One important area of expertise in the Luo community was traditional herbal medicine, which was used to treat both physical and psychological illnesses. Common medical problems included fractures and other physical injuries from accidents or battles; parasites; snakebite; eye infections; and tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), and bilharzia. Snakes are very common in the region and the Luo have a wide variety of treatments, which include mystical therapies as well as concoctions made from as many as twenty-four different herbaceous plants. The most common treatment involves cutting, sucking, and binding the injury, followed by the application of a poultice made from leaves or roots and held in place with strips of cloth or tree bark.
Before the coming of the Christian missionaries at the start of the twentieth century, the Luo believed in a supreme God or life force called Nyasaye, the creator. Nyasaye is all powerful, and he intervenes directly in the daily activities of humans, bringing disease and disaster when displeased. The mystery of Nyasaye is all-encompassing, and he can be found not only in the sun and moon but also in rivers, lakes, mountains, large rock structures, trees, and even snakes (especially the python)—all of which are natural conduits for his divinity. Some devotees even kept a large goat in their house as a living embodiment of Nyasaye. In this sense, the Luo are traditional animists.
The Luo believed that the sun could appear to people in dreams. When this happened, the sleeping individual would become very agitated and might have to be physically restrained as he or she reached out to ask for the sun’s blessing. The individual might also dream of throwing cow dung, human excrement, or seeds toward the sun, and in return he or she would be blessed with wealth in the form of a good harvest or many cattle. Believers also invoked the power of the moon: old men prayed for more wives, young men for a bride, young women for a husband, and married women for satisfaction. Many consulted celestial bodies to help forecast the weather and to predict the future. A ring appearing around the sun signified that an important person had just died, and solar or lunar eclipses were viewed with awe as harbingers of a major event. When these portentous signs appeared, the village elders would gather and deliberate over the most appropriate action to take to avoid disaster.
Belief in the power of Nyasaye is still common among the Luo. In 2003, the appearance of a twenty-foot-long python in a village on the banks of Lake Victoria exposed rifts in the community, pitting traditionalists against modernists. The snake was found by a thirty-five-year-old mother of five called Benta Atieno, who considered it her divine duty to ensure that the female python safely hatched its dozens of eggs. When she first discovered the snake, she ran to tell other people in the village about her find. The elders and other locals considered this to be a special snake, an omieri. If the omieri was cared for, they claimed, good things—healthy livestock, bountiful harvests—would ensue, but if it was harmed, then bad luck would befall the village. They recalled that seven years previously another large python had been killed in the village and a severe drought subsequently struck the area. However, some people, including senior church leaders, called for the snake to be destroyed, fearing that it would take livestock or even harm small children. The appearance of large pythons in Kenyan villages is a common enough event, especially during the rainy season, and so the Kenya Wildlife Service removed Benta Atieno’s snake and released it well away from human habitation.
The Luo also worship their ancestral spirits, both male and female. They believe that man is made up of visible and invisible parts; the invisible part, known as tipo or shadow, combines with the visible part (the human body) to create life. When an individual dies, their body becomes dust and the tipo becomes a spirit, which retains the individual’s mortal identity but becomes even more powerful and more intelligent in the afterlife. Thus the most potent spirits were those of important people, and powerful male ancestors were usually the most respected and the most feared. Spirits can haunt only the living members of their own clan, and the Luo believe that an ancestral spirit continues to exist for as long as those who recognize it are still alive. People perceive these spirits to be agents of both good and evil, and they might claim to see, hear, or smell them when awake, or encounter them in their dreams.
A spirit can become a demon, jachien, when the circumstances of his death and burial are not honored correctly. For this reason, the strict rituals and customs of the tribe must always be followed to avoid the creation of a jachien. The Luo sacrificial ritual involves the consecration of an animal before killing it and sharing the meat among the members of the clan. If the spirits are offended, the head of the family must seek expert help from someone who can best advise what course of action to take.
Within Luo society, there are both sorcerers and healers who claim to have unique spiritual powers and who can call upon juok—a supernatural force—to use in their spells. It is a battle between good and evil, between the jajuok or witch doctor who uses juok against the good of society, and the ajuoga, a diviner or healer, who can offer protection against these evil spells. Opiyo knew that if he needed advice about the future or had worries about his ancestral spirits, he should turn to an ajuoga for help: he is an expert in dispensing medicine and magic for positive reasons; he can diagnose illnesses, prescribe cures, and appease the spirits using sacrifice or other cleansing rituals. Whenever Opiyo visited an ajuoga, he took with him a present, or chiwo. The diviner might contact the ancestral spirits using a number of different techniques, including gagi—literally, “casting pebbles”—or mbofwa, meaning “the board.” This last method involves rubbing two flat wooden blocks together, one of which is much bigger than the other, and summoning the spirits by name. The ajuoga knows that he has contacted the spirit when the smaller piece of wood begins to stick to the bigger piece. For gagi, the diviner tosses wild beans or cowry shells onto the ground and interprets the message according to the pattern they make. These methods help the ajuoga to identify the rebellious spirit that is causing the problem. Most diviners rely on the ancestral spirits for their knowledge, and any consultation with the dead is done in darkness; only the ajuoga can see and talk to the spirits.
