Solving funerary crisis in Covid-19 era

An employee at Viana Funeral services arranges coffins in Manaus, Brazil on April 27, 2020. Brazil, the South American country worst-hit by the coronavirus pandemic, has registered more than 5,000 deaths from Covid-19. PHOTO | MICHAEL DANTAS | AFP

What you need to know:

  • A more feasible approach is debates and action to ensure that the urban poor are intimately connected and belong to urban areas as ‘home’.
  • If more urban poor were to have land tenure and the right to housing, cities like Nairobi and Mombasa would be ‘home’.
  • Then, more of the urban poor would consider an urban burial as befitting traditional burial rites administered through social and kin networks.

As we all get used to restrictive life in the era of Covid-19, the gulf and struggles between the citizens and the national and county governments tends to expand. They are about many things, including trust deficit, how power should be used to limit rights, what constitutes rational choices and decisions, habitability of houses and inequalities.

Most of these contestations are about difference, belonging and the localised criteria (culture) that citizens desire to use in interpreting and adhering to restrictive guidance by the government and multinational governance creed from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Among the various areas of contestation is on how to handle and conduct internment for the departed. The question is not just about those who are presumed or confirmed to have succumbed to Covid- 19.

Rather, it is about the largely common quest of the deceased and the bereaved to conduct internment in compliance with appropriate and specific traditional rites witnessed by social and kin networks.

To the authorities, such quests have largely been deemed as irrational and condemned as “reckless”. But while the Kisumu County government has developed a raft of measures to ‘regulate funerals’, Siaya has threatened to stop the transportation of bodies from towns for burial there.

No doubt, Covid-19 is a transformative force that is kicking up some surprising knock-on effects. Culture, more so funerary cultural practices, are by definition about close intimacies of bodies, things and words. For that reason, world over, funerals are undergoing (and have undergone) changes. But when it comes to the distinction between ‘home’ as an ancestral place mostly in rural areas and ‘house’ as the urban residence that is perceived as transient, we need to pay attention to why many Kenyans, more so the urban poor, are reluctant to bury their kin in urban cemeteries or even through cremation as a method that is gradually gaining acceptance in our society.

To understand this, I posed the question to several leaders of funeral associations in Nairobi and Mombasa. In Mombasa, there are about 57 funeral associations while Nairobi has about 140, mostly found in the low-income areas loosely called “slum areas” but, more appropriately, are ‘people’s settlements’. Here, I refer to the associations that have some sort of permanence and structured leadership that lately tend to venture in businesses such as making coffins, managing hearses and social security savings. This is excluding the many ad hoc and kin committees that tend to emerge in the occasion one of ‘their own’ passes on.

Speaking to the leadership of these associations, one gets the sense that one of the reasons why the funerary process and internment in one’s ancestral home has become so important for the urban poor is that they have never been allowed to belong to the city. One such leader told me “…while I have been in the village committees for many years, I feel powerless and unable to decide even where the authorities should locate our ‘mulika mwizi’ (the high mast floodlights). How can I claim to belong here?”

But it is in Owino Uhuru, Mombasa, that I got a gruelling critique for posing the question. The respondent argued: “You must be joking! I have lived here for 35 years and what I have earned during that long stay are 13 eviction notices. Why should I be buried in Mombasa while I know very well they will exhume and evict my body?”

Some of the fears could be farfetched. Yet when people feel that they have no right to contribute to building their city, you cannot convince them that they belong there. What they express is some sort of existential pain that characterises their daily life.

Therein comes the role of the funeral associations that guarantee its members that, should a death happen ‘far away’ or ‘far from home’, they shall be interred in a manner consistent with desired rites. I have also noticed that in people’s settlements these associations are not mere tools that reaffirm one’s connection to a rural ‘home’ through the faithful maintenance of ‘traditional’ burial rites. Rather, they are also political societies that groom their members to be active citizens and work towards consolidating their position in the settlements.

The response in the times of Covid-19 should, therefore, move beyond fiats and restrictions. A more feasible approach is debates and action to ensure that the urban poor are intimately connected and belong to urban areas as ‘home’. If more urban poor were to have land tenure and the right to housing, cities like Nairobi and Mombasa would be ‘home’. Then, more of the urban poor would consider an urban burial as befitting traditional burial rites administered through social and kin networks.

Dr Akoth is a legal anthropologist. [email protected].