The sting in Luo Culture

JAMES MWANGI takes you on a journey through Luo land and whips up a hilarious cocktail of tradition and cultural practices

Imagine a time, long before penicillin and you had the misfortune to catch lockjaw disease or Tetanus — a disease that clamped jaws shut.

If you were Luo, you would be minus six lower teeth, allowing medics of that era to feed you herbal concoctions through the gap.

Back then, cultural practices had a meaning. They gave the community identity. When one died, relatives, for instance, shaved their heads clean to symbolise a new leaf in the lives of the bereaved.

In the same breath, they never left a widow — young or old — to face life alone. A cousin of the departed would be selected by elders to inherit the widow. At times, a widow chose from amongst her brothers-in-law the one she fancied. The inheritor protected the widow, became a father figure to her children and provided for her family.

In keeping with strict tradition, a stranger — commonly referred to as jadak or a man from another community — was never allowed to inherit a Luo widow. You also had to be a man of mettle because wife inheritance was no child’s play.

Teeth removal might have died a natural death and wife inheritance is on the wane, but socio-economic pressures are threatening or redefining many hitherto thriving cultural lifestyles among the people of the lake.

Intimate

For instance, chodo wino or the shaving of a newly born child has often put married families living apart in awkward positions.

Amongst the Luo, shaving child for the first time was traditionally only done when the child’s mother and father got intimate. If it happens that the child’s father was far away, the child’s hair would grow bushy till he returned home and slept with his wife.

Three years ago Aggrey Ochieng’, a resident of Nyatike District in Migori County, got employed in Mombasa as a casual worker leaving an expectant wife behind. She delivered six months later. He sent money to cater for the hospital bill and to see her smoothly through the post delivery period and assumed all was well.

But a few months later, his wife called saying she desperately needed him to return home so that they could shave the baby. Being newly employed, he told her that the only alternative was for her to visit him in Mombasa.

He was, however, shocked when his father called and told him in no uncertain terms that a newly born baby is never shaved outside the homestead. Reminded of several unpleasant things that would befall the baby if the mother went ahead with the shaving before first getting intimate with him, Ochieng’ had to request his employers for leave to travel home.

“This cultural practice should be done away with. It was okay in the old days when men stayed with their wives in one homestead, but imagine the cost of travelling all the way from Mombasa to Migori to shave a baby!” laments Ochieng’.

While sex is the centrality of human existence, what many may not know is that it applies and defines to a great degree the Luo community’s cultural practices.

Sowing seeds

Traditionally, newly married couples could not, for instance, engage in sex on their wedding night before the man’s parents partook of the same that very night. Farmers, on the other hand, had to have sex the night before sowing seeds at the onset of the rains. Sex had to precede the ‘welcoming’ of crops to the granaries and of course a new home could not be opened without it.

This fixation with sex probably explains why widows had to take on other men to replace their departed husbands lest they became ostracised and excluded from the community.

Right to this day, a widow without an inheritor in some places is never allowed to raise crops for consumption and neither can her married sons. In my village, the best such widows can do is to lease the lands to others and use the money that they are paid to to buy grains from the market.

In Uriri District, Migori County, married men whose widowed mothers have refused to be inherited have even been compelled to move out of their homes and to rent houses at local trading centres. Villagers fear that the men’s continued stay in ancestral homes without a father figure may attract mysterious diseases.

Kelo lek

Wife inheritance has a curious twist, though. According to elders, when a man was buried, a widow had to wait for kelo lek or her departed husband to appear in her dreams. It is said that the time late husband took to ‘visit’ a widow in a dream depended on their relationship. If the couple led a quarrelsome life, the man could become stubborn and take long before visiting. But if the couple had a loving and healthy marriage, the dead man came knocking soonest.

The moment a widow saw her late husband in a dream, she informed her late husband’s relatives and soon after, a man was found to spend the night with her.

This first sexual activity after burial of one’s husband was referred to as chodo kode, not to be confused with inheritance. It was not a must that the man who ‘helped’ the woman in this way automatically became an inheritor, but note that every Luo widow had to undergo chodo kode to pave way for them to be inherited.

To get it right, the ritual was to be done in the woman’s matrimonial bed.

The man who opted to do this job was well known to the widow’s late husband’s family. He arrived early and a worthy meal, preferably chicken or fish, was prepared for him. Inheritance would follow after.

But much as the practice persists, the advent of HIV and Aids and the economic challenges related to wife inheritance have turned the age-old custom into something it never was.

Potential widow inheritors are no longer solid men who announce their presence in broad daylight, but shadowy characters who sneak stealthily to widows’ homes in darkness and leave unnoticed at the crack of dawn.

Vagabonds

Unlike in the old days, widow inheritors these days are mostly losers — vagabonds with an eye on the late man’s estate who want free lunch with ‘extras’. 

There are also those who take wife inheritance as a full time occupation.

Such men will inherit several women in one village. They are snidely called Jater. In fact, Jater has today earned another name —‘terrorist’! That was not the case in the past when wife inheritance was seen as a honourable responsibility because it came with specific duties.

They say culture is dynamic. To curb the spread of Aids, which is associated with these ‘terrorists’, mainstream churches now encourage ‘non-contact’ and symbolic inheritance.

They appeal to widows to only take a potential inheritor’s coats, shirt or long trousers and symbolically place them next to them when they are about to sleep.

 It would then be assumed that since the woman shared a bed with another man’s clothes, then the ritual is as good as done. But diehard traditionalists condemn the new practice arguing that merely sleeping with a man’s clothes is not enough.

Stylish

The paradox, however, is that whereas the Luo community is described as the most stylish in East Africa, with a love for the finest things in life, some remain shackled by cultural practices whose time has long passed.

The wider Luo community could perhaps heed the advice of their former Council of Elders Chairman, Ker Riaga Ogallo who has on occasion appealed to Luos to abandon practices that cause suffering to members of the community. 

In fact, the doyen of opposition politics Jaramogi Oginga Odinga is on record advising his community to shurn the practice of burying people only at their ancestral homes, arguing it disenfranchised the deceased’s nuclear family — especially widows.