Funerals and other things

Yesterday, May 23, I was stopping to visit the house next to ZOVFA in the morning when i heard these booming sounds from a distance, like explosions. I was curious as to what they were because the normal morning sounds were roosters, goats, sometimes a donkey and people (children laughing, yelling, crying) radios blaring and so on. I asked Alhassan - (a teacher working in Walewale who is on leave for 10 days to attend the funeral tomorrow of his brother (i think) who died in the South - What these sounds were. He said that the night before yesterday an old man had died in Poyamire, one of the communities I've visited. Traditionally in the morning when the burial is ready the tradition is to put gun powder into a pipe and then pack it down with sand. You then put the pipe in the ground and light it making the boom, explosive sound. It is a signal that someone has passed on and that anyone who has family members living in that direction should come and pay their respects but if you are not family then you are not invited, although the definition of family is so inclusive here that i'm not sure anyone would be turned away. They sound the pipes before they are going to bury someone and then afterwards to tell people that the burial is finished. People are normally buried around the house although many communities have started cemetaries when the houses are too close together. Normally they are seperated by farm land so it is very difficult to tell where one community begins and one ends. If the man or woman was a very great person, such as a chief, they are buried in a room in the house which is then reserved for them. If the person who died is very old, above 45, then the funeral is a huge celebration that they have lived a good long life. If the person is young the funeral is more serious as people mourn an "unnatural death". The funeral tomorrow in the house next door will be the latter because the person was only 37 years old and left behind a young daughter. Now people light gun powder during funerals as a display of wealth and sometimes there can be up to 100 blasts. The number of successive blasts also tells whether the person was a man or woman (3 for men and 4 for women). Numbering here seems very important such that odd numbers are associated with masculinity and even numbers are associated with feminity. For example, a man should marry 2 wives or 4 wives but not 3 although more than one wife is becoming less common and is associated with the traditional religion or Islam. The ratio in this area I would estimate to be 15% traditional, 35% Islam, 40% Christian and 10% agnostic. But this is very much intermingled with the culture that is predominant. I say that I am both which gets a few quizzical looks.

There is an excellent description of village life in the May 2006 New Internationalist magazine that is worth the read as it gives a perfect description of the area. Although the village community is in Burkina Faso it could easily be access from here because I am in the North East and the BF community is in the SE. It is probably a 30min - 1hr drive away.