Post by 50cents on Jan 27, 2006 23:09:33 GMT 3
www.timesnews.co.ke/28jan06/insight/ins4.html
Luo: The ‘nation’ that values power
By Mwangi Muiruri
“Luo” is the name of the mythical founder or leader of the Luo people. The “Ja Luo” community is found in both Kenya and Uganda, but the largest number is found in Kenya. Luos trace their origin from Sudan. The Luo in Kenyan and Uganda share a lot of body resemblance with the Sudanese. Their commonest feature is their coal black pigmentation added to their tallish features.
Not many people are aware that Egyptians are descendants of migrants from Sudan. History books tell us that there was a time when the ancient Nile Delta of Egypt was uninhabited because of permanent floods. Then over the millenniums and as the floods diminished, the people from the Sudan area followed the Nile with settlements towards the Delta, and finally reached the Delta. Hence, the first occupiers of Egypt did not come from Europe but from the Sudan side, which at that time was called Chem or the land of the black people who built the city of Memphis. The Memphis civilisation was at its best in 3000 BC. The name “Egypt” is derived from the Greek’s “Aigyptos” which the Greeks used as the second name for the city of Memphis.
The Upper and Lower Egypt kingdoms of Egypt comprised Sudanese kings or Pharaohs as they were called. There were stories that the most aggressive or fiercest fighters in those kingdoms came from Sudan. The ancestors from Sudan who followed the Nile towards the Delta eventually intermarried with Arabs and Southern Europeans and produced the present brown skinned generations found in Egypt. Otherwise, those who remained in Sudan and others who went up towards the origin of the Nile, hence settling in East Africa, retained their colours but they had lost their great Memphis civilisation.
One can claim that the original Luos were Memphis members. Kenyan Luos take a lot of pride in their genealogy. There are many Luo whose works have roots in Sudan. The researchers do so with great pride. Mr Paul Mboya and Tom Ojienda, both my friends, have completed an exhausting genealogy covering hundreds of years.
The Luos are proud of their culture and their roots. Most of them may not be aware of their lost great civilisation, but the aggressive genes in the Luo blood reveals the ancient Sudanese militancy. Luo people will engage you fiercely in a battle to defend their values if they think you threaten those values. Some of them are so much ingrained in their roots that they believe those roots hold all the answers to the present problems, believing that the present has little of value to offer to them.
It is unusual for anyone to meet a Luo who does not believe in spirits. Ancestral spirits form the biggest chapter of the traditional Luo religion, and spirits rule them. Those spirits tell you where and how you should be buried. They influence both the living and the dead. Not even high education standars would appear to wear down those beliefs, which you may find room even in minds of professors.
Because of the belief that a Luo is not absolutely in charge of his destiny outside the interests of his ancestral spirits, he is, in a way a prisoner to what he considers spiritual forces. He is here to serve those forces to the best of his ability. He is governed by spiritual things, but not by material things.
The tendency of being freed from material bondage puts the Luo person in a respectable position with regard to guarding the storage of human values. Someone once told me, “When a Kikuyu is in position of power he sees his position in terms of how much material things he can get from that position, a Luo sees it in terms of his own self esteem plus the respect he gets from holding the position responsibly.” There is a stereotype saying, “If you give a Luo a salary of one thousand shillings where he is called “Director” he will gladly work for that place.”
Luo people place university education at very high level. This is because education is power and he loves power. If you rise to address a Luo audience, they want to know “Who is he?” If you are Honourable Ochieng, or Minister Obok, or Dr Owuor or Professor Okwach they will give you all their attention. The less you are in the power echelon irrespective of your money, you will not impress Luo people. This may explain why the Luos lead in Kenya in producing doctorate holders, Professor So-and-So. What a Luo would do with the degree after getting it is less important than having that qualification. From this angle, the Luo community has done Kenya proud in the academic intelligentsia.
Kenyan administration would harvest plentifully if it made the best use of placing Luos in positions of authority. But if you want to frustrate Luos, try to block their way to power. It may explain the reason why, since Kenya became independent, Luos never gave Kenyatta, Moi, and finally Kibaki peace of mind.
If Luos go to compete with outsiders, many of them tend to believe it is their right to win and anyone who beats them is an enemy. This may explain why they have been called stone.throwers. Their mood to throw a stone at someone is not merely to frighten him, but to maim or kill the challenger. There are stories told that when you see a Luo going to the stadium to watch a football carrying a briefcase, that briefcase contains nothing but stones for punishing the winner if he is not a Luo.
