By Stephanie Shaakaa
Africans don’t joke with burials. We may joke with education, with health, with our neighbours’ pain but burials? Never. We plan them with the precision of war generals. We save for caskets we’ll never see, build houses we’ll never live in, and design ceremonies that make weddings jealous.
It is easier to get a relative to send money for a burial than for hospital bills.
We treat death with the seriousness life never received. Someone can live in quiet suffering, unnoticed and unvisited, but once they die, the streets are blocked with canopies. The same relatives who never called show up in matching asoebi. The same people who couldn’t afford medicine contribute millions for a coffin that shines brighter than their conscience.
We build mansions for the dead and leave the living to rot in rented rooms. We borrow to bury, but not to educate. We stretch our finances for a funeral, but ignore hospital bills. Our logic is simple but tragic.The dead must be honoured even if it kills the living.
Burials have become our biggest social performance. We measure love by how loudly we wail, not how tenderly we cared. We record the event, post the videos, and count sympathy comments as though grief were a competition. But who are we really trying to convince, the dead or ourselves?
We do not simply mourn. We perform grief. We choreograph it into something communal, visible, almost ceremonial. Death gathers people like a magnet gathers metal. It pulls the far and near, the known and unknown, the estranged and intimate. Villages turn into processions. Towns turn into songs of remembrance. Homes become temporary sanctuaries of collective sorrow.
We do not rush the ceremony we stretch it. We hold on, not because we misunderstand death, but because we understand it too well. Burial is not just a rite of passage, it is the final act of love. It is the one last thing we can do for the one we loved.
We will cook, dance, cry, sing, argue, remember, and fall silent. We will build tents spilling into the streets, because grief in Africa is never private. It is communal, loud, layered with faith, tradition, and memory.
We will pay ransom for a body. We will cross borders, sell land, face danger all to bring the corpse home. Because to an African, a grave is not just soil it is a declaration of belonging. This one lived among us. This one was ours.
Even the poorest will find a way to bury beautifully. Families pool resources. Communities raise funds. Sometimes a house is built from scratch, just so the dead may rest with dignity. We Africans do not bury to forget ,we bury to remember. Graves are monuments of love, memory carved into soil and stone.
Many of us do not know how to say “I love you” while breath still remains. We postpone tenderness, assume there will be time. And then there isn’t. So when death comes, all the unsaid words rise at once. All the visits we delayed. All the apologies we rehearsed but never made. The funeral becomes heavy not just with grief, but with regret. Perhaps that is why we hold on so fiercely because as the coffin lowers, we are burying not only a body, but the conversations we will never have.
We want the body. We want to see it, touch it, wail before it. We want to confirm for ourselves that life has truly left. We do not simply mourn we inhabit grief. We want to cry, we want to feel pain and if you can’t cry loud enough we get professional criers and undertakers to make a spectacule.
Until the last handful of earth is dropped, we will hold on. We will weep, sing, pray, tell stories. To honour the dead is to affirm the living. To bury with love is to declare even in death, belonging matters.
Some may call it obsession. We call it devotion.
We do not rush our goodbyes. We do not turn grief into a footnote. We make it an event. Because love deserves nothing less.
Shaakaa can be reached through:
shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
