careful of strangers. She grabs my hand and pushes my fingers onto his chest. I cant help but cry. When Mwanaisha comes in and sees my dad she cries even louder than all the other women Mama says are relatives from the village. Mwanaisha talks to my dads body and cries at the same time. Mama rolls her eyes and looks at me in that if-I-ever-seeyou-behave-like-that-youre-dead kind of way (Mboya 2010: 363364).

The same activity dividing the clothes of the late father, in this case arises different memories for different people which depend on their personal experiences (not last gender roles which determine 74

different rights/duties), on opinions of other close people (suriving parents and relatives, friends, religious guides), on further developments in their biographies Children are but passive presences throughout the funeral events, yet they must develop a bodily knowledge of how to take part in the events on which they build further ideas and attitudes.

Youth and funerals: urban negotiations of presence and exclusion Lamont compares ethnographies about death in two different African cities, Kinshasa and Nairobi. He observes that the Kenyan urban youth doesnt seem to have, nor does it (forcefully or not) claim any control over funerals (Lamont 2009: 457). The intergenerational conflict that seems to fuel the creative and often violent appropriation by the youth of the funeral rites in the Congolese capital is on the other hand not absent in East Africa. Sheng, for instance, a urban language reminiscent of verlan born among youth in disadvantaged areas of Eastern Nairobi since the 1970s and now spread across the country, bears the marks of intergenerational changes; it is considered by various authors an identity marker for youth, especially in the way it excludes adults who are less likely to follow its rapid mutations (Githiora 2002: 174; Ogeki 2008: 75). Its creativity relies on borrowings from English or Kenyan vernacular languages as well as on morphological and/or semantic inversions whereby for instance terms used to indicate old men (mzee) become signifiers for young people, very badly (mbaya) means instead very well, dirty (mchafu) stands for very good (Bosire 2009: 81)37. This language the primary code of communication for most
Sheng is constantly created and recreated through sillable truncations and/or inversions, as well as linguistic borrowings and coinings also subject to semantic expansions, transitions and/or inversions (Ogechi 2005). Moreover, whereas its characterisation an idiom for the urban youth regardless of the geographical provenance is widely recognised, Mazrui notes a tendency of Sheng to drift towards local variations that betray the presence of ethnically predominant groups in the respective localities (Mazrui 1995: 169). The same process is observed by Githinji who writes
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youth in the Nairobian slums also gained importance through its use in locally produced hip hop. Samper considers rappers as culture brokers who bridge global and local cultural products and who help redefine the ideology of home. For him Sheng, the language of the everyday, of hip hop, and of the matatu, is used to construct a urban sense of place and to build emotional connections with such places (Samper 2010: 48). In this space, the complexity and fludity of the contemporary urban exprerience can be reflected. The fluidity, seen in Shengs versatile incorporation of new words and coinages, reflects the way in which modernity is appropriated, modified and blended with revised pre-existing values (Journo 2009: 3). Like other urban vernaculars across Africa, Sheng symbolises the highlife of the city: the urban represents the cool, the hip, the modern (Childs 1997: 342). When talking to some friends and informants, who were always the proudest if I tried to learn new Sheng words, I started to wonder how this daily production of a urban sense of belonging and of urban identities by the youth can relate to funeral practices that recenter the life around the ancestral village? Youth, especially in the cities, are busy creating their own individual identities. From the city, I had the impression that such identities are rarely taken into consideration during funerals: the deceased is made to wear a suit or dress instead that the fashionable clothes showed off in the city; the organisation of the funeral is taken over by the family and/or religious group with friends being assigned but very marginal tasks or being excluded all together, especially from the rural ceremonies. Showing (off) identities: do funerals question visual practices of identity? Behrends article Im like a movie star in my street centres on the image of a desired other, the African American from the ghetto, around which Kenyan urban youth develop their identities through photographic portraits (Behrend 2002). These images, which visualise practices of (desired) consumption obliterate the friends own ethnic differences and thus represent them renewed as autonomous individuals (Werbner 2002: 5). Moreover, the
about the existence of specific shibboleths traceable to specific groups of youngsters, united around their bazes (Githinji 2006).

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reference to poor African-American young people from the ghettos offer these youth an idiom of protest that relate to their own particular experience of violence and marginalisation (Behrend 2002: 60). Such dynamic of visual achievement of utopia is also described in another article by Behrend on the photographers of the Likoni Ferry in Mombasa. The photos taken by these photographers in their studios stood in opposition to the lived realities of the customers, mostly migrants from the rural up country, and they imagined an African modernity opposed to ethnicity and traditional culture: in this way they executed a radical rupture with the past while opening up a future that imagined the heaven of modern consumer culture (Behrend 2002b: 104). Funerals too have become subjects of visual representation: photos are gradually being accompanied or substituted by videos. In the city, around the mortuary and the cemetery, bunches of paparazzi wait to take pictures of the events and sell them to the families. I was asked to record one funeral myself only to find myself surrounded by at least two other photographers with better equipment and knowledge of the desires of the perspective clients; other times they are hired to travel up country and cover the funerals there38. These images, contrary to those Behrend writes about, dont represent the individual and his/her struggle to achieve an urban identity but insert the individual as a
38