However, Opiyo not only feared ancestral spirits; his neighbors could pay a jajuok to use witchcraft and sorcery to bring harm or death to him and his family. (In witchcraft, practitioners use mystical powers to harm or kill others, whereas sorcery achieves the same objective through the use of material objects.) Throughout his whole life, Opiyo lived under the constant fear that a curse could be cast on his family, and he took elaborate precautions to guard against evil. A neighbor might engage a jajuok for a number of reasons; for example, rivalry over land or a woman, or resentment toward a successful neighbor. The Luo believed that by cursing and killing a successful neighbor, you could benefit from their death. Whatever the reason for the dispute, the jajuok acted as a hired hand who could bring death or pestilence, for a fee (usually three cows). An individual could also protect themselves against a jajuok by finding a practitioner at least as powerful as the protagonist, who (for another fee) would conjure up an antidote to the spell.
Jajuok inherited their powers from their fathers and grandfathers, and their techniques varied; some could simply stare at or point the dried forearm of a gorilla at a person to bestow a fatal curse. Others could summon lightning to strike an individual, or slaughter a black sheep or a cockerel to produce a curse to strike morbid fear into their target. Some would mix the blood of a sheep with secret ingredients and leave the concoction in front of the hut of the targeted individual, or alongside a path where they would be sure to pass. In many respects, these techniques are similar to those used in other African societies, and also in Haitian vodou; when they work, it is because people believe in the power of the magic.
Unsurprisingly, practitioners of magic and sorcery were the most feared individuals in Luo society, for they literally had the power of life and death over ordinary people. (The fees they received for their services also made
them among the wealthiest.) However, they were also considered to be outside the normal social structure of the Luo tribe and could not live a normal family life.
Belief in witchcraft persists today. Roy Samo is a local councilor in Kajulu, a sprawling village north of Kisumu. He told me how people in the village feared witchcraft and how only recently somebody had directed a bolt of lightning onto a neighbor’s house. I know Roy well, and I asked him almost jokingly what he thought about these traditional beliefs. I was astonished at his response. “Oh, I fully believe in them—they have the power of good as well as evil.” “But Roy,” I said, “you’re an educated man, a devout Christian and a pastor at your local church!” “Yes,” he laughed, “but I am also an African!”
As recently as May 2008 in Kisii district, south Nyanza, eleven elderly people—eight women and three men between eighty and ninety-six—were accused of being witches and burned to death by a mob. Villagers told reporters that they had proof the victims were witches: they claimed to have found an exercise book that contained the minutes of a “witches’ meeting,” including details of who was going to be targeted next. In 2009 Kenya’s Daily Nation claimed that on average, six people are lynched in Kisii district every month on suspicion of witchcraft.
Sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, Opiyo Obong’o died. Like many Luo men, he reached a good age due to a combination of a high-protein fish diet and a lifetime of physical labor that kept him lean and fit. Indeed, it is not unusual for men in this part of Africa to live to be a hundred years or more. For the Luo, there is no such thing as a natural death; there must always be a cause. An old man dies not of old age, but because he has been called by his ancestors to join them for further duties in the afterlife.
Opiyo’s death marked the beginning of his last ritual on earth, an elaborate rite of passage for both the deceased and the family who survived him. Even in death, Opiyo was expected to conform to certain traditions. First, it was considered a very bad omen to die at any time other than between two o’clock and seven o’clock in the morning. Today it is possible to preserve a body with formalin; failing that, the body is placed on a bed of sand covered in banana leaves to keep it cool. But in the past, a corpse had to be buried very quickly, and certainly on the day of death before the midday heat emerged. If Opiyo died in the evening and his body lay in his hut overnight, then three goats had to be sacrificed to dispel the bad omen and the evil spirits that would otherwise haunt the family. The goats would be provided by close members of his family, either his brothers or his cousins, and they would be brutally bludgeoned to death instead of having their throats cut. Only by killing the goats in this gruesome way could the evil influences that had caused the man to die be dispelled.
The first that the villagers heard of Opiyo’s death was when his first wife, Auko, began wailing—a high-pitched howling cry called nduru. By tradition, she stripped naked and ran from her hut to the entrance of her compound and back again. Auko then dressed in her husband’s clothes, which she would continue to wear throughout the protracted mourning period. This was the first ritual, which only the first wife could perform. Opiyo’s other wife, Saoke, also showed respect toward her dead husband by wearing his old clothes. Saoke joined Auko in nduru; alerted by the noise, people soon began to congregate outside Opiyo’s hut. Meanwhile, Opiyo’s two married daughters had been told about their father’s death, and they came to the family compound as quickly as possible. By tradition, the eldest daughter had to arrive first; her younger sister could not enter the compound until after the older daughter had arrived.
