On the day that Auko and Saoke were inherited, the family slaughtered a bull in celebration and the women discarded their dead husband’s apparel for new clothes. They were now free from the taboo of Opiyo’s death. The restrictions placed on other members of the family were now also lifted. Within a few months of Opiyo’s death, all of the huts of his wives were destroyed and new ones built in a ceremony called loko ot, literally “changing hut.”
Today, most Luo are Christians, and their families have been so for more than a century. Nevertheless, traditional rituals still play an important part when a Luo dies. Although most people are now buried in a shroud or a suit and their body is placed in a coffin rather than a bull’s hide, every Luo insists on being buried in his or her own homestead. In 1987 the Nairobi courts heard a landmark case to determine the final resting place of a prominent Luo lawyer, S. M. Otieno. The trial held the attention of the nation for months. Otieno’s widow, Virginia Wambui Otieno, was a member of the Kikuyu tribe, and their marriage in 1963—one of the first between a Kikuyu and a Luo—was considered to be shameful at the time. Mrs. Otieno argued that because her husband had led a modern life and had no regard for tribal customs, she had the right to bury him in a place of her own choosing; in this case, she wanted a nontribal burial on their farm near the Ngong Hills on the outskirts of Nairobi. The lawyer for Otieno’s Luo clan argued that without a proper tribal burial in his homestead in Luoland, the ghost of Otieno would haunt and torment his surviving relatives.
Otieno’s body lay in a Nairobi mortuary for more than four months while the dispute worked its way through the courts. Finally, the Nairobi Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Luo tribe, arguing that it was impossible for a Kenyan citizen to disassociate himself from his tribe and its customs, especially those of a tribe such as the Luo, who still retain such strong traditions. The court ordered that Otieno’s body be given to his fellow tribesmen for a traditional committal in his homeland near Lake Victoria. Although the judges said that tribal elders owed it to “themselves and their communities to ensure that customary laws keep abreast of positive modern trends,” this significant legal ruling highlighted the power that tribalism still exerts in Kenya. To this day, neither Otieno’s widow nor his children have visited his grave in Nyanza.
Otieno was an exceptional case; nearly every Luo wants and expects to be buried in his homestead. Even if an individual dies overseas after living abroad for many years, he or she would still want the body returned to the family compound. Many Luo now live and work in other parts of Kenya, especially Nairobi, so when there is a death in the family, relatives and friends can sometimes take several days to return to the family homestead. It has therefore become customary to preserve the body, either in a hospital mortuary or at home, to allow people time to pay their last respects.
Leo Odera Omolo said that as a boy, he always looked forward to a death in the village. “We would look at the old people, waiting for them to die. That way there was lots of singing and dancing, and plenty for people to eat and drink. It was a good excuse for a party, and we enjoyed ourselves!”
I have been to several Luo funerals, and it is clear that people attend them for many different reasons. The immediate family is grief-stricken, while others are in tears because the deceased owed them money and they know that now they will never be repaid. Local politicians use the events as an opportunity to press the flesh and make promises to the electorate that they are likely never to keep, and most of the rest of the company are there to eat, drink, and dance, or maybe just to pick a fight with somebody. After more than a hundred years of Christianity, the indigenous Luo traditions have been absorbed and integrated into Christian rituals, and the tribal influence still colors these major life events.
Many other strong Luo traditions persist to this day, even among modern city dwellers. Husbands and wives have to respect rigid taboos when visiting the compound of their in-laws. For example, when one of a Luo’s in-laws dies, the person cannot visit the in-law’s homestead until after the burial; to view the corpse would effectively be “to see them naked.” If a man visits the house of his wife’s parents, he must never look at the ceiling. If a man’s in-laws come to visit him, they must never sit opposite the door leading to the marital bedroom. Nor would someone ever accept (or be offered) food in an in-law’s homestead, or sleep there. To do so would break an indissoluble taboo.
Recently in Kajulu, a bad tropical storm prevented a couple from returning home after visiting their daughter and son-in-law. They had no option but to stay the night; this was quite acceptable providing the parents-in-law sat upright and stayed awake all night. Unfortunately it was a long night, nature took its course, and both parents fell asleep. This serious breach of protocol had only one possible solution: the house had to be destroyed completely.
This rule raises serious problems, of course, for the president of the United States. When he moved to Washington, D.C., with his family in January 2008, he invited his wife’s mother, Marian Robinson, to live with them and help raise their two daughters. By Luo tradition, there is only one way to break the taboo created by such a rash decision—and that is to knock down the White House.
4
THE WAZUNGU ARRIVE
RIEKO LO TEKO
Brain is mightier than brawn
SWAHILI is an East African Bantu language that has been greatly influenced by Arabic; its very name comes from the Arabic sawīhilī (meaning “of the coast”). Swahili has always been a lingua franca, enabling people with different native tongues and different origins to come together, to communicate, and especially to trade. In the nineteenth century, Swahili-speakers had to find a new word to describe the increasing number of European traders who were appearing on the shores of East Africa. It did not occur to them to choose an obvious word linking the Europeans to their color, because in their eyes, the odd-looking strangers could be anything from white to pink, red, or brown, depending on how much time they spent in the sun. Instead, the Swahili-speakers coined the word wazungu (mzungu in the singular) to describe the newcomers as “people who move around.”
