During the burial ceremony, close family members remembered all sorts of instructions the general had left behind in case of his death, some bordering on the bizarre.
You see, food at funerals is not a matter of mere convenience, where I come from. Apart from the fact that many mourners travel hundreds of miles to attend a burial and may not get back to their abodes on the same day, therefore have to be fed, meals in many western Kenya communities are a festival of kinship, communal bonds and opportunities to reconnect with long lost friends and relatives. Other communities, looking from a distance, see it merely as “feasting at funerals”, without understanding the deeper, underlying significances.
Following Gen Ogola’s funeral, there was hue and cry among members of the community, not only against the deceased’s unwelcome decrees, but utterances by some of the family members, especially the general’s son, Joel Rabuku. In a region where development and the politics of marginalisation have remained tied to the hip, the younger Ogola’s declaration that he would be taking over his late father’s “development agenda” and ultimately “change this region”, didn’t sit well with residents.
In many local political circles, the prevailing view was that since the general’s widow originally hails from the Mount Kenya region, the son’s utterances were a reflection of the parents’ failure to educate him on the community’s history. This history, complete with a siege mentality built over time from perennial political and economic marginalisation visited on the lakeside people by successive regimes since independence, was brought to life by local Senator Oburu Oginga, when he rose to give his speech at the same funeral.
Oburu said, and quite rightly, that the region had suffered political assassinations of several senior figures over the years, and it was not the place of Ogola’s son, or his family at that, to remove suspicions over the circumstances surrounding his death. To be fair, even those who want to believe that it was all an accident, still question the manner, method and tools of transportation that Gen Ogola used on the day of his demise.
The Luo are arguably the most political of all Kenyan tribes. Even for regular social activities, mobilisation in the region often takes a heavily political tone. Gatherings here are not complete without updates from the community’s preferred political formation. At the grassroots, the dream has always been that when a member of the community finally takes power, the region will experience the same level of economic growth that has gone to pro-government zones since independence.
This is why taking the podium to discuss development, in terms that suggest that this has to come only with government support, for a community that has been in opposition for most of the independent years, reeks of contempt. The younger Ogola obviously didn’t get the script. Besides, in finding no reason to question the manner of death of his dad, he invited the ridicule that came towards him from a mourning region still unable to come to terms with the monumental loss.
The whole spectacle reminded me of the death of another political giant many years ago. When iconic freedom hero and politician, Masinde Muliro, collapsed and died at the JKIA in August 1992, just four months to the first multiparty elections, his family declared to a shocked nation that the doyen had left instructions that no postmortem be performed on his body if he ever died. Muliro’s widow was neither a Luhya nor Kenyan, leading many commentators to quip that if she had been a daughter of the soil, she would have channelled different instructions from the late Ford party luminary.
In a way, intermarriage between communities, and the rise of elitism, are playing a part to blunt the homogeneity of ethnic political mobilisation. With it comes the decline of certain cultural identities. Gen Ogola came from Alego, a sort of bastion of Luo culture. You can understand when his kinsmen do not buy the idea that he would make decrees about his death that negate age-old customs among his people.
Actually, death has a way of bringing to life the conversations about the place of culture, largely wrapped in political garb. To begin with, Kenyan funerals are in fact blended occasions, where religion combines with traditional tribal practices to showcase a delicate mix of the old and the modern. Traditionalists find funerals the best avenues for re-enacting ancient customs and as reminders of where each community has come from.
But a critical look suggests that these young people lacking education in the intricacies of community history are slowly becoming the majority, which is to say that the new age face of most of tribes will be the English-speaking young technocrats who do not share the “pains” of tribal siege mentalities that are a fixture of our politics. Indeed, this generation, to whom both the independence struggle and the second liberation are alien concepts, will soon make up the majority of the country’s voters.
I say this because the political class and rabid tribalists are yet to internalise the fact that the fabric of society is changing, while they are stuck in an ancient rut. Moving forward, there will be many more senior people whose families will reveal, at their death, that their desires had been to be cremated, or such other “strange” ones like being buried without caskets, no meals served at the ceremony or even no politicians and political speeches at their funerals. Ordinarily, it is testimony to the changing times, and you would imagine that leaders would take note and adjust accordingly to these changing trends.
I have often wondered how many electoral cycles it will take before Kenya enters the stage where the voters and the candidates do not communicate in ethnic tones, as a combination of education, urbanisation and generational transitions take over. I get the impression that the era of tribal lords and regional voting blocs will slowly fade away, ultimately, and a more principled political class will emerge. And to be honest, each time an event takes place, and a region collectively retorts “no, that can’t be our culture”, it confirms we are a step in that direction.
And that is how I see the trend of politics and culture undergoing a metamorphosis with every elite funeral. Or a grand intertribal wedding. Soon, the young men and women we dismiss as not educated in our culture and therefore not representative of our aspirations, will become the faces of our tribes. They are our children. They speak with foreign accents. They are not beholden to our brand of politics or our community heroes. They do not care where we came from, or how long we walked barefoot in our youth to get to schools situated at the end of the earth. The sooner we realise that, the less blood pressure we will have in retirement!
Political commentator