Kariuki too describes these visual practices aimed at fixing the memory of those last moments of the deceased with the family and all the people that were present (Kariuki 2003: 68). The videos have started initially from well off families from the city but nowadays, thanks to cheaper technologies, its more widespread. A friend who takes videos of weddings, baptisms, and funerals and commemorations for the dead such as the unveiling of the cross done in some Christian groups thought this new need is more a fashion than anything else, video being now cooler than pictures. Another photographer thought that these videos matter a lot especially for families in the diaspora (Europe and USA mainly, for which he usually chose to edit adding some American songs to make them feel included) because, through them, they get to check events that they funded themselves and they can participate to the life of the community; sometimes these migrants also participate by holding speeches over the phone. Moreover, he noted that this one way, a contemporary one, to pass on words of advice from the elders of the community to the children and the children of the children.

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part of networks of people that one after the other look at the deceased and/or gather around the coffin in various formations. The setting goes back to being mundane rather than a creation of the imagination (luxurious places and commodities, Western touristic ideals of Africa, space even) and they represent dynamics of presence rather than absence, as it was for the pictures of the migrants which Behrend interpreted as surrogates of their presence to be sent home. Yet, as I mentioned at the end of the first chapter, up country ceremonies are events which different groups use in different ways. Funerals drive Kenyans crazy is a hyperbolic account of the recent transformations of these celebrations especially in the experience of the urban bereaved, into machines to forge identities. In this vision, up country becomes a stage for urban people among which youth despite their being substantially excluded from the organisation to both show off against the rural and to reconnect with it as the corpses find a final resting place. Hairstyles, music, and bombastic eulogies a show for the living For mourners, according to Kharaka, funerals have become times to show off clothes and might, a time for manicure and pedicure, stylish hair cuts, three-piece black suits and bow ties, gigantic black goggles, bottles of mineral water, alcohol and a motor show for who drives the best car. And since the dead cannot see, this great show is for the living (Kharaka, in The Standard Online, 11/12/2011). It seems to me that for the urban bereaved, the funeral is a burden but can also turn into an occasion to go back to the village and construct their image as successful migrants. Especially among Luo and Luhya, but in other groups too, one of the funerary rites has been increasingly abandoned or undergone radical change which relates to the practice of shaving the hair of the closer bereaved after burial (meant as a getting rid of the pollution of the funeral). Youth, but it seems others too, refuse more and more to comply with this custom: instead, especially young people, started to use funerals as occasions/excuses to get elaborate hair styles and most recent haircuts while still in the city. This shows a temporal shift of the practice from after the burial to before the burial; it also somehow 78

negates (or substitutes) the reciprocity of the act of shaving. Fashionable hair styles are one of the features of urban citizens39. A friend showed to me how easily urban women are recognised in funeral footage (though this is valid in most of their visits up country). Rosalitas older daughter was combing her hair before the burial and I asked her if she was supposed to shave it off, like I had heard from one of her uncles. Continuing to apply lotion to the hair, in front of the mirror of the neighbours bathroom, she strongly objected to that: they know Ill not shave my hair! Funerals, an occasion to come back to the city sometimes the only one are also a moment in which rural youth build their expectations on urban life. Tales of Kasaya is an autobiography by Eva Kasaya, a woman from Western Kenya (Maragoli, a Luhya group), in which she recalls her migration to the big city. Forced to abandon school
Recent research on hair in Africa show how hair styling can be understood as a complex practice of consumption and production (as in Weisss work on barbershops in Arusha, 2009). In a way they depend on foreign products and models, marking a participation in the globalised world but they can also be considered a testimony to creativity not simply of the (female) hair, but also to their need and ability to imagine new social projects as a whole: women and youth, in Cameroon as well as across Africa, are prone to elaborate on this imaginative capacity which simultaneously is a sign of liberation and of capture (Nyamnjoh 2002: 102). Hair ceases to be an outgrowth of an originary interior state (motherhood, widowhood, sexual expression) as described in conventional studies on hair in traditional societies, but are a sign/tool of hope for conversion into new forms of feeling good, modern, confident, or beautiful (Nyamnjoh 2002: 114). Stambachs article on Tanzanian politicised discussion of female hairstyles around the 1980s, a time of great economical and political changes, provides one interesting example of the changes in the concern for hair in one African society in transition: (modern) hairstyles were interpreted a marker of ideological loyalties (to economic self reliance rather than commitment to reinterpreting previous policies) through which women were allowed in, although contested, as part of the wider civil society (Stambach 1999: 252).
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because her family could not afford school fees, she started working as a housegirl in her home area but desired the life of the city, symbolised by beautifully plaited hair: every time her neighbours daugthers visited from Nairobi I stared at them. They looked so pretty brown and healthy with plaited hair and good clothes. That was the kind of life I wanted. I wanted to plait my hair and look as smart as they did (Kasaya 2010: 75). She will run away from home and arrive in Nairobi, be exploited and harassed various times facing the complexities of human behaviour in Nairobi but she will manage at some point to buy clothes and have her hair done with her first salary. The first time she will go back home to her village, after about a year in the big city, she will feel different from everybody else:
women were in headscarves, their lips looking dry and hands cracked [] It seemed unreal that I used to be like them. For my journey home I had worn a skirt. It was actually a blue kitenge lesso tied around my waist. That was the fashion in Nairobi. On my head I had long braids. I had applied Cleartone body lotion and red Cutex. I wore a nice pair of high-heeled shoes. I felt great to see people gazing at me, certainly thinking I was successful (Kasaya 2010: 137).

