In this 2nd Installment of Dr. Kavirondo, we delve into the Luo funeral culture that has long been a point of argument and ridicule around the customs surrounding food, duration of mourning and the infamous wife inheritance.

Part 2

The breaking news of the death of Brigadier Kavirondo schemed a screaming storm of mourners from every side, men and women, bursting, exploding, whimpering and crying like babies. Women expressed their grief by holding their heads and sinking fingers into their bosoms. They cried for the loss of their beloved person. The world should know that a great man in Luoland has died. Crying voices should reach all concerned ancestral spirits.

        As if they had rehearsed how they would behave towards the armed security guards manning Brigadier Kavirondo’s homestead, they came in full force and fearlessly overcame the armed guards screaming, “Go away!”

        “Get the hell out of this place!”

        “We want to mourn for our son peacefully!”

        “Come back after the mourning.”

        First, the threatened guards reiterated by firing into the air to scare them away only to be met by shrieking voices, “Shoot us dead! We want to die!” The guards knew the women meant business when some of them scared them away by baring their bottoms. Some of the guards were driven away by stones being thrown at them.

        Dr. Kavirondo’s attempt to bring order out of the disorder was met with hostility. Screaming people poured into the house from every corner. At that moment he didn’t know where his mother was. It was a 12 bedroom house, she could be anywhere, he only hoped she was safe. He spotted some of the mourning people falling on the ground to cry, kicking and dusting themselves. Was his father so-much loved? It sounded like the death of a king. Or was Brigadier Fred Kavirondo also a king?

        Dr. Kavirondo watched helplessly as people started doing what he had feared most would happen if the armed guards couldn’t help. He saw some of the mourners scream their way into the house, some dancing to mourning songs only to reappear from the house carrying something and getting away. The house was being looted… Clothes, shoes, beddings, precious items, furniture, pots, utensils – name them, and they were taken away by the mourners under the claim that it was the Luo custom that the life of the deceased had come to an end, thus; everything he owned should disappear with him in creation of a new order where the bereaved would start a new life.

        Let bygones be bygones with their properties.

        “What the hell is this!” Dr. Kavirondo cried tears with the awareness of the cost of what was being taken away. He watched it helplessly until his ears just shut it all out. He didn’t hear their cries anymore. He didn’t think about the claimed custom. No, that wasn’t and shouldn’t be the custom. He watched the opportunist mourners. Of course, not everyone who came there went away with something camouflaged as a mourner. Of course, there were mourners who didn't touch anything. He saw some of the property carried away by hired transport.

        He had been looking for Okelo without success. To get away from what he was seeing, he finally decided to walk away to somewhere he couldn’t hear any of that wailing. He was walking away when he started regretting having come home. What had he gained? Surely, his father could have died peacefully without him. He felt killed.

        The peak of the mourning came in one piece on the burial day. Dr. Kavirondo couldn’t believe his eyes looking at the sea of lives clamouring for the burial of his father. The mammoth crowd was iced by the Commander-in-Chief, the President, flagged by the Army fraternity led by the General, the executives, top businessmen, ambassadors and citizens of all walks of life.

        As it had become the tradition of later days of postcolonial politics, funeral functions were harvest times for politicians. They attended funeral functions heavily loaded in the mouth to capitalize on silent funeral crowds where they enthusiastically marketed their so called ideologies to the masses. It was where they talked out their spirits and spilt beans of their competitors. No politician worth his salt missed funeral functions. Since the entry of the culture of materialism, the respect and solid attention given to the deceased and the family mourners, had been left and forgotten in the forest of tradition.

        Political vultures at their best.

        Politicians left burials wondering, “where’s the next funeral?” If only there could be plenty of funerals…

        Everybody who came to the burial knew today was Honourable Were’s greatest day. He had the ambition of becoming the Luo kingpin one day. There could be no better place for building himself than during the burial of the great, Brigadier Fred Kavirondo. All the media houses were there and he knew, come the next day, his image would appear in newspapers. He had become dangerously critical of the government that, at times, he was described as a British bastard born to African traditional values.