Politically, Luo people are treated with distrust. Non Luos have expressed sentiments to the effect that if a Luo became a president he would be a dictator. A Luo leader is perceived by Luos as an ancestral spirit brought to save and lead them. He is listened to and obeyed unquestionably. What he says becomes law that should be obeyed and wherever he points as the direction to be followed, that is where they must go officiously. Any challenger to that is and should be dealt with harshly. Unfortunately this trend of following the leader blindly places the Luo “nation” in a terribly dangerous position just in case their leader lacks reason and vision.
Luos have been victims of Kenyan politics because of their aggressive and rather antagonistic way in which they demand their rights. That aggression has been repaying them with reprimands and neglect by dictatorial regimes. This is why little development has been initiated in Luoland by past regimes, hence placing Luos in a stagnant economic position while the other less aggressive communities were given a sympathetic ear in development.
But in spite of whatever good values may be hidden in Luos past and whatever message and demands their ancestral spirits are presenting in Luoland, the present Luo homestead has been hit hard by the storms of modernity. First, the fast diminishing curriculum of oral history and library is leaving big cracks in the Luo aesthetics. The old guard are disappearing with that curriculum, leaving behind halfbaked traditional knowledge, in order to survive and retain the cultural pride of the people, that half-baked knowledge is subjected to new editorial additions and subtractions. In other words, the nobility of Luo tradition is gravely beaten up.
Nothing gives a better example of that than two issues. One on the “wife-inheritance” and the second on “cost of burials.” There are Luos who claims that when your brother dies, you are bound by ancestral spirits to totally inherit that wife. In other words, you grab her and everything else she has--all become a part of your household.
In fact, this is sheer aberration or distortion of the tradition. There is no Luo tradition in support of such materialistic and commercial move. The true Luo tradition, like many traditions in Africa, does not approve of a man “owning” the widow of his brother. It only recommends that a responsible male a close kin, usually selected by the elders of the home, should act at a “caretaker,” to that widow, but not as a husband. He is allowed to extend emotional care to the widow whose property remains hers absolutely. She has no obligation to remain with him and, in the event of any child born to their intimacy, the child is named after the diseased father.
But the modern Luo has translated that noble traditional responsibility into commercial gain irresponsibility. There are two brothers: one is materially successful and is married to a beautiful wife while the other brother is reckless or lazy and unsuccessful. The distortion of the tradition pushes the failure brother to jealously wait for the successful brother’s death so that he should inherit both the widow and the property. Some of these failures have been know to find a way of getting rid of the successful brother.
This cultural distortion has created hell for the Luo woman, reducing her into sheer property. It is a situation which has launched malicious jealousy between brothers. Those who are successful live haunted by what may be manufactured by the “brother” enemy. It is an abuse and a destructive engagement, awfully inhuman to the woman. It is even a sin.
The second distortion is in the way funerals are handled these days. There is no tradition in Luo which supports the action that if I died today my property should be shared among my relatives. There may be a few rituals of sacrifice to address spirits, but those spirits want the widow and the orphans remain in a peaceful and loving position whereby they are given sympathy by the homestead. That, of course, means the economic foundation of my family should be protected to remain stable.
It is a disaster for the bereaved family. The funeral invites the greed of relatives to plunder the property of the deceased, hence driving the bereaved into deeper loss and depression. Funerals have become commercialised, a great shame to the noble African social order. Half-baked interpreters of the Luo tradition are destroying the Luo community. In fact, the government should not allow it. If the government doesn’t do something about his with soon, then it imay get out of hand and it will be condoning abuse of African tradition.
There is also a growing traditional fungus in the Luo community, which puts a claim that what anybody in the homestead has, in a way, belongs to everybody in that homestead. Another social distortion even extending to cover the neighbour; a feeling that nobody in the neighbourhood should be better than the other. That when you are wealthy, the wealth should be shared among the have-nots. Or what the rich man has is perceived as something “stolen” from the others, which should be retrieved. That view frustrates individuals from engaging in material development. It is an oppressive attitude of demanding conformity irrespective of whether or not that conformity is socially destructive. It is something that kills creativity in the “nation” and appears to say, “I am what I am because I must look like everybody.” The only thing they can’t take away from you is education, or your Ph.D perhaps, because they have no way of taking it away.