It is clear, now, that the refusal to shave is not particular to the youth but it is nevertheless one instance even if this detail might not even bear great importance, nowadays in which they find space to state their identity against traditional expectations; on the other hand, this experience is shared by urban adults. Music too differentiates the way different groups take part in the same event, as I showed at the end of chapter one: the author of that passage writes about a cacophony of styles hip hop and reggae hits, the church choir, and the African drums which symbolises the diversity of the crowd attending the event and might suggest different memories of the deceased. Youth, especially in Western Kenya, seem to have generally taken over the night wakes during the funerals, which are also known as disco funerals, transforming them in occasions of extremes and evasion, of easy and risky sexual

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encounters (Njue 2009)40. These wakes are also common in the city to gather money for the bereaved family to face the funeral expenses. They are mainly organised and attended by the youth which put to use their familiarity with loudspeakers and music equipment and are one way, sometimes the only one, in which they feel included in the process of burying the dead. I suppose as I was not able to really take part in any that these moments are also a very important moment in which friends and acquaintances share, construct, and discuss memories on the deceased person, possibly through choice of music, dance styles, anecdotes. For the urban youth going back up country can also be the occasion to bring back to the rural areas their new Sheng words, new styles (clothes and hair), recent hip hop or reggae discoveries, almost staging their urban identities. A last aspect of contemporary funerals which the author of Funerals drive Kenyans crazy mentions not without some exaggeration is the bombastic eulogies, featuring schools that dont even exist, companies the deceased didnt work for, fake relatives with fancy jobs, visits to foreign countries which never occurred, save sometimes the truth coming out explicitly. What I found interesting of this passage is how this (apparently) common discursive reinvention of the lived world forging persons that didnt really exist has similarities with the youth reinvention of the world they live in through Sheng: their language creates a parallel reality in which they feel empowered, just like for urban families burial up country can lead to creating verbal utopias which help state their power over the rural appropriation of the dead.
40

During Rosalitas funeral, young men and women took part in the nightly prayers initiated by a pastor. Most of them under the influence of changa, they gradually transformed it into a chaotic moment of mourning by taking over a religious song and covering it with loud crying and weeping. Elder women, who directed the mourning during the day, stood on the side, curiously observing these young people ways: the women looked amused by the energy both men and women put into the crying. Finally, they changed to reggae and gospel hits which they danced until morning, with the exceptions of one young man who passed out, too drunk, and they left in the middle of the dance area, covered with a blanket.

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In general I have noticed, as Lamont above, that youth is not particularly concerned with funerals. I tried, in the paragraph above, to explore how they take part to the ceremonies and if they contribute to any changes. It is my understanding, though more extensive research could contradict me, that youth accepts a somewhat passive role in the decisions which regard the death of loved ones, especially as this exclusion also implies less duties and expectations. In the paragraph above I also situated their participation of burial up country within the urban uses of these events which are traditionally associated to the rural area: the funeral up country can be understood as a way to reconnect with the places one came from but, at the same time, through some details (hair, clothes, music, biographies) urban people find ways to maintain their (new or not) urban identity. Whereas Ive mentioned several times the importance of burial customs concerning land rights, inheritance, power relations especially from a gender perspective my informants substantially showed a lack of concern for these topics. Again I dont doubt that if I could have more time to develop my research, I could find different opinions which would offer a more nuanced analysis41. OBrien, but the Comaroffs as well, reminds of the political role of the marginalised youth in postcolonial Africa, whereby youth can be intended as a political term, the study of youth being a study of the powerless (OBrien 1996: 55; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 274). From this perspective, we can perhaps consider the urban participation to funerals up country, as characterised above, as youthful in that it can be seen as deploying tactics by the powerless to come to terms with events traditionally produced by the rural elders. Moreover, topics like those mentioned above are most likely to be discussed by the older generation, although they influence the youth as well. I fear that I dont have enough data and insight to
41

I havent had the chance to discuss with young widows in Kibera, there are many of them, the effects on their lives (in terms of belonging to husbands family, for instance) of the death of their husbands. Most of my young informants were male and I definitely lack a more female perspective. This is mostly a result of the set up of my research and my initial lack of focus on a particular topic.

