The tribe that has sex before everything

A Luo farmer in a sorghum field in Kenya. An attempt to introduce a hybrid so variety once fell flat because it did not fit the local culture

The donors were horrified. The story was that the Luos of Kenya allowed sex with corpses. Really? Necrophilia? That would have to go. It was a Harmful Traditional Practice.

There was a list of HTPs, including Female Circumcision and Female Genital Mutilation. In one tribe, ritual rape was said to be allowed on certain nights, though the rapist was obliged to later marry the woman he had raped. Another HTP. That had to go too.

I was to design the communication strategy to get Luos to give up their nasty sexual habits but my research had drifted off track and I found myself intrigued by an odd story from the Kenyan island of Rusinga.

Hardly anything grew on Rusinga other than sorghum, and poverty and HIV were rampant. This made the island a Mecca for missionaries, international donors, and philanthropists. Rusinga was the most funded part of Kenya, a Charing Cross station of NGOs and donors.

I came upon an article describing a donor's attempts to introduce a hybrid sorghum into Rusinga. Proven marketing wisdom said younger farmers were more likely to bite and should be wooed first.

Accordingly, young farmers and their wives were invited to a Sunday prayer with a beer and grilled meat lunch. "It will grow twice as fast in half the time," the donor promised them, raising a toast to prosperity. Later, free seeds were handed out.

A year later, the donors invited the same farmers back for BBQ lunch, this one just after the harvest. There was joy in the air. "That seed you gave us, bwana, it was truly from Jesus!" one farmer swore. "It grew twice as high in half the time, just like you said."

When the donors moved in for the kill and asked how many seeds they'd like for the next planting season, this time on cash payment, there was unhappy murmuring. No one wanted any more of those amazing seeds that grew so well and so fast. No reasons were given for declining.

One of the older Luos present said, with some hesitation, "You see, bwana, that seed of yours - it does not fit our culture well."

That was the sentence that got me curious. What was it in Luo culture that found a fast-growing high-yielding culturally unacceptable?

The next month, digging really deep, I found a thesis written by a Chinese American from Yale University. His work said that sex was intricately interwoven into nearly everything the Luos did. In their culture, sex went well beyond a mere passionate coupling of lusty bodies. It was thought to be benediction, protection, sanctification. A Luo will have sex before nearly every significant event - selling a house, going on a long journey, taking a child for her first vaccine shot, buying a new car.

And yes, sex was mandatory before planting or harvesting a new crop. The practice was called golokodhi.

There were rules. In a large Luo family, the patriarch and his wife normally occupy the main hut in the circle. The male children's huts would be arranged around it, in order of seniority. Each son would have his own plot of land but could neither plant there nor harvest until his elder brothers had had ritual sex with their wives and were sighted on the fields. The younger waited for the older.

The fast-growing sorghum seed presented a bit of a problem since it was ready for harvest well before the others were. However, golokodhi did not allow the young, enterprising farmer to have a quickie with his wife and head out to reap his harvest - because his elder brothers and his father were still waiting for their slow-growing sorghum to mature. Nothing could be done until they had had blessed sex and were sighted heading for their happy harvest.

The wretched farmer had no choice but to wait for his elders to do it before he could - and meanwhile watch his bountiful sorghum harvest die before his eyes.

Necrophilia? The Luo believe that when two people have sex, their spirits cross over, the woman's to the man and vice versa. Once this axiom is accepted, everything else is logical.

When a woman is widowed, her husband's brother must marry her, but can't, since his brother's spirit still inhabits her body and must be evicted. An odd fellow called the "cleanser" is paid to terrorise the spirit out of the widow's body. He does this by having sex with her.

The cleanser is an odd bod, drunk blind and stoned most of the time, utterly exhausted from his day job.

What if the widow should pass away from, say, AIDS, before she can be cleansed? She couldn't possibly be buried along with her husband's spirit. Wouldn't be fair to the husband, would it?

The cleanser just drinks a little more hooch, says a Hail Mary, and has sex with the corpse.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.