By Charles T.M.J. Dube

THE word Chihota has struck me with two funerals I am connected with.
First, was the passing on of my brother by another mother, Norman Chihota, whom we buried at the Glen Forest Memorail Park in Harare on Sunday, having passed on last Friday aged 70.
His family migrated to Tanganyika when he was still very young and his father had to be buried there.
He only came back with his mother and part of his siblings at Independence in 1980 and got recruited in the Ministry of Sports.
An Olympiad, he had a street named after him in Tanzania while very few people knew about him in Zimbabwe.
The Lutheran Church is very dominant in Tanzania so it was not surprising that he grew up in the Lutheran Church and got married to a Lutheran Tanzanian wife.
It was therefore no wonder that Lutherans were the majority at his send-off at Glen Forest while the sporting fraternity was conspicuous by its absence.
When the family invited me to speak as the sahwira (friend to the deceased), I protested as I felt being a Dube like him, I could only speak as a brother.
We struck a compromise, and indeed, while I eventually spoke as a sahwira, it was apparent that I was speaking as a brother born of the other mother as my speech boiled down to Bantu-relational identities and practices.
The brother-sister relational rankings remain perennial throughout generations and the word ‘cousin’ is anathema. To be understood, we have coined our own word, ‘cousin-brother’ or ‘cousin-sister’ to help the uninitiated.
It is on that account that I found myself attending another funeral of my cousin-brother’s mother-in-law, Mainah Masawi in Chihota on Tuesday.
I had gone there the previous night.
There are key stakeholders in an African funeral.
The bereaved family and their extended family remain the key players.
However, in the case of a married female, our culture places her clan as the key stakeholders in terms of the agenda of the day. They must be consulted, concur and give direction from behind the scenes all the time.
They are the ones who will mark the gravesite (kutara guva/rukaho), whereas in the case of a male’s funeral, an elder in the paternal family or somebody sharing the same totem does the marking.
These roles are strictly observed such that in the event of no elder being found among the paternal or maternal relatives, even a six-year-old would perform the function or somebody just sharing the same totem in the event of no other relative being found.
Females do not lose their identity in our culture and will always remain members of their original families unto death.
But then, the church has become a critical stakeholder in African funerals of late.
Gogo Masawi was Methodist and the vigil in Harare all the way to Chihota was painted red with Methodist women’s fellowship uniforms.
Members of other churches grace funerals with their own uniforms and apparently not to be outdone by their female counterparts, the men’s fellowships have also come up with their own uniforms which they don at funerals of other believers or major church gatherings.
Most churches now seem to have adopted a common funeral liturgy by which during funeral services speeches are made first before the final sermon and final laying to rest. The understanding is that the pastor’s sermon and burial ceremony must occupy last stage with nobody else allowed to speak save for important announcements only since during such speeches ugly and inappropriate things not consoling enough could be said.
I noticed some variants at the funeral from what I am used to and even my in-law (mukuwasha), who also happens to be Zezuru, agreed they did not run it that way at his home.
Apparently, the family of the deceased Gogo Masawi (her own family side) were given their own kitchen and cooked for themselves while those tasked with digging the grave also prepared their own meals at the grave site.
Most regions have a centralised catering service with special co-ordinators assigned to critical stakeholders.
The vakuwasha (those married into the family) are normally expected to provide the cow slaughtered at the funeral and in this instance they did not have enough time to organise themselves, they had to kill a goat as deposit to a replacement beast that would be killed at some future funeral-related occasion.
Nobody asked them to do that, but they knew they were obliged by culture, having sired children with the deceased’s daughters.
The vazukuru (nephews and nieces) can take the place of their parents, but in any event remain the central cog in the organisation of the funeral and the traditional events after.
While traditionally the deceased’s estate would be distributed at the kurova guva ceremony, usually after a year, because of the frequency of deaths since the late 1980s, most families now tend to do it just after the funeral or the morning after.
Traditionally, about 30 days after the funeral, the family is expected to brew doro remvura, a non-religious event intended to thank the community for helping in the burial of the deceased as the affected family would have been too weak in their sorrow to bury their relative on their own.
This also provided close relatives and friends who missed the funeral the opportunity to pay their condolences to the rest of the family.
Our times of joy and grief are supposed to unite us as Church and community and the African funeral generally provides this opportunity where love is allowed to prevail.
However, at times death signals the death of family harmony as family schisms erupt.
In my own family, the death of two elderly family members once split the family into two and it had to take those among us who were generally love-driven to bring it back together.