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continue in this direction without a great deal of abstraction and reductionism. Still I often wondered about the future of the rituals if or when my informants had one day the access and the resources to take decisions, overcoming their exclusion. Id be interested to see how their personal beliefs and decisions would be influenced by the sensorial memories of good and bad deaths, good and bad funerals, of continuous loss and pain experienced in the city and beyond but also shaped within the imaginative worlds elaborated in the youth hybrid argots. Reappropriating death through narratives of pain and personal construction I started this chapter bearing in mind a conversation I had with a friend, Victor, a twenty-six year-old Luo man who started his filming carreer in the Hot Sun Foundation. One sunny day, during lunch time, I sat with him and a few others discussing about one story I had heard outside of the City Mortuary, about a dead person not allowing his family to travel up country by stopping the car engine despite all attempts of the living to fix it. I was feeling particularly lost in my research at that point, still interested yet puzzled by all the possible angles from which I could/should tackle the topic, uncapable to reach any conclusion at all, and was realising I had been way too careful in approaching discussions on death, fearing to hurt people, to seem nosy, to be irrespectful. Victor looked at me, smiling, and commented: My mom died. Why dont you interview me? We decided to talk about it on the way back to Wanye, where he lived, very close to Satellite and my place. As he shared his story with me deaths in the family, violence, running away from home, finding and losing friends in a long walk along the railway line until the sky turned black and we reached my home, it occurred to me that each of the steps we took could be reminding him of the thousands others he took away and back to home, around Nairobi commuting for survival: we passed by Kibera where he started his filming career and met many others in his same situation, Adams where he used to sell his clothes, Wanye where he lived; also of the new opportunities opened by Hot Sun Foundation which allowed him to have his voice heard in Kenya, as well as abroad. I thought back to Brad Weiss research started from the 83

barbershops in Arusha, Tanzania, and from the heavy thoughts of his participants. One of Weiss informants would talk a lot about his mother, dead as of recent:
Without mentioning all of the responsibilities he shouldered, or plans he was pursuing which were typical topics of discussion on other days he simply told me kichwa kinajaa na mawazo my head is full of thoughts. The dreams that Jamaa depends upon for prophecy (itself predicated on an unknown future) are here dreams of loss, and distance, and separation, and unrealised possibilities all manifest absences. This absence seems inevitably to flood with thoughts. Moreover, the felt qualities of thought, the painful process of being overcome by worries, are plainly embodied experiences my head is full of thoughts. Thinking is not just experienced as the active doing of thought, it is perceived as the accumulation of mawazo mengi, many thoughts, as thoughts that take on weight and mass (Weiss 2005: 110-111).

Pain, for Weiss, is more than merely an internalised condition, a silent lament and is not to be considered in antithesis with pleasure: suffering is a dimension of engaging with reality as it presents itself to the active subject. Pain, then, is being-in-the-world (Weiss 2005: 111). His analysis is also looking into the significance of the specific world of signifiers these youths use, namely hip hop and rap, in relation to their lives. Weiss interestingly shows how this very global repertoire of signs implies some sort of exclusion, cause of pain; being excluded by forces that are themselves characterized by pain is however a way of being in the world, rather than an exclusion from it, and grants some sort of global participation (Weiss 2005: 117). Even if this analysis doesnt directly address either my topic (death is only, and not always, part of the troubles Weiss is referring to) nor my geographical scope (only to a certain extent can I get inspired by Arusha to talk about Nairobi), I found it extremely interesting in that it inserts death into a broader economy of loss and pain, which doesnt isolate it as a particular event, but situates it in the urban (and global) experience of youth, somehow parallel to other cultural

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processes of coming to terms with death42. Many young people transform their sense of exclusion, not last in relation to death of loved ones, into a repertoire, a patrimony of pain that they try to express, for instance, in spoken word and hip hop songs or by taking part in community activities, joining people in the same predicament but I suppose (as shown also in chapter two about AIDS-civil society), and in some cases, I suppose, also through violent reactions against the forces that determine their general oppression. The transcript of my interview with Victor is to be found in annex 4 for space reasons but was always in my initial idea integral part of this chapter, its starting point.

Mutongis ethnography on widowhood in Western Kenya, for instance, focuses on past practices of expressing pain among Luhya women. Widows would walk on the grave, lamenting publicly their worries of the heart so that relatives and neighbours were aware of their emotional and economical struggles and would act upon it (Mutongi 2007). In her research she shows the importance and efficacy of this method as a tool of female agency vis-vis the changes that independence and a shift towards discourses of rights have brought. For youth, pain seems to be reinterpreted as a way to find a legitimate voice which ensures participation at a local and global level.

42

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CONCLUSION ________ You only have to die!

Theoretical and personal perspectives on a familiar topic, reworked on the field

As with the proverb about the stranger who might be able to recognize a grave but not know who occupies it, a familiar reality masks different layers of meaning (Ferme 2001: 32)

Of anthropology and death The end of my thesis start with a familiar voice. Most of my highschool questions regarding whether some math exercise had to be done or not were answered by the same cavernous, charismatic You only have to die! That teaching remained part of who I grew up to be, the memory of those school days sweetening the bitter idea of the inevitability of death43. All ethno-graphy is connected to (auto)bioThe inevitability of death can be seen as an overriding concept within anthropology. Lvi-Strauss goes as far as proposing that anthropology is nothing but the study of death; he renames it entropology, the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms (LviStrauss 1967, in Fabian 2004: 56). Favole observes how such certainty about the end of existence corresponds to a deep uncertainty about the boundaries between the world of the living and that of the dead, between
43

