The Spirit of their Son

Friday night, 2015-02-20, I heard something I hadn’t heard in a long time. I was halfway asleep and at first it occurred to me like a dream. In the dream, I heard a group of Acoli tribesmen; our neighbours from the west side of the village singing and dancing to the tune of a calabash whose edge were being rhythmically rubbed against a dry and smooth wooden post. They sang in bass, the required songs, except for one woman whose voice was very unique to me. Her sharp voice went above the men’s.

When I fully woke up, it was true. I was not just dreaming. Our neighbours from the north side were running a traditional spiritual ceremony. The first time I witnessed such a ceremony was from a group of neighbours from the west side of our traditional clan in Padibe.

I was still a kid and was sitting outside with my grandmother at the fireplace that night. I asked her what the party was all about and she said I would understand it after growing up into a man one day. When I told her the music being generated by the calabash was scaring me, she said that it was not good to be a coward.

You see the one that built the home to the north of the property we live in was from a clan in West Acoli. One has to cross a river called Acwa to get there. He was a teacher. He was such a great man. He taught very many people. And when he passed on two years ago, his funeral ceremony attracted an impressive numbers of human beings.

Traditionally, he was supposed to be buried in their ancestral home, but due to some delays; he had to be buried in the home he built here.

At 5 00am Friday morning, five members (one of them a woman) of the deceased’s clan arrived in our neighbourhood. They were sent by the high command of their clan to take back home with them the spirit of their son, and leave only his dust in a foreign land.

They carried with them a goat, some booze, a medium-sized calabash covered with rough pimples, and apparently other detailed small items that I don’t know. They slaughtered the goat when the sun rose and good signs were seen, say the goat defecating well where it was fastened.

Those who attended the ceremony feasted on it. I suppose some of the soup was also poured on the grave like the locally brewed liquors that was poured three times there to appease their son's spirit. If it was a woman, they would have poured it four times.

The remaining booze in that bottle was placed on the grave, but later on taken in the night by his clan members as they partied while stamping their feet—by the fireplace, to the tune of the calabash. The lady they came with was the one who played the calabash; one of the men had a traditional horn; he kept on blowing it, and sometimes chanting the slogan of their clan in between.

They left during the early hours of Saturday morning. They took back with them the deceased wife (she’ll come back at the end of the ceremony of the main clan), the tools that were used for digging their son’s grave, a piece of wood from the fireplace (they put off fire from it), and other items that I may not know. May be their son’s clothes too, because they’ll have to be given to his uncles (in this context uncles mean the brothers of the deceased's mother).

I was told the piece of the firewood was going to be placed to rot in the deceased’s ancestral home’s graveyard. I don’t know what will become of the tools used for digging his grave. Perhaps they’ll also be placed there. As for the deceased wife, she could choose a clan member whom she likes to be her new husband. Even so, this is a practice that is dying off for obvious reasons.

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Ojara