Unless Luos ask their ancestral spirits to help them adjust to modern economic demands, the Luo community is headed for the worst times tomorrow. Why? Because their memories are still lost in the Memphis jungle at a time when the modern world has become more complex, dictated to by many local and foreign forces. Even if Luos succeeded in distorting their traditional values to make it a good business to inherit the property and wives of the diseased, they must realise that they do not live alone in Kenya. They have no full control of their own resources, and their material territory being invaded by other more materially thirsty communities.
It has not been good enough for Luos to adjust to the modern economic demands. As of today, in spite of Luos’ high academic performance, there are miserably too few Luo businessmen. Kisumu town belongs to Luos by name but not by economic realities. It is an economic power base for Indian and Kikuyu businessmen. Luos are employees but hardly employers. They are systematically being wiped out of the economic world. The survivors will be the economic owners of the Luo territory because they will control everything and Luos will become the colonised and the beggars.
Their political fights and pride in their roots will have lost meaning. They will have lost the power of what they are today and what they should be tomorrow. They shall be scattered into oblivion among all the economically aggressive communities. In those days, the game of inheriting wives, plundering bereaved families and throwing stones will have become buried in the graveyard of history. Two major signs of the Luo fate heading for destruction is evidently carried by the economic status of the present development in Luoland. 43 years independent, the Luo community has nothing but miserable and pathetic economic development worth Luos’ pride. The second sign of fast growing destruction is in the Aids epidemic which has been eating the community in big chunks, taking away with it even the top brains, leaving thousands and thousands of helpless orphans with no future. If the Luo youth is threatened like that, what is the future of the community?
This fast growing devastation could be stopped before it reaches irreversible stages. The Luo intelligentsia should urgently re-examine and re-evaluate their position in the modern world and how they can adjust to it, then stop following things that are absolutely untrue to the real Luo tradition.
Whereas the second help should come from the government, I dare say the past and present regimes have been semi-illiterate in relating developments to these special problems within individual “nations.” Ironically speaking, the literate Kenyan government ignores the details of the multi-cultural differences and sees the nation more or less the way the British colonials saw their Kenyan subjects: simply as a bunch of people who only needed food, water and shelter, which could be accommodated by a blanket development.
Luo: The ‘nation’ that values power
By Mwangi Muiruri
“Luo” is the name of the mythical founder or leader of the Luo people. The “Ja Luo” community is found in both Kenya and Uganda, but the largest number is found in Kenya. Luos trace their origin from Sudan. The Luo in Kenyan and Uganda share a lot of body resemblance with the Sudanese. Their commonest feature is their coal black pigmentation added to their tallish features.
Not many people are aware that Egyptians are descendants of migrants from Sudan. History books tell us that there was a time when the ancient Nile Delta of Egypt was uninhabited because of permanent floods. Then over the millenniums and as the floods diminished, the people from the Sudan area followed the Nile with settlements towards the Delta, and finally reached the Delta. Hence, the first occupiers of Egypt did not come from Europe but from the Sudan side, which at that time was called Chem or the land of the black people who built the city of Memphis. The Memphis civilisation was at its best in 3000 BC. The name “Egypt” is derived from the Greek’s “Aigyptos” which the Greeks used as the second name for the city of Memphis.
The Upper and Lower Egypt kingdoms of Egypt comprised Sudanese kings or Pharaohs as they were called. There were stories that the most aggressive or fiercest fighters in those kingdoms came from Sudan. The ancestors from Sudan who followed the Nile towards the Delta eventually intermarried with Arabs and Southern Europeans and produced the present brown skinned generations found in Egypt. Otherwise, those who remained in Sudan and others who went up towards the origin of the Nile, hence settling in East Africa, retained their colours but they had lost their great Memphis civilisation.
One can claim that the original Luos were Memphis members. Kenyan Luos take a lot of pride in their genealogy. There are many Luo whose works have roots in Sudan. The researchers do so with great pride. Mr Paul Mboya and Tom Ojienda, both my friends, have completed an exhausting genealogy covering hundreds of years.
The Luos are proud of their culture and their roots. Most of them may not be aware of their lost great civilisation, but the aggressive genes in the Luo blood reveals the ancient Sudanese militancy. Luo people will engage you fiercely in a battle to defend their values if they think you threaten those values. Some of them are so much ingrained in their roots that they believe those roots hold all the answers to the present problems, believing that the present has little of value to offer to them.
