Why there is little fanfare with Muslim funerals

[Photo: Shutterstock]

In 2008, five years before his death, former New York Mayor Ed Koch paid $20,000 (Sh2 million) to a cemetery to secure a place for his burial. Funerals, just like weddings, can be expensive as you want them to be. A report in the Journal of Human Development in 2013 found that 63 per cent of poor families in the Kenyan society blamed funerals for their poverty.

 In 2019, the late University of Nairobi lecturer Ken Ouko said the African culture is to blame for the chock hold death has on ordinary Kenyans, leaving them gasping for breath financially. He added that poverty and funerals are intertwined. “If you are poor, death is always a disease away, and if you, as a breadwinner dies, burying you will drive your widow and children deeper into poverty. And it is all because, in many cultures, the dead have to be ‘buried well’. In many cultures, the dead being buried in cemeteries is seen as throwing them away, so they are interred in the villages, next to the graves of their relatives. So that their spirit settle and doesn’t come back to haunt the living.”