No cry for death

Gerhard Muller-Kosack (1999). In: Mandaras Publishing (www.gmk.clara.net), London.
First presented at: International Electronic Symposium: “AFRICA IN VIEW OF THE THIRD MILLENIUM”, Programme section: Society, democracy and religion (November, 2-8 1998)

It was after I had attended the funeral of Rufkata's sister, who had died in Dughwee, at the age of 25, just two days after the death of her new born child, that I understood the significance of handling public grief about death to be an indicator of cultural changes currently taking place. 

The Dughwee are terrace farmers on the Nigerian side of the Mandara Mountains, about 200 kilometres south of Lake Chad. I was staying there for a third time since 1995 in order to ethnographically document their current and past cultural traditions. I think it is important to study cultural change in order to understand the dynamics of peoples' lives and realise that changes in moral values are of special interest.

Being Dughwee is not the same for every person who calls himself a Dughwee. To construct something like a common Dughwee ethnicity is almost impossible and so I tend to use the ethnic name Dughwee only as a name people use to distinguish themselves from their neighbours by language and regional belonging. Although all Dughwee identify themselves with a common ancestor bearing the name Dughwee Mbra (who is believed to have come into the area many generations ago) this is a matter of a political descent. Traditional religion made good use of this ideology in order to be in charge of Dughwee land, and this now seems to be changing rather dramatically.

In Dughwee today we find three main religions. The first is the common local religion I refer to here as traditional religion, the second and the third are Islam and Christianity which I refer to as global religions. In the context of expressive public mourning about the death of a person, Islam and Christianity, as it is practised in Dughwee, share an interesting feature in their ways of dealing with grief, which is opposed to the way of the traditional Dughwee religion. Moslems and Christians do not mourn expressively in public, while followers of the old local religion do. The metaphysics of this specific alliance of the locally adopted global religions in opposition to the traditional religion throw an interesting light on moral attitudes, beliefs and differences in how the death of a person is handled as a public event in the community.

Rufkata, the sister of the young mother who died, is a Christian, as is her husband and his family. However, her sister and her brother-in-law are Moslems. Rufkata's parents, the parents of the dead young woman, are followers of the traditional religion. The day before her sister had died, misleading news had reached Rufkata from somebody who was shouting down the hill, that her sister had died. Rufkata started screaming and crying, running uphill in order to see her sister, only to discover, that her sister was still alive, but that the baby had died instead.

Rufkata was heavily criticised by her husband's family for her outburst of grief. They believed that death was nothing to cry about, but rather an event to be appreciated as something like a move of the soul to a better world than this, to a place where there was no more suffering for 
those who were believers in Jesus Christ. I found this attitude very cruel, and I was to discover, only two days later, after Rufkata's sister had really died, that the Moslems shared this same view as the Christians. 

Again, it was Rufkata who made me aware of the situation. I had walked up to express my condolences to the family of her sister's husband. We reached a silent crowd, mainly adults, sitting on the slopes surrounding a small flat valley where the grave had been dug. The actual burial was already over so we went straight to the husband's house to join a group of Moslems sitting with the grieving husband and saying prayers. When Rufkata walked by crying loudly she was again told, this time by the Moslems, to keep quiet since her cries would help no-one. She was advised to go home and do this in privacy. John, my companion, himself a Christian and a relative of Rufkata, was in agreement with this suggestion, believing that Rufkata had behaved very inappropriately in public. 

After a while we left and decided to visit the parents of the deceased, who lived nearby. On our way out we heard another woman crying loudly and I asked John whether she was also a Christian. He told me that she might even be a Moslem from the same house, who too had not understood the significance of death, being unable to control her emotions in public. When we came to the parents' house, there were only a few old men sitting together with the father outside his house. It was very quiet and I felt rather sad about the situation. Since the deceased daughter had become a Moslem, there was no drum being beaten, no funeral dance, no expressive public grief, nothing but silence. I paid my respects to the father who said that this is the course of life, and that we all would have to go the same way one day. 