The East African coast had welcomed many foreigners long before the first Europeans arrived at the end of the fifteenth century. Attracted by the lucrative profits to be made in gold and ivory from the African continent, Arabs traded along the coast as early as two centuries before the Christian era. Commerce with India came later, around the seventh century, and then in 1414 a huge fleet of sixty-two Chinese trading galleons and 190 support ships under the command of Zheng He crossed the Indian Ocean and landed on the African coast.1 Fourteenth-century Chinese maps show the East African coast in great detail, suggesting that they had been sending trading missions to the region for some time before Zheng He’s armada arrived. This trade with both the Arabs and the Chinese disproves the myth that Africa—the “Dark Continent”—had little or no contact with the outside world until it was “opened up” by Europeans.
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, just as the Luo were leaving their cradleland in Sudan and migrating south up the Nile valley toward Uganda, the Portuguese landed on East African shores. On July 8, 1497, just five years after Columbus set sail for the New World, the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama departed from Lisbon with a small fleet of four ships. Like Columbus, he hoped to find a sea route to the spices and other riches of the Orient. Da Gama, however, chose to sail east around the southern cape of Africa—a longer and much more challenging task than crossing the Atlantic. As he sailed into the Indian Ocean, da Gama was entering unknown territory, where no white-skinned European had yet traveled. By the time da Gama’s fleet reached Mombasa on the east coast of Africa, the Arabs—who dominated trade in the Indian Ocean—were waiting for him. They launched a seaborne attack to cut the Portuguese anchor ropes. Da Gama retreated and sailed farther north to Malindi (Melinde), where he finally found a friendly sultan. The association between the Portuguese and the town lasted almost two hundred years; the Church of St. Fran
cis Xavier was built during da Gama’s visit, and the building survives to this day as one of the oldest churches on the continent.
Da Gama signed a trade agreement with the local rulers in Malindi, which heralded the onset of European involvement in East Africa. Two years later, in 1500, the Portuguese sacked Mombasa in retaliation for the earlier snub and established a series of trading posts and forts along the coast, including the construction of Fort Jesus in Mombasa in 1593. By skillfully manipulating the rivalries between Malindi and Mombasa and other independently governed towns on the coast, the Portuguese successfully dominated much of the coastal trade in the region for a century.
Trade between East Africa and the rest of the world continued to flourish; Indian cotton, Chinese porcelain, and metalwork from the Middle East were traded for slaves, ivory, and gold. However, several environmental factors in sub-Saharan Africa inhibited trade and travel. The prevalence of the tsetse fly (which carries the parasite that causes trypanosomiasis, affecting both humans and animals) in large areas of highland savannah severely limited the use of pack animals for transporting goods. Unlike other parts of coastal Africa, East Africa has no large rivers running inland and the highland tributaries are too shallow and fast-flowing for the extended use of boats and canoes. As a result, any exploration or trade inland relied on human porterage. Before the British built a railway at the beginning of the twentieth century, the only route inland from the coast to Lake Victoria was a meandering track through dense tropical jungle; a return trip could take as much as six or seven months. Food had to be purchased or hunted en route, tolls paid to ensure safe passage, and the loads were limited to what could be carried by human porters—effectively no more than about sixty-five pounds. Therefore the trade to and from the interior mostly involved items of high value and low weight: rare skins, ivory, copper and gold, glass beads, cotton textiles, and, in later years, tobacco, guns, and liquor. Slaves were also traded, and they had the additional advantage of being able to walk.
Ever since the Spanish opened up the New World at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the European nations had been on an imperialist binge around the globe. But given the difficulties of accessing the interior, they paid scant attention to East Africa—at least at the beginning. The Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas in the 1500s was soon emulated by Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands. India and other Asian countries became absorbed by the burgeoning European empires, which sought new spheres of influence around the world, and sources of raw materials to fuel the rapid industrialization back home. Only in the late nineteenth century, after they had carved up most of the rest of the world, did Europeans turn their attention to the division and colonization of Africa.
After the Portuguese left the East African coast for good in 1720, bloody and bowed by repeated conflicts with local rulers and the Arabs, the sultan of Oman became the undisputed ruler of the coastal region. However, he proved ineffectual, appointing governors from rival families in Pate, Mombasa, and Zanzibar who soon began to fight among themselves. In 1822 the new ruler of Oman, Seyyid Sa’id, finally sent a fleet of heavily armed warships to subdue the querulous city-states. The Mazruis in Mombasa had no defense except for their puny muskets and the massive stone walls of Fort Jesus. At the time, two British survey ships, HMS Leven and HMS Barracouta, were on a Royal Navy mission to survey the east coast of Africa. The Mazrui chief pleaded with Captain Fitzwilliam Owen to make Mombasa a British protectorate and defend them against the sultan’s fleet. In return for British protection, the Mazrui agreed to assist the British in ridding East Africa of the scourge of slavery.2 With imagination and foresight, Owen realized what Britain could achieve in this part of Africa. On February 7, 1824, the Royal Navy hoisted the Union Flag over Fort Jesus; it was the start of Britain’s domination of East Africa, which would last for the next 140 years.
