Tag Archives: Dar es Salaam

The Funeral Next Door

You would be right in thinking that this is a photo of a party. In the U.S. however, we usually do not throw parties for this reason. Taking a closer look at this image, you might notice the particular blessings imprinted on the women’s kangas, or their colorful printed pieces of cotton fabric that communicate different Kiswahili messages. At this type of gatherings kangas say things like, kuishi kwingi ni kuona mengi (to live long is to see much), or penye wengi pana Mungu (where there are many people, there is God).

As I sat in my host family’s apartment in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania with its permanently wide-open windows, which welcomed many birds, it took me a while to realize that this was not your typical party. This was not the sort of party for celebrating the coming of a new year, a holiday, or a birthday. This was a party for celebrating life, or rather, to honor the leaving of one. This was a funeral. The man who died had been a doctor at the university hospital and had the right side of his face paralyzed, and he would clearly be missed. From all the singing and guitar-playing below, it later sounded like a big celebration of this man’s life. I could hear every word of the funeral going on four stories below. Funerals are clearly important social occasions here. It had all of the elements of a huge block party: people who knew the doctor or his family just stopped by and pulled up a chair or took a seat in the lawn for however long they wanted to. Here your neighbors are your family. Emmanuel, my host brother, told me that this funeral had been going on for one week—so far.

I do not mean to imply that mourning was not taking place alongside the merriment. The night before, when the body arrived from Ghana, we heard loud cries coming from the apartment across the lawn. Dozens of people were gathered in the parking garage below their apartment, and we heard wailing for hours. In the morning we awoke to about a hundred lawn chairs spread out in the lawn around the garage. There were cars parked up and down the street and hundreds of people surrounding a big stage that was also set up in the garage where there were speeches being delivered.

A distinct feature of Tanzanian funerals that sets them apart from any funeral that I had ever attended is that the focus seemed to be on everyone coming together to celebrate the goodness of having a life more than the sorrow of losing one. My dad led a study abroad trip to Ghana when I was younger, and I remember him saying that funerals there consisted of giant parades of people singing and dancing down the street, coffin in tow overhead. I wonder what it is about American culture that leads us to have a more solemn and depressing approach to recognizing the end of one’s life. Whenever I get the opportunity to visit different countries, I generally try to resist the temptation of feeling inferior and valuing others’ cultural practices over my own. I have to say though, this one seems pretty logical and meaningful and desirable to me. This block party is exactly how I would want my funeral to be.

 

Photo © Katie Paulson-Smith. All rights reserved.

Laura Itzkowitz headshot 2 by Melissa Itzkowitz

As a Global STRIDE (Student Research in Departments) Scholar, Katie Paulson-Smith studied Kiswahili in Tanzania after her first year.  She next studied French and went to Geneva during her junior year, and has since been working in the Lewis Global Studies Center and helping to launch Global Impressions. Katie is eager to apply these international experiences and her African Studies background to fieldwork in East Africa next year.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmailby feather