Long before his death, Opiyo had prepared the skin of his biggest bull for his funeral. He had not only killed the bull himself but also lavished great care in curing the skin, readying it for the day when it would be wrapped around his naked body as a burial shroud. A man never used the skin of a cow—that would only ever be used for a woman. (This practice largely died out over the years from the influence of European missionaries, and most Luo are today buried in wooden coffins.) Opiyo’s body lay inside his duol to the right of the door until later that morning, when he was buried within the confines of his homestead.
On the day of Opiyo’s burial, his relatives built a bonfire next to his grave to honor the deceased. The fire was called magenga, and the big logs burned for several days as friends and relatives came to pay their respects. The magenga always has to be lit by a cousin and the eldest son of the dead man. Like the skin of the bull, Opiyo kept an old cockerel in his hut ready for the day of his burial. During the lighting of the magenga, the cockerel would be killed and then roasted on the flames to signify that the man has now gone and can no longer offer the household his protection. Along with the bird, Auko also prepared a traditional dish of ugali for the visitors.
By the evening, all Opiyo’s relatives and his two married daughters had congregated by his grave, and for the next four days neighbors brought food to the house to help feed the visitors. The morning after the burial his family brought out Opiyo’s three-legged stool, his fly whisk, and his clothes and placed them on his grave to accompany him to the next life. During the four-day mourning period, the women wailed and danced to chase away the “death spirits.” They left the houses in the compound uncleaned until the last day, when his two wives performed yweyo liel—the “cleansing of the grave.” This marked the start of a spring clean throughout the whole compound. On the fourth day, Opiyo’s three sons, their wives, and his daughters also had their heads shaved in a symbolic act called kwer, which indicates to others that a person is bereaved. Opiyo’s wives too had their heads shaved, and they continued to wear his clothes for several more months.
On the fourth day the mourners prepared to leave. As with other ceremonial functions with the Luo, seniority and sexual consummation were all part of the ritual; Opiyo’s eldest son, Obilo, returned to his homestead and had sex with his wife before his two younger brothers could leave their father’s compound; the other brothers also had to consummate the mourning period by having sex with their respective wives. If this is not done correctly, the Luo believe, you might become sick or bear a child with physical or mental problems. (Most Luo Christians, even those living in the cities, still practice this custom today.) Meanwhile, Opiyo’s two wives continued to mourn their dead husband, rising early in the morning at dawn to sing and praise him, extolling his virtues to anyone who was listening.
Opiyo’s widows, Auko and Saoke, were now restricted in what they could do and where they could go. After his death they were considered to be unclean—tainted by his death and capable of putting a curse on people. They could not enter another’s hut for fear of bringing bad luck to the owner, nor could they shake hands with their friends, eat with them, or pick up their children. They could not stroll by a river for fear of it drying up, nor walk through a field of maize for risk of it shriveling. These women were in chola, and they could be released from this restriction only once they were “inherited.”
During the first four days of mourning after Opiyo’s death, his two brothers and his male cousins gathered in the family compound to decide which of them would inherit his wives. Inheritance is a process by which a dead man’s wives are literally shared among his immediate relatives. It might be several weeks or even months before the women are finally inherited, but on the day of the inheritance, it is essential for the man to consummate the event with his new wife. Sometimes a man might inherit more than one wife, or even all of them, and he would be obliged to have sex with all of the women on that first night, in strict order of seniority. Any woman toward whom the man failed in his obligation on that first night was required to remain confined to her hut until another husband could be found to rise to the occasion.
If her married sons had not already established their own homestead before their father’s death, then they could not do so until after their mother had been inherited. This rule placed pressure on women to agree to inheritance, no matter how much they might prefer otherwise.
There are some restrictions over who can inherit a woman; for example, a woman could not be inherited by a man with whom she had previously had an extramarital affair. The woman might also object if she considered the man to be “of bad character,” so there has always been some element of choice. However, in the past, the women would always be inherited by somebody. This tradition of wife inheritance might seem bizarre, but in a society or environment where survival is tough and tenuous, it does guarantee that any widowed woman and her children will be looked after and not abandoned.
In rural areas wife inheritance is still the norm and its modern-day practice is partly responsible for the high incidence of HIV/AIDS among the Luo population. Due to the great social stigma attached to being HIV positive, a man will often keep his illness hidden from his family and take his medication only at his place of work. When he dies, his wife might be quite oblivious to the fact that she is carrying the virus, and when she is inherited, she can pass it on to her new husband, and thence to his other wives.
Sometimes a woman will resist inheritance: Hawa Auma, aunt to President Obama, told me that when her husband died she refused to be inherited. Auma is a practicing Muslim, and many people in her mosque supported her firm stand. In the end, she agreed to a token inheritance but refused to allow the union to be consummated. Auma is a very strong-willed woman, but others are not quite so fortunate. In the village of Kajulu on the outskirts of Kisumu, there was recently a case of a widow, devoutly Christian, who spurned all attempts to be inherited. Her own son then died quite suddenly, leaving the woman’s daughter-in-law widowed as well. Luo tradition forbids two widows from living in the same compound, so in order to bring pressure on the woman to be inherited, the village elders refused to bury her son. Within a matter of weeks, the woman relented.
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