        It was a hot afternoon of a cloudless sky. The sun appeared to have decided to punish the mourners by burning them. It went without any announcement that the burial would take the whole afternoon. The big people were protected from the sun’s heat by sitting under massive tents, with the President’s dais decorated with a red carpet overlooking the most expensive grave that must have cost not less than half a million shillings. The golden-coated coffin shared the national flag with the armed forces flag.

        To the silent mammoth crowd stewing under the heat of the sun, honourable Were finally stood behind the microphone. He cleared his manly voice  and went silent for a while to create suspense. When his voice returned to the microphone, he said the official goodies in honour of the President and dignitaries, after which he coughed again louder before he blasted his maiden question to the silent anxious crowd. “Citizens of this nation, have we been told who ordered the assassination of the Luo great man, Tom Mboya, during President Jomo Kenyatta times?” He went silent to hear the reaction, “No.”

        “Have we been told who ordered the assassination of the Luo great man, Dr. Robert Ouko during President Moi’s time?”

        “NO.”

        “Are we going to be told exactly what disease killed the Luo great man, Brigadier Fred Kavirondo?”

        Only sounds of murmuring greeted him. But he knew he had touched the nerve centre of the government. “Do you know why Tom Mboya and Dr. Robert Ouko were killed?”

        He was replied with silence.

        “They were killed because of challenging the status quo. My next motion in Parliament is going to demand a thorough investigation regarding who ordered the assassinations and the reasons behind it. Since the death of Jaramogi Oginda Odinga, the Luo community has been taken for granted. It has been given nothing else but lip service. It’s high time the Luo voice rose to the sky. We can’t take any more of the regime beating us lying down. We should demand our rights.”

        One morning Dr. Kavirondo stood pensively by the grave of his father as his memory replayed the scary military burial salutes of guns that had shaken the earth and nearly tore people’s eardrums. The Christian memorial cross that marked the grave jeered at him. He thought it was an abuse and an eyesore to the Luo cultural integrity; hence, misplaced. Getting rid of it from the grave would be emotionally too expensive to his mother who had been going to church mostly because it was a fashionable camouflage for wives of big men to go to church. They frown at you if you don’t go to church. She had stopped reading the bible ages ago after being baptized Isabella when she was in primary school. Baptism was a must at the catholic school.

        He felt like moving to touch the cross and tell it, “you don’t belong here.” An idea dawned on him regarding how to remove it without hurting his mother. Revisit the place at the heart of the night and knock it off then exonerate himself from the blame by wondering aloud to his mother in the morning, “who the hell destroyed the cross?”

        But what had driven him to the grave was a different matter. It was the pain at heart regarding the shocking revelation he had seen from the domestic CCTv unfolding devil details of what had transpired during the mourning looting. He spotted some people entering the house wearing faces of grief and screaming only to spot them smiling as they grabbed items of their choice only to go out of the house wearing crying faces.

        Mourning harvest.

        Furthermore, he was trying to digest some unbearable revelation that Uncle Okelo had made a fortune out of secretly selling some of the items from his dead brother’s home. How can I stomach that? He whispered to himself. The father’s house had been cleared of any portable items. The kitchen was swept clean of anything. There were some incidents of broken furniture drawers by people searching for money. Luckily, the looting was survived by properties locked up in other rooms.

        The family learned too late how much they could have saved if they had thought in advance to have most of the rooms locked up during the mourning. Uncle Bondo could have played a part in salvaging the property during the period, but he had been swallowed by elders attending to the funeral arrangement. Biting his lips with desperation, Dr. Kavirondo wondered how to confront Uncle Okelo for the blatant theft. Although Okelo could claim his move was a compensation for losing his brother, Dr. Kavirondo felt more justified in the ownership of his father’s property as the heir to the estate, not Uncle Okelo. His mother was still under the doctor’s care who had prescribed a private rest for her, fearing she could be a candidate of a heart attack based on what she had told him about the impact of the death of her husband. She couldn’t imagine what her world would be like without her husband. The husband had gone into his grave not only with his own glory but with the full glory of his family. To her, that was the end of an era. She was heard often mourning, “what’s the value of my living anymore?”

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As Dr. Kavirondo reaches its explosive finale, we tear into the controversy: Is marrying a Luo woman the smartest financial decision a man can make or a cultural landmine waiting to explode? Find out.