It is unusual for anyone to meet a Luo who does not believe in spirits. Ancestral spirits form the biggest chapter of the traditional Luo religion, and spirits rule them. Those spirits tell you where and how you should be buried. They influence both the living and the dead. Not even high education standars would appear to wear down those beliefs, which you may find room even in minds of professors.
Because of the belief that a Luo is not absolutely in charge of his destiny outside the interests of his ancestral spirits, he is, in a way a prisoner to what he considers spiritual forces. He is here to serve those forces to the best of his ability. He is governed by spiritual things, but not by material things.
The tendency of being freed from material bondage puts the Luo person in a respectable position with regard to guarding the storage of human values. Someone once told me, “When a Kikuyu is in position of power he sees his position in terms of how much material things he can get from that position, a Luo sees it in terms of his own self esteem plus the respect he gets from holding the position responsibly.” There is a stereotype saying, “If you give a Luo a salary of one thousand shillings where he is called “Director” he will gladly work for that place.”
Luo people place university education at very high level. This is because education is power and he loves power. If you rise to address a Luo audience, they want to know “Who is he?” If you are Honourable Ochieng, or Minister Obok, or Dr Owuor or Professor Okwach they will give you all their attention. The less you are in the power echelon irrespective of your money, you will not impress Luo people. This may explain why the Luos lead in Kenya in producing doctorate holders, Professor So-and-So. What a Luo would do with the degree after getting it is less important than having that qualification. From this angle, the Luo community has done Kenya proud in the academic intelligentsia.
Kenyan administration would harvest plentifully if it made the best use of placing Luos in positions of authority. But if you want to frustrate Luos, try to block their way to power. It may explain the reason why, since Kenya became independent, Luos never gave Kenyatta, Moi, and finally Kibaki peace of mind.
If Luos go to compete with outsiders, many of them tend to believe it is their right to win and anyone who beats them is an enemy. This may explain why they have been called stone.throwers. Their mood to throw a stone at someone is not merely to frighten him, but to maim or kill the challenger. There are stories told that when you see a Luo going to the stadium to watch a football carrying a briefcase, that briefcase contains nothing but stones for punishing the winner if he is not a Luo.
Politically, Luo people are treated with distrust. Non Luos have expressed sentiments to the effect that if a Luo became a president he would be a dictator. A Luo leader is perceived by Luos as an ancestral spirit brought to save and lead them. He is listened to and obeyed unquestionably. What he says becomes law that should be obeyed and wherever he points as the direction to be followed, that is where they must go officiously. Any challenger to that is and should be dealt with harshly. Unfortunately this trend of following the leader blindly places the Luo “nation” in a terribly dangerous position just in case their leader lacks reason and vision.
Luos have been victims of Kenyan politics because of their aggressive and rather antagonistic way in which they demand their rights. That aggression has been repaying them with reprimands and neglect by dictatorial regimes. This is why little development has been initiated in Luoland by past regimes, hence placing Luos in a stagnant economic position while the other less aggressive communities were given a sympathetic ear in development.
But in spite of whatever good values may be hidden in Luos past and whatever message and demands their ancestral spirits are presenting in Luoland, the present Luo homestead has been hit hard by the storms of modernity. First, the fast diminishing curriculum of oral history and library is leaving big cracks in the Luo aesthetics. The old guard are disappearing with that curriculum, leaving behind halfbaked traditional knowledge, in order to survive and retain the cultural pride of the people, that half-baked knowledge is subjected to new editorial additions and subtractions. In other words, the nobility of Luo tradition is gravely beaten up.
Nothing gives a better example of that than two issues. One on the “wife-inheritance” and the second on “cost of burials.” There are Luos who claims that when your brother dies, you are bound by ancestral spirits to totally inherit that wife. In other words, you grab her and everything else she has--all become a part of your household.
In fact, this is sheer aberration or distortion of the tradition. There is no Luo tradition in support of such materialistic and commercial move. The true Luo tradition, like many traditions in Africa, does not approve of a man “owning” the widow of his brother. It only recommends that a responsible male a close kin, usually selected by the elders of the home, should act at a “caretaker,” to that widow, but not as a husband. He is allowed to extend emotional care to the widow whose property remains hers absolutely. She has no obligation to remain with him and, in the event of any child born to their intimacy, the child is named after the diseased father.
