Kenya: How to Remain a Global Sporting Nation

My attention was drawn to a piece in the August 8th online edition of the Daily Nation newspaper. It was titled "Why Kenyans are world beaters". In view of Kenya's poor performance in London2012, I thought it was an exceedingly incongruous and inappropriate line to push right now. It makes the world think that we have our heads firmly and naively buried in the sand. Perhaps there are those who will argue "Who cares what the world thinks?"  -- but that's how you get left pitifully behind.   

This is no time for chest-thumping, as Kenya is not, not by a long short, a world beater where it matters a lot (and most) -- at the (London2012) Olympics, where all participating nations are driven, after arduous preparations, to do their best in the presence of all the rest. Our poor performance so far, compounded by the apparent lack of professionally competent mentoring of our younger athletes, such as Chemos, and by the high expectations that escorted the athletes, makes Kenya arguably the unhappiest nation on earth this Olympic season. 

Shame on the policy makers. They have not invested the requisite funds and infrastructure to back-stop our talented sports men and women -- mostly young people. They are embarrassing our youth by denying them the national wherewithal to continue to shine in the world -- and to outperform. The youth are mostly left to their own devices, and to the charity of a few. The Ministry in charge of sports is asleep, deluded perhaps that 'airbagging' is enough to nourish champions. Is it a wonder that our athletes seem to really shine only when there is mouth-watering prize money to be had individually in major sporting events?

I hear Kenyans of different walks of life wonder, based on the goings on in London, why we continue to compete with the rest of the world in practically the same narrow band of track and field events as we have since 1968 or so. Let us learn from the Chinese idea (as well as the TeamGB, US, Japanese, Australian, Russia and Ukrainian models) of a truly sporting nation. Let us invent massively in our youth in all areas of sport. Let us rewrite Vision 2030 to address this great and debilitating oversight. Let us start anew with a new crop of competitively recruited national sports officials with fresh and imaginative ideas. 

Rudisha and perhaps someone else may yet re-knit our tattered reputation before London2012 is over, but it's time to wake up. Look how much weight Rudisha is carrying on his dignified shoulders!

POSTSCRIPT:

I came across the print version of Elias Makori's article on the above theme only around 2 p.m. today, several hours after posting my own piece.Then I knew there was an online version. Here it is: "NOCK officials must take the cane for the mess in London". It is much more informative than mine, and more to the point than Dr. Joshua Arimi's. Makori points out in detail what ails Kenya's athletics at the Olympics, and points to a string of solutions that must be introduced if there is to be hope for the future, and if Kenya's athletes are to become world beaters again. Let the conversation begin -- devoid of political grand-standing, but with some necessary finger-pointing.

Kenya: The Tug of Cremation and Tradition

"Dust to dust, ash to ash"!

No burial tug-of-war ever gripped the attention and imagination of both men and women in Kenya than that of S.M. Otieno -- a prominent Luo lawyer long married to Wamboi, a Kikuyu -- some twenty three years ago (in December 1986). In some ways, it in fact drew worldwide attention, particularly among feminist and gender advocacy groups.

With the recent passing of Mr. Joshua Okuthe -- a well-known sports personality in Kenya, a former national athlete and a member of the same Umira-Kager clan of Ugenya and Alego that, after a long court battle successfully fought, buried S.M. Otieno according to its wishes and against those of his wife -- the far-less emotive, intra-ethnic controversy was now not about where to bury the dead one, but whether to cremate or bury his remains.

Okuthe's first wife insisted on cremation, arguing that that was his own wish. His second wife, and his clan, sought to bury him in Muhoroni, in the lake region. The first wife pulled a fast one on the rest and had him cremated in Nairobi under the clan's very nose and before a court injunction could have effect. This left the clan with no option but to ritually bury the idea of his body in an empty coffin. It proceeded to do just that, in a low-key and partially televised ceremony at Okuthe's modern-rural home in Muhoroni.

I suspect that an appropriate portion of Yago, the funerary tree of Luo tradition, took the place of the absent, nowhere-to-be-found, body in that bewildering coffin. This is a practice which Luo mourners have typically resorted to when the body is lost and is nowhere to be found despite a decent period of search and waiting and when all sorts of other protocols have been duly observed. So there are really never empty coffins there, and no hollow burials.

Philip Ochieng, the renowned columnist, whose writing I much admire, suggests (I think he thinks that he argues rather than suggests) that cremation was very much a Luo tradition, which they lost (and have forgotten all about) when their paths and those of the Baganda -- who (and whose 'country') bear the names that they gave them, and who have kings because they gave them a kingship though they themselves had nonesuch -- crossed and for a while merged, some centuries ago. For him, the evidence of a cremating past is in the persisting and highly charged practice of "Tero Buru" (Dispatching of the Ashes), which brings to an end, several days after the actual lowering of the departed's body into a defined grave, the series of burial rituals for the community's dead prominents. To Ochieng, "Buru" refers to real (but now only imagined) ashes of the departed. You get "Buru" only whey you burn and burn to the core, and in this case when you cremate. Read more.

I think that Ochieng's conjecture stands on very thin ground, though I have never really tried to unravel the symbolism of "Tero Buru" -- or the genesis of Oburu. In fact, I have never paid it much attention, beyond its momentary theatricality -- which is perhaps monumental on occasion, and which is infrequently shown on local television.

There is just so much historical narrative and folklore -- compounded by a long-running, deeply ingrained and 'living' system of norms and values -- that leaves one with the suspicion and even conviction that the actual burial of ringre (Flesh of the Departed, who is Elsewhere) was the common mode of practice long ago in Sudan*, and long before contact with the Baganda was made -- a practice which only continued, unabated, after that greatly consequential symbiosis was overshadowed by the further, single-minded, movement into present-day Kenya. This view seems to be reinforced by, as I am able to tell, the persisting burial practices of other Luo groups -- who remained and remain in the Sudan, Ethiopia and the DRC, and who did not experience that passionate politico-cultural embrace between the Jok'Owiny and the Baganda.




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*Sudan: That land of countless pyramids, more numerous than in all of Egypt. Pyramids, which symbolize not the practice of cremation but the very idea of creation, and of the everlastingness of the body (and hence of the life hereafter).