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graphy, states Fabian in his Anthropology with an attitude. Sharing this view with the author, I find such an approach solid in that it allows for a critical consideration of the actual history and involvement of writing subject, at the basis of the dialectical process of knowledge production (Fabian 2001: 12, 49). The ethnographic gaze is contingent, grounded on an experience that is intersubjective and historical. Seremetakis, studying mourning in rural Greece, recalls that there is a tacit interplay between the theorization of death in anthropology and the social context of the theorist (Seremetakis 1991: 12)44. To spell out these contexts is perhaps the only way to reach a valid objectivity. Fabian find this as fundamental task with concern to political legitimation even before than intellectual grounding (Fabian 2001: 21). De Martino invented in the 1970s the concept of critical ethnocentrism, declaring it central in the pursuit of a new, ethnographic humanism, which he considered expression of historical (and political) human coexistence. The ethnographer is himself representative of a local culture that needs to be critically accepted in the anthropological encounter. De Martinos positions can be situated along a third path between relativism and ethnocentrism which reminds, as Pasquinelli well points out, of Geertzs interpretive paradigm (Pasquinelli 1996: 71). The ethnographer brings to this encounter particular categories of observation, "without which the phenomenon is not observable [] The only way to resolve this paradox is found in the very concept of the ethnographic encounter as a double thematicization, of 'one's
life and death (Favole 2003: 3). He conceives death as an uncertain threshold. The body, or bodily remains, are locus of cultural negotiation(s) of this threshold. 44 Is it hence that American anthropology, as noted by Fabian, has a problem of dealing with death? Or is my concern with the individual identity of the deceased resonant with the reality Im engaging with or is it a personal concern before everything? Contemporary research about death practices is also to be read as a research of alternatives, a critique to a process that is deemed as gruesome and dehumanized (Palgi and Abramovitch 1984: 402). Simultaneously, the ghost of a possible end of all life that would occur in case of a nuclear holocaust also seems to be present, especially in the second half of the 20th century, behind the interest around death.

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own [culture]' and 'the alien'" (De Martino 1977, in Saunders 1993: 885). Understanding occurs along a transversal perspective, which seems to be the only acceptable one for the anthropological gaze (e.g. Remotti 2009: 20). It is such transversal characteristic of reality that should concern anthropology, according to James Clifford. Providing that historical thinking is bound to space and time, location should better be conceptualised as an itinerary rather than a bounded site a series of encounters and translations (Clifford 1997: 11). Whereas Clifford follows routes, Remotti talks of anthropology itself as the longest journey:
[t]he most prominent and decisive result of the longest journey is the idea of the revocability of any order one can suggest, the belief that not only does the longest journey not coincide with one single path, but also that there is no definite return: the deepest meaning of the longest journey is that, in fact, it does never end (Remotti 2009: 29, my translation).

And what a journey this has been. Not only it hasnt ended more research could probably make me notice the many gaps and inaccuracies of my analysis but it started long before I left for Kenya. I remember witnessing, years back, my mothers concerned discussions (over an inevitable cup of coffee) about the burial of the father of a friend of mine. My friends mother, an Italian teacher who had been married for over a decade to her Nigerian husband, had decided despite the will of her in-laws to bury her late partner in the Italian village where he spent most of his adult life and where his children lived. This is but one another example of the ways in which the decisions about the body together with the power relations they embed reveal different constructions of personal identity45. After a short trip to Kenya, in the framework of a project that had nothing to do with death, I decided to seize the opportunity of going back to this place where I had at least a few contacts and to relocate
45

Again, I sat puzzled in a church in my town as the priest told the congregation about the last months of our philosophy teacher, whom my friends and I knew as a political activitist, a hilarious poet, and a loving father never the good Christian he came to be during that homely.

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my curiosity. Intrigued by Nairobis urban realities, I wanted to understand (city-)life through death. Or should I say viceversa? Seremetakis and Robben, among others, point at the paradox which much anthropological work about death ends up facing: to be life centred rather than death centred (Robben 2004: 13). Many approaches are concerned with the cultural domestication of death in other societies. Seremetakis, in her book about Maniat mourning and divination, calls instead for a theoretical shift from the familiarization of death to the defamiliarization of social order by death (Seremetakis 1991: 14). Questioning ethnocentric expectations As Hertz pointed out, [w]e all believe we know what death is because it is a familiar event and one that arouses intense emotion (Hertz 1960: 27). Meanwhile, Robben reminds anthropologists of the risk that the ethnographic experience overshadows their general understanding of death (Robben 2004: 1). This leads to the construction of an exotic other, forgetful of our own cultural peculiarities. Panourgi reflects on the construction of the anthropological place, which emerges inherently as a foreign one, exuding the insecurities of anything new and the excitement of the unknown. The reader is immediately positioned opposite something interesting. Right from the beginning, the reader is made to expect an out-of-the-ordinary experience and to partake in a minute and exoteric way of this otherness (Panourgi 1995: 7). It is a study of how others die, in style, anthropological theories, and choice of subject (Palgi and Abramovitch 1984: 385; Fabian 2004). Blochs work on death rituals in relation to personhood illustrates how our common Western view of death as the matter of an instant can lead to a processual understanding of death being lost of sight (Bloch 1988: 24). Such an idea is prevailing, according to him, in many of the societies that have been objects of anthropological investigation. Even if he himself warns against over-emphasising the us/them dychotomy in the analysis of individualistic and holistic approaches to death, my feeling is that his work is still very much constructed along such a divide. In contrast, Favole tries to bridge 90

