Dead expensive: Flashy funerals a measure of wealth, status, family pride

Cost is relative; that is why of late I avoid using expensive or cheap when describing the cost of something. I have trained myself to use costly and affordable because what is expensive to me may not be expensive to you.

Raila Odinga recently pointed out that the cost of Luo funerals has become exorbitantly high; I couldn’t agree more. I was, however, conflicted.

I have struggled with the cost of funerals since I was a young man. As I grow older, I have come to terms with the fact that culture is stubborn. I am surprised that Raila, at his age still has the energy to push back culture. Why do Luos spend a lot of money on funerals? Even families that are struggling financially will go out of their way to make sure they hold a befitting sendoff for their loved one.

What made me relax my strong stand against expensive sendoffs is the realisation that what makes sense to me may not make sense to majority of people. I remember my father telling me that people will stop eating at funerals in Luoland, but it is not going to start at his home.

That is how we left coffins for caskets, hearses for cortege, mortuaries for morgues, and printed T-shirts for designer clothes.

Benchmarking

Then I came to learn that the two weeks to one month we spend organizing a befitting sendoff is child’s play compared to what happens in some communities in Nigeria.

Nigerians will spend up to one year preparing to bury a loved one, especially if it is an old person with a large network of relatives. Here, I was benchmarking with Muslims and the communities around Mt. Kenya who will bury within a week and without much fanfare.

The other is talking to some people from communities who bury fast, and they still reel from not fully mourning their loved one.

Grief is personal and private; if you don’t step into the shoes of someone who has lost a loved one, you will assume many things.

Here are people who shared how they arrived at the morgue in the morning due to delays and found they had sealed the coffin. Their awareness of culture meant that they could not gather the courage to ask to view the body and even confirm that it is their loved one in the casket.

Communities that do not have elaborate burial rites also have a challenge grieving publicly. People are supposed to move on after the burial and forget everything. This leaves those who process grief slowly and hold onto memories to grieve for much longer and often without support. Some of them blamed this for their siblings’ and other relatives’ poor mental health status.

This left me to embrace elaborate burial rites. The Luo picked this from the Nile Valley cultures who have a long history to the ancient days of burials. Most of the other Africans dumped critically sick and the dead in forests to be eaten by hyenas.

Most African communities have names for people who “came back from the dead.”

These are people who could not be devoured by hyenas and somehow recovered from the brink of death and walked back home. They had to take a new name and lead a new life.

The dilemma was how to maintain elaborate burial ceremonies but lower the cost. A lot has changed about Luo burials ever since I witnessed the funeral of my grandfather in 1987. However, even as details have changed, the cost has been rising. 

The general economic condition of Kenyans has improved, which gives people latitude in choices. This disposable income is evident in luxury goods and new status symbols.

This has come with new dimensions even in homes and house designs and building processes that were once cultural but now come with a dose of aesthetics. This has crept into funerals, in the tents, quality of food, and even funeral programmes.

The ladies who used to break their backs fetching water and cooking are today the “independent women” with agency. Meanwhile, the ladies whose husbands are coming for the funeral fall over each other to “take care” of their people beyond the standard set up for everyone at the funeral.

Everyone comes to mourn, so no one wants to cook and do the chores. Everything is outsourced because it can be afforded; the catch is in the quality of what is procured. The men also hire people to slaughter the cows and pay people who put up the tents and dig the grave.

Mourning involved staying with the bereaved overnight after the burial for a few days or a whole week. It eased the transition for the family to life without their loved ones as relatives departed in phases.

Today, the economic growth has come with boundaries. People leave immediately after the burial which makes you believe that in the past people stayed behind for lack of fare.

The funerals are becoming more expensive but losing the human touch. That is my problem, in as much as I acknowledge that you cannot have your cake and eat it. To embrace the new order, the old order must be let go. May be if we lower the cost, we will take away the induced trappings of wealth and improve the human touch and connection in the mourning.