But the modern Luo has translated that noble traditional responsibility into commercial gain irresponsibility. There are two brothers: one is materially successful and is married to a beautiful wife while the other brother is reckless or lazy and unsuccessful. The distortion of the tradition pushes the failure brother to jealously wait for the successful brother’s death so that he should inherit both the widow and the property. Some of these failures have been know to find a way of getting rid of the successful brother.
This cultural distortion has created hell for the Luo woman, reducing her into sheer property. It is a situation which has launched malicious jealousy between brothers. Those who are successful live haunted by what may be manufactured by the “brother” enemy. It is an abuse and a destructive engagement, awfully inhuman to the woman. It is even a sin.
The second distortion is in the way funerals are handled these days. There is no tradition in Luo which supports the action that if I died today my property should be shared among my relatives. There may be a few rituals of sacrifice to address spirits, but those spirits want the widow and the orphans remain in a peaceful and loving position whereby they are given sympathy by the homestead. That, of course, means the economic foundation of my family should be protected to remain stable.
It is a disaster for the bereaved family. The funeral invites the greed of relatives to plunder the property of the deceased, hence driving the bereaved into deeper loss and depression. Funerals have become commercialised, a great shame to the noble African social order. Half-baked interpreters of the Luo tradition are destroying the Luo community. In fact, the government should not allow it. If the government doesn’t do something about his with soon, then it imay get out of hand and it will be condoning abuse of African tradition.
There is also a growing traditional fungus in the Luo community, which puts a claim that what anybody in the homestead has, in a way, belongs to everybody in that homestead. Another social distortion even extending to cover the neighbour; a feeling that nobody in the neighbourhood should be better than the other. That when you are wealthy, the wealth should be shared among the have-nots. Or what the rich man has is perceived as something “stolen” from the others, which should be retrieved. That view frustrates individuals from engaging in material development. It is an oppressive attitude of demanding conformity irrespective of whether or not that conformity is socially destructive. It is something that kills creativity in the “nation” and appears to say, “I am what I am because I must look like everybody.” The only thing they can’t take away from you is education, or your Ph.D perhaps, because they have no way of taking it away.
Unless Luos ask their ancestral spirits to help them adjust to modern economic demands, the Luo community is headed for the worst times tomorrow. Why? Because their memories are still lost in the Memphis jungle at a time when the modern world has become more complex, dictated to by many local and foreign forces. Even if Luos succeeded in distorting their traditional values to make it a good business to inherit the property and wives of the diseased, they must realise that they do not live alone in Kenya. They have no full control of their own resources, and their material territory being invaded by other more materially thirsty communities.
It has not been good enough for Luos to adjust to the modern economic demands. As of today, in spite of Luos’ high academic performance, there are miserably too few Luo businessmen. Kisumu town belongs to Luos by name but not by economic realities. It is an economic power base for Indian and Kikuyu businessmen. Luos are employees but hardly employers. They are systematically being wiped out of the economic world. The survivors will be the economic owners of the Luo territory because they will control everything and Luos will become the colonised and the beggars.
Their political fights and pride in their roots will have lost meaning. They will have lost the power of what they are today and what they should be tomorrow. They shall be scattered into oblivion among all the economically aggressive communities. In those days, the game of inheriting wives, plundering bereaved families and throwing stones will have become buried in the graveyard of history. Two major signs of the Luo fate heading for destruction is evidently carried by the economic status of the present development in Luoland. 43 years independent, the Luo community has nothing but miserable and pathetic economic development worth Luos’ pride. The second sign of fast growing destruction is in the Aids epidemic which has been eating the community in big chunks, taking away with it even the top brains, leaving thousands and thousands of helpless orphans with no future. If the Luo youth is threatened like that, what is the future of the community?
This fast growing devastation could be stopped before it reaches irreversible stages. The Luo intelligentsia should urgently re-examine and re-evaluate their position in the modern world and how they can adjust to it, then stop following things that are absolutely untrue to the real Luo tradition.
Whereas the second help should come from the government, I dare say the past and present regimes have been semi-illiterate in relating developments to these special problems within individual “nations.” Ironically speaking, the literate Kenyan government ignores the details of the multi-cultural differences and sees the nation more or less the way the British colonials saw their Kenyan subjects: simply as a bunch of people who only needed food, water and shelter, which could be accommodated by a blanket development.