The European exploration of the interior of East Africa began in earnest in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In early 1844, Dr. Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German Protestant missionary and accomplished linguist, arrived in Zanzibar. His ambition was to link the east and west coasts of Africa with a chain of Christian missions. He soon moved on to Mombasa with his wife, Rosine, and their newborn daughter; tragically, both mother and child soon died of malaria. In spite of his deep depression from this shocking introduction to the privations of nineteenth-century Africa, he persevered and moved inland to establish his first mission on higher ground at Rabai. But his spirits did not fully recover until the arrival of a Swiss Lutheran missionary, Johannes Rebmann. Together they became known, not for their missionary work, nor for their translation of the Bible into Kiswahili (the name of the language in Swahili), but for their expeditions into the interior.
Together, Krapf and Rebmann became the first Europeans to see the snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro in 1848, and then Mount Kenya the following year. (Krapf recorded it originally as Kenia, which he learned from the indigenous tribes who live around the mountain.) The local Embu people told Krapf that they did not climb high on the mountain because of the intense cold and that “white matter” rolled down the mountains with a loud noise. Noting that the rivers on the slopes of Mount Kenya flowed continuously, unlike other rivers in the area, which dried up after the rainy season had ended, Krapf and Rebmann deduced that glaciers existed on these equatorial mountains—a correct deduction that was initially greeted with derision by the scientific community.3
From information gleaned on their travels, Johannes Rebmann also co-created the “slug map”—an ambitious but ultimately misleading representation of East Africa, showing a single huge lake in the center of Kenya. The map, which was presented to the Royal Geographical Society in London in 1855, did much to stimulate further interest in the region, as armchair travelers who had never set foot in Africa argued fiercely about Krapf and Rebmann’s findings.
The travels of Krapf and Rebmann pioneered the early exploration of East Africa, but their travels only highlighted how little was known of the African interior and other adventurers soon followed. Next into the region were the British explorers Richard Burton and John Speke, eager to find the great lakes which were said to exist in the center of the continent and to locate the source of the White Nile. Burton and Speke mounted their expedition in 1856, a year after the “slug map” came to London. Like Krapf and Rebmann before them, they found the travel arduous, and both men fell ill from a variety of tropical diseases. In 1858 Speke sighted a vast lake, which he named after the British queen, and claimed it to be the source of the Nile. This infuriated Burton, who was too ill to travel at the time and who considered the matter still unresolved. This very public quarrel between two of Britain’s greatest explorers only generated even more interest among geographers back home, encouraging others who were keen to either confirm or disprove Speke’s claims.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, finding the exact location of the headwaters of the White Nile had taken on an importance that is difficult to comprehend today. It resulted not only from the excitement of exploring a continent hitherto unknown, but also from the British government’s obsession with gaining strategic control over large parts of the world. East Africa became even more important in 1858, when the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez started work on a canal to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. The British considered this French-backed project to be a threat to their geopolitical and financial interests in the region, even though the canal was intended to be open to all nations. They instigated a revolt among the workers, bringing the construction to a halt.4 Despite these setbacks, the canal opened to shipping in November 1869, and it played an important role in speeding up the European colonization of East Africa by offering a quicker route to the Indian Ocean.
Even before the Suez Canal was opened, David Livingstone, the Scottish medical missionary and explorer, began his own search for the headwaters of the Nile. Livingstone had worked in South Africa since 1840, but now in January 1
866 he arrived in Zanzibar to mount his first expedition in East Africa. He believed the source of the Nile was farther south than the great lakes; assembling a team of freed slaves, he set off inland and reached Lake Malawi in early August. However, his mission was not a great success; one by one, his porters deserted him, and most of his supplies and all of his medicines were stolen. Livingstone then traveled north through difficult swampy terrain toward Lake Tanganyika, but with his health declining, he had to join a group of slave traders to stay alive. Livingstone was ill for most of the last four years of his life, suffering pneumonia, cholera, and tropical ulcers on his feet.
Livingstone was appalled by the scale and barbarity of the slave trade in East Africa, which had continued despite Captain Owen’s attempts to contain it more than forty years previously. His reports back to England referred to what he called the “great open sore of the world”:
To overdraw its evils is a simple impossibility.… We passed a slave woman shot or stabbed through the body and lying on the path. [Onlookers] said an Arab who passed early that morning had done it in anger at losing the price he had given for her, because she was unable to walk any longer. We passed a woman tied by the neck to a tree and dead.… We came upon a man dead from starvation.… The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves.5
Slavery was not new in Africa, where the use of forced labor goes back more than five thousand years. The Egyptian king Sneferu recorded in the third century BCE that he had attacked neighboring Nubia and brought back 7,000 black slaves and 200,000 head of cattle.6 The Arabs too traded extensively in human labor, and although the Prophet Muhammad laid down precise rules about the ownership of unbelievers, the Qur’an does not explicitly forbid human bondage.
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