We buried a man today. An educated man, probably the most educated in this neck of the woods, and we buried him on a Sunday.
When I die I don’t want to be buried on a Sunday. Sundays are when people get to go to church in the morning, young mothers try to lull their crying babies to sleep during a sermon, fathers distribute church offering amongst the kids, and teenagers discover new things to do in lieu of going to church and me, I oversleep.
Sunday afternoons are when some people get to hang out with the TV a little bit, maybe get to see why everyone is talking about La Casa De Papel.
Others go with their families to the local ‘meating’ joint for nyamachoma.
It’s the only time you, the wife and the kids get to go a place where you can have a beer in their presence and you won’t get a menacing side eye from you-know-who.
But then a very educated man died. Educated people are buried by bishops. Local priests are sidelined when it comes to burying a man with a doctorate in some complicated course about tortoises. But bishops are busy too, so this one said the only day he’s available to bury this educated man, is Sunday.
And so instead of catching the bank heist action on La Casa De Papel as I try to act like my daughter Evelyn isn’t smearing saliva all over my nose, I am attending a funeral with my father in law.
In movies, people show up at funerals in black and stare morbidly at the coffin. They hold their hands at the front and just stare at the thing as if the dead will immediately rise if they stare hard enough for long enough.
In the part of Kenya where this educated man is from, you would be forgiven to think that nobody cares that this is a funeral.
People show up in their most colourful clothes because it’s a social event. There will be many people there and you don’t want to be caught not looking your best.
People don’t wear dark suits to this funeral because it is a funeral; they wear dark suits because all the suits in their closets are dark. They wear these very suits to weddings.
Nobody cries
People who haven’t met in decades meet and ask each other, “Eh-he. Otherwise?” They laugh hard and say, “Niambie sasa.” They tell each other’s children, “I haven’t seen you since you were small like this,” demonstrated by putting the appropriate distance between the ground and their hand.
In attendance are the educated man’s nephews, one of whom appears acquainted with the intimacy between Vladimir Putin and his gun.
“Have you ever watched Putin walk?” he asks his voice loud. “One of his hands doesn’t move. That’s his gun hand. He keeps it close to his waist, close to his gun, just in case.”
Then there is philosophical woman under the tree telling boys her sons’ ages, “Life ends. See your beloved uncle with his many degrees from universities in countries I can’t even pronounce? Now he is in the ground.
He has left all his expensive clothes behind, a big house he’ll never spend another night in, hundreds of millions in banks and invested in I-don’t-know which companies and businesses, he has gone and left it all behind.”
She goes ahead to say the thing poor people say at rich and educated people’s funerals. “He hasn’t been buried with any of it, has he? He has left it all behind.”
There are youths at this funeral who went to school, graduated top of their classes then put their degrees aside to pursue their respective passions. One old man with zero chills is saying of such one young person, “This one is a lawyer.
He looks poor now like the writer he chose to be, but he is a lawyer.”
When the educated dead man is put in the ground, the philosophical woman tells the young people his sons’ ages, “Today we laugh and talk about the dead man. We won’t talk about his degrees and his money, we won’t talk about how wayward his children have become because he was too busy chasing money and degrees where he should have been raising them instead, we talk about how he had an ear for everyone, a space on his shoulder for just one more head to lean on, today we celebrate him and tomorrow, well, tomorrow we cry.”