We finally made our way home. As on our way to the funeral there were still people coming and going to offer condolences, among them many women of all three religions, but still nobody mourning expressively about the loss of Rufkata's sister. I found this significant and rather unusual, since I had attended funerals of followers of other local traditional religions of the region before and these had been social events of great emotional distress and grief being publicly expressed for days. I thought it was a real insight into the changes in moral values, revealing, through its public silence, a great deal about the metaphysics underlying cultural change.

The most significant feature seems to be public silence as opposed to public crying about the death of a member of the community, and the banning of any expression of emotional distress from the public sphere into the sphere of privacy. Both local Christians and Moslems, each believing they, themselves, were on the right and only path, were still, however, of the same opinion that death is nothing to complain about in public, since the soul would hopefully pass on to paradise and salvation. There is no connection between this world and a belief in the world beyond other than an adherence to moral values which would ensure eternal life in paradise as opposed to eternal suffering in hell. 

The local traditional religion, however, does not distinguish between paradise and hell. The metaphysics of the belief in a life after death is rather a mirror of this world, whereby the maintenance of communication between the living and the dead is an essential part of religious practice. For Christianity and Islam, this communication cannot take place, since this would mean that somebody would have to make sacrifices to their ancestors. For Islam and Christianity this practice has to be overcome in order to perceive this world as a test field for salvation. Therefore it seems important to remain publicly silent about hopes and fears regarding the last judgement of what can only be for God to decide. For followers of the local Dughwee religion it is God, the thief, who decides to take away the living into his realm of death and the loss of a person is understood to be rather unjust since nobody really deserves to die. 

Therefore, people feel able to cry out in pain publicly about the loss of their relatives and friends, blaming and asking God why he has taken them away. To remain silent about death would not suit the local Dughwee religion at all. Death is seen as an act of violence through higher forces and sorcery, not salvation. Therefore nobody would wish to remain publicly silent since this would suggest an acceptance of the evil of death. Death is seen as a punishment rather than a salvation and paradise was metaphysically lost right at the beginning and cannot been regained through entry into a better world beyond.

The differences in local interpretation of global and traditional religion are not only expressed in the concept of salvation versus theft as an idea of the quality of a world beyond, but it also demonstrates the idea of what this world is about and how metaphysical ideas are part of a philosophy conceptualising the moral nature of this world.

Global religions like Islam and Christianity develop, in opposition to the local religion of the Dughwee, a specific approach to change the moral idea about the purpose and nature of this world. The Dughwee approach to Christianity and Islam is very much to establish a belief in certain moral values which see this world as a test field leading to salvation after death. The traditional religion is not aiming to remain silent in the face of death or to regard it idealistically as leading to eternal salvation from suffering but rather as recognition that this suffering can continue in the world beyond as well. 

Ancestors can demand a lot from their living descendants in order to live a comfortable life in the world beyond. A dead person who has nobody to make sacrifices for him in this world is doomed to suffer. Traditional Dughwee fear that such a person is condemned to eat his own flesh. 

Somehow the belief that this world is mirrored in the world beyond appears rather realistic to me, since it moves more appropriately from that which is known towards that which is unknown. The concept of hunger is not only physical but also spiritual and the problem of hunger is not necessarily solved after death and so, suffering can continue. To consider the world beyond as a place of both pleasure and suffering and not to leave the suffering in this world sounds feasible to me. To make the pleasure a reward for decent moral conduct which leads into the world beyond, seems to diminish this world to a moral test field for hope only. 

Real fulfilment cannot be found in this world if we follow the local adaptations of Islam and Christianity, while traditional religion sees real fulfilment as being possible in this world. Therefore there is much expressive public mourning in the case of the death of a member of the community who was a follower of traditional religion, but with the death of a Christian or Moslem there is silence.