such a divide by focusing on the debate of death and dying within the field of Western biomedics. The biological perspective on death, he notes, also seems to imply a process rather than a punctual event: cell death is a life-long process of decay, no matter whether we consider the pathological necrosis (caused by e.g. viruses, external conditions etc) or the functional process of death and regeneration. On the other hand, some biological processes continue after death. The (contested) practice of organ transplant, for instance, relies on this very fact. The biomedical debate around death, then, can be seen as sharing the aim to define this uncertain threshold with various ritual processes. The debate revolves around the (disputably universal) decision that the biological death of the body occurs with its cerebral death. This currently held definition is not without strong ethical dilemmas and cultural bias. At the same time, such scientific perspective leaves open many doubts around issues of personhood (and its end) and opens itself up to ethical, political, cultural, religious, anthropological perspectives, reiterating the notion of death as the uncertain threshold (Favole 2003: 10-16). Such an analysis draws topical attention to the historical cultural processes which inform contemporary conceptions of death and debates in which I partake. Likewise, Aris studies shifting Western beliefs from the Middle Ages to the present. Four different attitudes arise chronologically, in a succession imperceptible but to the long gaze of historical analysis, due to changes around four main psychological themes (the awareness of the individual, the defense of society against untamed nature, belief in an afterlife and belief in the existence of evil) (Aris 2004; Aris 1978). Such kind of research is necessary if we want to critically approach the study of mortality. In much literature, Western mortuary practices seem to be conflated around a commonly accepted notion of denial of death, the hospitalized, bureucratic, invisible death of Western (American?) funeral business (Palgi and Abramovitch 1984). Although reminded of the contingency of our own understanding of death, many a researcher has faced ethical dilemmas as to the acceptability of the intrusion in peoples lives at a time of anguish. Palgi and Abramovitch hold that such an opinion is more revealing about the understanding of death as a private affair, demonstrating the depth of 91

death anxiety engendered by the contemporary cultural milieu (Palgi and Abramovitch 1984: 385). As Fabian would ask: am I projecting rather than understanding? (Fabian 2001: 44). Whereas ethical concern about gaining access is a common theme of anthropological research, Bradbury shows particular attention to the practice of approaching bereaved people for her study of death in contemporary London. However, like Palgi and Abramovitch, she contends that an analysis of death cannot blindly follow cultural restrictions that merely express our discomfort with the topic of death. Instead, it is necessary to voice the sentiments, views and opinions of people going through the universal experience of bereavement if we are to forge a humanistic response to death and bereavement (Bradbury 1999: 42-43). Often I found myself torn between the curiousity for my investigation and the ethical issue of intruding into peoples lives in a difficult time or of arising painful memories for the sake of academic work or which is worse? my own personal interest. I was probably more careful than I should have been in approaching my informants, even my Kenyan friends sometimes reminded me of this, building my own expectations on a shared habit back home not to really speak about death. Personal expectations vis--vis research results Ruth Behar, the author of Vulnerable observer: anthropology that will break your heart, calls for an explicit reinsertion of the anthropologist as native of her own body, building on her own issues and stories into the research. She also states that such authobiographical effort
is only interesting if one is able to draw deeper connections between ones personal experience and the subject under study. That doesnt require a full-length autobiography, but it does require a keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world and, more particularly, the topic being studied (Behar 1996: 13).

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The way I initially approached the topic definitely speaks about my own personal reality and beliefs: after my fieldwork I cannot still consider the dead as completely absent, forever gone, and yet Im still far from having gone native, whatever that should mean in a reality, like the cosmopolitan one of Nairobi, characterised by countless groupings of people and innumerable perspectives on life and the after-life. I initially wanted to focus on memories of death, but soon though not soon enough I realised that such work was doubtlessly too ambitious for an unexperienced student of anthropology and a fieldwork with a two-month expiry date. That quest for stories and anecdotes told or remembered by the bereaved and the survivors still guided me in my work as it is part of who I am and how I grew up: talking about it is a way to situate the results of my work against what, deep down, I expected this thesis to be about. Every trip back home I took in the past years meant, at one point or another, visiting the grave of some relative that recently passed away, as I could not for one reason or another attend their funeral; in some cases, instead, I would be sent off to attend the funeral of somebody I hardly knew as a representative of the family. I attended the rosary on the night one of my uncles died last year and, as I was looking around, I started to realise how people around me looked familiar: I could trace somebodys look back to their parents or viceversa; for them too, in the village, Im the exact copy of my mother. Even if we didnt speak, there was the feeling of being reunited around the coffin of a person that we all knew, from many different angles, and were going to miss. How differently I felt at Rosalitas burial in Musanda! Maybe the people gathered around her coffin had the same impressions I had now, leaving out the reflexive vein of the participant-observer which we are trained to be. Last October I visited my late uncles grave. My mother, though she missed him dearly, didnt let go of the chance to bring some humour to the occasion46. She looked at the grave of her dead brother who
46

Her attitude to funerals had always been a relaxed one, though I know of the pain she felt in the past years in burying friends and relatives, since that one funeral she attended as a young girl with her brother and an uncle. The story narrates that they were nearly sent out of the church for laughing at the

