No, Luo culture doesn't require widows to sleep with strangers

Members of the Luo Council of Elders in Kendu Bay town during a meeting on August 17, 2020. [James Omoro]

This is in reference to the article titled, “Why women pay for sex with strangers after husbands’ death”, which appeared in The Standard on February 14, 2022.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this type of article pops up every time the general elections are around the corner, which makes me believe that there is a connection between the authors’ narrative and the Luo community’s choice(s) in the elections.

Be that as it may, allow me to poke holes in the disturbing story, where facts were sacrificed for sensationalism in order to achieve whatever agenda the story set out to.

Wife inheritance among the Luo, and generally within Nilotic communities, is the most misunderstood custom of all.

In its basic form, it was meant to perpetuate continuity and applied mostly to widows of child-bearing age.

Because young widows would ordinarily remarry, the custom meant for them to be taken care of by cousins or brothers of their deceased husbands so that, first, if they were to bear more children, it would be within the clan and, second, so that such inheritance would keep them within the late husband’s clan to secure the lineage.

Wife inheritance, as with all other Luo cultural practices, was not a sex-based occupation, as painted by ignorant commentators and rumour-mongers of today.

In fact, just like with all customs of old, it has largely died a natural death and is rarely practised today.

We live in the era of sensationalism. We understand that for stories to trend, they have to be packaged in drama and make-believe stuff.

One of the strengths and also weaknesses of the Luo is that it is a pretty open community where secrets barely exist.

It is a legacy of the community’s lack of oathing and initiation processes that require an Omerta sort of vows.

Because of this, the community is known to discuss its issues openly, a unique capability that also makes it one of the few that hardly keep grudges due to its old fashioned way of overcoming adversity by talking.

NGOs have long exploited this character, by setting base in the community’s land and turning its honesty with health and cultural issues into a stigma bonanza.

The HIV pandemic is one such case, where the Luo community’s willingness to discuss the disease openly, has been used to paint it as a paradise of disease.

I am thoroughly disappointed by this story. Indeed, I am not aware of any African culture which mentions sexual fluids in customary practice.

This makes a sentence like “the practice will be considered incomplete if their fluids do not mix during coitus”.

In all honesty, this sentence alone should have voided the whole story in a civilised world, but we live in difficult times.

It would surprise you that in a community that has to live with false allegations of sleeping with corpses and all sorts of “cleansing” practices, none of these customs actually depend on real sexual contact.

I have read, with real bemusement, stories of widows claiming they were forced to sleep with infected men as part of cleansing, or that they had to pay “joter”, wife inheritors, to sleep with them.

No such thing exists within the Luo cultural framework, but as a fundraising tactic among NGOs, it must be a gold mine!

My only gripe with mainstream media is that it allows itself to be a purveyor of cultural stereotypes and sensationalism without making any attempts to reach out to community elders to get the truth about such stories.

As far as cultural stereotypes go, the Luo community has suffered more than any other, so one expects editors handling such stories to go behind the scenes to establish the truth and set the record straight.

However, you can be sure that an intimate relationship between a random Luo couple in exchange for rent money would translate to a headline like “Sex for rent now prevalent in Kisumu”.

Essentially, where the community cites state marginalisation as a long term problem, the media has acted as an agent or mouthpiece of such marginalisation by enabling the dehumanisation and stigmatisation of the community.

The Luo community is probably the one that protects and celebrates its women the most, among the Kenyan tribes.

If you check out most Luo legends and public figures, you will notice that the Luo custom called “pakruok”, where mostly men hype their achievements in competing with others, revolves around them praising themselves using the names of their females' relatives.

That is how Raila Odinga is famously known as “Owad g’Akinyi” or “wuod Nyalego”, in reference to his sister and mother respectively. It is a fallacy to then paint the community as one that deliberately sets out to disenfranchise its women or lower them in the community hierarchy.

In a nutshell, the story was full of falsehoods and innuendo. I will not for a moment declare that no such actions exist in modern society, where men are paid to sleep with widows or where some strange forms of cleansing happen out there, but to package them as Luo culture is to disrespect a community’s way of life and dangerously perpetuate the stigma that has been fed by political differences over the years.

Not everything that happens in Luo land is part of the community’s culture, and the practice of passing it off as such is part of a long history of marginalisation and dehumanisation, whose shelf-life should surely be over now.

If one needs to know what constitutes Luo culture, I believe it is not too hard to contact the community’s leaders for clarification.

At any rate, I have never seen this problem burdened on the other Kenyan tribes. So why Luos?