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Sekai Nzenza on Wednesday
“NEXT time, when there is funeral, I want to mourn, sing, dance and laugh the way we used to do. No church will stop me,” my cousin Piri declared.
It was Sunday afternoon and we were watching the rains coming over the mountains.
My brother Sidney was there too.I had just been telling Piri about the funeral of my sister-in-law’s mother, our Mukurungai, where the burial ceremony was done by the Jehovah’s Witness church.

It was a calm and peaceful funeral with no loud wailing the way our people normally do because Mukurungai had converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses when she was quite unwell.
In times of vulnerability and pain, we become more spiritual and look for what can heal us.

“I have been to one of those Machitawa funerals and nobody mourned, danced or played the drum,” Piri said. “Mourning and expressing grief should not be like that.”
“It’s not Machitawa, Piri. It’s Watchtower or Jehovah’s Witnesses.”

Piri did not care to correct herself on the pronunciation of Watchtower. It was Machitawa for her. She said at one such funeral the pastor had told people not to cry or show any emotion.

Close relatives did not gather around the coffin because the deceased man had told everyone that Machitawa will bury him.
“These days, Sis, once a new convert says the church is his family, and then the real family has little say. Not only that, the families have no room to display open grief the way we still do here,” Piri said. Sidney shook his head and said he has remained a Catholic ever since he went to Kutama College.

He will die a Catholic.
He said the new wave of conversions is bringing alienation to the children, close relatives and friends of the deceased. Decisions on burials are made by church people. Suddenly, that deceased tete or sekuru of yours belongs to strangers from the church — people you have never seen before. All those people who normally play a significant role at funerals like muzukuru, the nephew, muroora, the daughter-in-law or tete, the aunt, can sit back and pray with everyone else. A pastor you have never met before tells you to leave while the company of strangers follows the biblical burial rituals the same way they do it in the deserts of Arizona or Texas. The church becomes one family and there is no room for another identity. Age old cultural practices that define you as a person disappear. There is no one to tell your story. The memory of ancestors and the ties that bind you to your blood relatives is also gone. An old lady is called by her first name because in heaven, we are no longer mothers, aunts, or grandmothers.

The room for traditional mourning and wailing is replaced by song, prayer and more songs from little hymn books with pictures of Europeans on the front and back cover.
“There is confusion in heaven because there are some people up there saying, ‘I was not buried properly. I want a ceremony to bring my spirits to the world of ancestors’,” said Piri laughing. “When you die Sis, I shall throw myself on the ground, threaten to kill myself, get drunk, dance and sing until I lose my voice.”

“But, what if I want the church to bury me? Before I die I could say to all of you, ‘No alcohol at my funeral, no uncivilised behaviour like killing a beast, do not share my clothes among yourselves.

Do not say good bye at the grave site and no funny skits from varoora either!’”
“Forget that. We will do just what we want with you when you die,” Piri said.

“How can you feel that you have said goodbye to the dead when you show no emotion? Aiwa, that is not the way to mourn. Let people cry and show their grief. Why suppress the wailing with quiet prayers?”

They still express big unsuppressed natural emotions here. Few months ago there was a funeral in the village. The silence of dawn was broken by one wailing voice. A piercing cry appealing to the dead person to arise. That was about a month ago, when Rowesai died. Rowesai’s village is way down the valley past the kopje and the granite rocks.
Voices travel fast before sunrise.

We could hear the wailing from our village compound.
Rowesai’s mother walked around her hut at dawn calling Rowesai: “Chimuka Rowesai. Kunze kwayedza. Maiwe kani vangu vapera! It’s daylight, rise Rowesai. Oh my mother! My children are dying,” she cried. Grief was eating her heart. This was her third adult child to die in less than five years.

Everyone in all the villages in Simukai and across the river heard that voice. We felt the pain when Rowesai’s mother mourned her daughter that day at dawn.
They let her cry. Tears eased the anguish of sorrow.

“Vakambobva kupiko?” Piri asked, meaning, where did the new churches come from. I told her that some came from America, like many other churches around us. The Pentecostal ones and prosperity gospel preachers also come from there. These days you also get churches led by our African brothers like Christ Embassy, Family of God International, African Apostolic Mission and many others associated with the new prophets and their prophetess wives. We have become a praying nation.

Some of us who used to be strong believers in our younger days struggle to balance traditional beliefs with the new wave of Christianity that does not recognise the rituals linked to our identity. Looking back, we recall a time when we imitated Europeans in dressing, eating, drinking, loving, making love, dancing and in everything. Everything European or Western was good and everything African was bad. Then there was an awakening in some of us when we moved to the Diaspora. We blamed the missionaries for taking away our culture and replacing it with a certain kind of civilisation or Englishness. We discovered that Christianity was not the only religion. God was the same God among many other nations around the globe. We just worship or honour the spiritual world in different ways. We celebrate the differences in how we see God and the after world. But we cannot blame the missionaries any more for our way of worship.

There was a time when funerals were rare. Old people died of age and sometimes babies died at birth. When an elder died, all the rituals were managed by close relatives from her maternal home because when you die, your body and your spirits return to your people. A year or more later, in the dry season, we helped the elders to prepare mamera, the red millet to use in our week long beer preparation. Then we did the countdown to the night of kurova guva, bringing the spirit of the dead ancestor home. A beast was killed and there was an all night beer drinking and dancing ceremony. I recall the sound of mbira, the drum and solo pitched voices followed by the many others, each one singing their own way. There was no practice and no song book. And yet we knew the songs passed on from generation to generation.

And in those days, back in the village, most people did not go to church. We went to church only on a Sunday because the church was connected to the school. Others, like my grandmother Mbuya VaMandirowesa, avoided the church like the plague. She said it killed our culture. She celebrated the ancestors and participated in ceremonies. Our ancestral spirits lived with us. Late at night, during bira ceremonies, spirit mediums or masvikiro got possessed and gave us messages from the ancestral spirits. That way, we were given counsel on how to live and behave according to the ancient customs of our people. If there was shame or guilt for an evil done, that was shared by the extended family.

The individual concerned was forced to correct his or her behaviour.
Looking back, I can see that Mbuya VaMandirowesa, my mother and many others in the village, mourned but they celebrated death and the passage of time with dignity and hope.
Varoora, the women who married my mother’s nephews, used to come and play the clowns at funerals in our village.

They did many skits to imitate the deceased, making everyone laugh even if they were in mourning. Years later, because some of them belong to various churches where they are not allowed to show too much emotion or dance, they come and sit there, leading in prayer and slow repetitive songs. No more jokes. We feel the seriousness of their polite decorum, their long prayers and soft sadness. But we cannot tell them what to do. Different types of Christianity give people certain individual freedoms that separate them from blood relatives and friends.

No doubt, the church has a role to play in weddings, funerals and other ceremonies. But the church must acknowledge the hierarchy of our old traditions, pahukama, and respect the family ties that bind us to one another in this life and the one after.

Surely suppressing natural emotions, praying so hard daily and more so at funerals cannot be that healthy. In our quest for God, we are becoming more restrained, more formal, subdued and generally unhappy. After the prayers and the preaching, a loud drum with hosho at a funeral will bring back the laughter and the rhythms that have always accompanied our people to the ancestral world.

Dr Sekai Nzenza is an independent writer and cultural critic.