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rested next to his best friend and cousin, dead of the same type of cancer one year before him, who in turns rested next to his son who died of leuchemia soon after turning 18; around them many other relatives with the same surname. Look, she said in dialect, uncle Elio made me notice that they are surrounding the poor Samoein. They made him go crazy in life, they are probably bullying him here at the cemetery too. On the way out, we stopped in front of a couples grave whose picture had been photoshopped uniting a black and white picture of the man, who died in the 1970s, with a colour one of his wife who died about thirty years later: we felt touched by such a story, still we couldnt help smiling at the tacky result of the effort. We decided to go visit my grandfather too, in the cemetery of my fathers village where I grew up. Like always, my mother greeted her late father-in-law by asking him why he looked so crossed: she never liked the picture his family decided to put on the grave, too angry, its not him. She reminded him that we didnt come with flowers, mindful of his requests to be offered more booze in life rather than flowers in death. He died eleven years ago, a few weeks before turning 90; on that day, we ended up loudly celebrating his life with salame and wine, like he would have wanted, creating quite some puzzlement for some of the villagers that came, silently and respectfully, to give their condolences; such celebrations are hardly ever the case in our village. Last year, on what would have been my grandfathers birthday, my father organised a dinner with his siblings and ordered a cake to congratulate him: the baker, from another village, asked how old my grandfather was; my father looked at her sighing yet smiling and told her that he was 100, but died ten years before. Rather than being pointless stories and perhaps a sign of how in my family we tend to deal with issues through (an excess of) humour, these stories have shaped the way I learnt to deal with death and how I think about it. Whereas I never expected anybody to be as light-hearted as we were we ourselves were not always as relaxed as Ive described above in dealing with the deaths of people around us, all the contrary I am fond of this habit of sharing stories, of remembering, of criticising other ways of remembering or of finding
words of the priest celebrating one of her uncles as a great person, whereas the whole village had always made fun of him for being a very short man.

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comfort in the warmth of our past lives with the deceased. I dreamt, while in Kenya, of being able to understand how the deceased are remembered, beyond the funeral ceremony; if and how they are still present in peoples activities and rituals, how they influence their choices and attitudes, how this is expressed47. As said above, though, obviously I had too little knowledge about the context and too little time to be able to address such topics. Such narratives occur, I think, in a (sometimes silent) dialogue with those that share at least some knowledge of the surrounding reality cultural as well as personal in order to be able to understand them; it is much harder to gather such information through investigative interviews and by using languages that are known but not familiar (English, rather than Swahili, or Sheng, or other vernacular languages which I didnt speak). Even then, networks of people share familiar lexicons through which the world around them is experienced. Ginzburg wrote a great piece of literature, Lessico Famigliare (translated as The things we used to say), in which she traces the history of her family through a repertoire of saying and phrases particular to them:
We live in different cities, some of us abroad, and we dont write to each other very often. When we meet we can be indifferent or distrait. But among us a single phrase is enough. A single word, a single phrase is all that it takes, one of those old sayings that we heard repeated endlessly during our childhood []. One of those words and sayings would be enough to make us recognize each other
47

Schwarz, for instance, developed a very interesting work on post-mortem agency of Luo and Luhya women. Both for Luo and Luhya, the dead continue in the after-life to contribute to ongoing history in dreams, in acts of possessions, and through their deeds. In her work, she followed stories of how some women, according to the views of their community members (to whom they appeared in dream or whom they possessed), we able to protest against wrongs done to them at burial or in life, manipulate kinship structures, convincing the survivors of certain choices. Her work gives an account of how life stories accounts should in some cases continue in the post-mortem; she also discusses the effects of religion on death and burial, and addresses the complexities of coexisting systems, in this case, traditional view, Catholicism, Anglicanism and the Kenyan-born Legio Maria (Schwarz 2000).

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in the darkness of a cave or among a million people [] Those sayings are the basis of our family solidarity, which will exist for as long as we remain on this earth, reviving and recreating itself at the opposite sides of the globe whenever one of us says my dear Signor Lipmann and at once my fathers impatient voice rings in our ears. Enough of this story! Ive already heard it more times than I can say (Ginzburg 1999: 21-22).

Ginzburgs family, on the other hand, was one of intellectuals and writers and words quite likely mattered to them more than to most people. Concluding remarks Rosaldos study of death concerns bereavement, beyond the ritual: its emotional force is culturally defined and to be found at the level of practices of the body, of prelinguistic experience. Linguistic codification, he says, is not necessarily more deep and revealing about the experience of bereavement, nor is the latter confined to the ritual: its analysis should extend to myriad less circumscribed practices (Rosaldo 2004: 174). Seremetakis calls this broadened perspective ritualization, which is as dependent on symbols as it is on the senses (Seremetakis 1991: 97). Hallam and Hockey discuss, with reference to Britain, ways in which memory comes into play as an important aspect of the process of dying, mourning, and grief. They approach memory as embodied performance (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 11). Feldman works in the same direction48. He tackles the perceptual diversity that characterises the experience of the subjects on the field and that of an audience or of the reader that inhales different cultural givens, touched different material realities,

48

His article is about the public reception of a lecture given by a Croatian folklorist on the culture of fear in former Yugoslavia. In particular, he is concerned with the way in which the folklorist searched for a translatable language of terror. Whereas he appreciates how she rewrote her text while she spoke it with grief in her body and voice, he noticed that instead such embodied knowledge of grief and terror was not available and not comprehensible for the audience (Feldman 1996).

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and who did not have to sniff out imminent death from once familiar surrounds (Feldman 1996: 88). I followed particular trajectories on the field (Western Kenya to Nairobi, and back; within Nairobi; my own from anthropological journey from home to Kenya) with the aim of grounding my research into peoples experiences and culturally/personally constructed places. De Certeau reminds, with concern to the concept of trajectory, that is suggests a movement, but it also involves a place projection, a flattening out; this reduces the reality it related to by operating a transcription. He suggests instead strategy and tactic as better concepts which are able to at least capture the forcerelationships in which the (directed) movements and actions of people are inserted (De Certeau 1984: xviii-xix). I guarded the term and its implied abstraction but I attempted nevertheless within the limits of my short, sometimes unfocused experience on the field to account for such directionality. In the first chapter, the movements of the corpses and of the bereaved between the urban and the rural contributes in determining the identity of both. The complexity of the social reality of Nairobi, where everybody is part of several groups which can have diverging opinions on death, is also influenced by the political and cultural-religious context. The organisation of death is determined along traditional patterns but is increasingly subject to a normalisation through common, shared Christian practices. However, at the end of the chapter, I favour an interpretation of each funeral as a particular context in which many groups interact and one can observe multiple interpersonal dynamics: on the one hand, especially at the funeral and burial ceremony, conflictual views tend to be juxtaposed rather than resolved (although there are many attempts to have national courts take decisions in burial matters). On the other hand, like I show in the third chapter, choices and decisions tend to be contingent, a matter of situated concerns rather than systematic interpretations. In the third chapter, I followed particular life paths, especially through the help of two young men, Reagan and Victor. Death, in their experiences, is reinserted into life trajectories: the deaths of relatives have been, for them, determining moments in shaping the directions their lives took, not last through decisions that didnt depend on them. Through concepts such as situated concern 97

and intersubjectivity, I tried to offer a more nuanced perspective on what death might mean in the lives of young people, how they relate to traditional/shared practices of burial when these dont really take into consideration their urban identities and changing sense of belonging, and how expectations about death, in relation to burials and funerals, depend not only on personal beliefs but also on their embodied knowledge of the process. In Nairobi, instead, from the starting point of the mortuarys stock of dead, I gave an account of how recent phenomena such as the AIDS epidemic or episodes of ethnic violence are shaping the social life of the city and its reactions to death. Such knowledge is useful to better contextualise the youth experience in face of death of which I wrote in the third chapter. It was nevertheless hard to stick to Nairobi when speaking about death as, especially in this circumstance, one can perceive the stop-over qualities of its origins. Until now I seem to have dragged myself through a theoretical journey which sometimes risks to lose connection with the actual research material, and debouching into useless abstractions. On the other hand, the academic history of areas of interest and approaches, alongside personal and cultural dispositions and the banalities of everyday life on the field, shape the research experience, its methods, expectations, and outcomes. It did so in my case too. Ethnographic inquiry demands wide-ranging theoretical capacities as well as finely tuned sensibilities, remarks Rosaldo. Even if, too optimistic a prospect, this requirement could be fulfilled, I still remind myself and the reader that [A]ll interpretations are provisional: they are made by positioned subjects who are prepared to know certain things and not others (Rosaldo 2004: 170).

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WEB SITES ___________ Abeingo community portal: www.abeingo.org 11/01/2011, Luhya funeral rites, by Nandemu (http://www.abeingo.org/NEWS/bukusu_funeral.pdf)

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24/01/2011, Death rituals among the Luhya Part II, by Nandemu Barasa (http://www.abeingo.org/NEWS/Bukusu_funeralRitualsII.pdf) Kwani? literary magazine: www.kwani.org Politicised Funerals, by Stephen Derwent Partington http://kwani.org/editorial/poertry/50/politicised_funerals_by_stephen _derwent_partington.htm Pictamtaani. Healing the Nation: www.pichamtaani.org http://pichamtaani.org/about/the-project/ Poem Hunter: www.poemhunter.com 2012, A Luhya Funeral, by David Yobbie (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-luhya-funeral/) The Global Post: www.globalpost.com 23/07/2010, Kenya: Nairobi runs out of space to bury its dead. Langata Cemetery is nearly full, but corruption prevents purchase of new land, by Tristan McConnell (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/kenya/100721/kenya-nairobiruns-out-space-bury-its-dead) The Standard online: www.standardmedia.co.uk 11/12/2011, Funerals drive Kenyans crazy!, by Sophia Kharaka http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/archives/InsidePage.php?id=%2020 00048180&cid=349&story=Funerals%20drive%20Kenyans% 20crazy!

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14/02/2010, The mishmash of traditions at a Luhya funeral, cartoon by Munene http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/archives/mag/InsidePage.php?id=20 00003281&cid=349& USAIDS: www.unaids.org USAIDS survey 2008 Kenya country fact sheet (http://www.unaids.org/en/dataanalysis/tools/aidsinfo/countryfactshe ets/)

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