Malawian Funerals

With a hollow sounding thud, the wooden box hit the earth at the bottom of the hole. With it came a collective groan across the crowd, followed by mournful wails.  The weary-eyed crowd watched in silence as the family placed wreaths on the box, and then walked past in procession. All the gatherers sat shoulder to shoulder in the dust, bearing witness to the grief.  Family members mumbled and groaned and wailed as they walked, supported by others’ arms and hands. Some were wet-faced, some were yelling prayers and last good-byes. All were greeted with a solemn crowd.  A whole village was gathered, a people not immune to suffering and loss. Wearing matching clothes and matching grim faces, people came to simply be present to the certainty of death.

Another funeral in Malawi.  Another monumental loss. Another gathering of souls around shared pots of nsima and meat.  Another singing choir, another witnessing pastor, another group of cloth-clad mothers with babies on their backs.  

I think what struck me most about the funeral I attended was how it displays the collective reality of life in Malawi.   This is a place where every other man in the village is your ‘uncle’ and where everyone puts in money towards the cost of the funeral by way of baskets passed around, despite each family’s inability to pay for basic school fees.  This is a place where the oneness is felt in the matching chitenji fabrics, in the shared songs that start and stop like waves of wind in elephant grasses, and where babies are passed around like the bowls of shared food. Men gather to dig graves, women gather to help wash dishes and bow low to wash each others’ hands.  Life together. Moyo pa modzi.

I suppose it’s not so different, the things we share together in Canada,  Yet, somehow it speaks louder here, this collective responsibility – the shared gains and losses, and communal joy and sorrow.  It’s beautiful and hard at the same time. Where one succeeds, all are expected to benefit. Where one loses, all share in that too.  Expectation gives way to cooperation which gives way to unification. Life together, death together, one and the same.

Together through it all

And I think it gives me a clearer picture of kingdom living.  It is not easy, nor is it always convenient. Jobs and tasks and errands give way to funerals which you cannot pass by.  Your life pauses for another’s’ needs as seamlessly as one house and yard and family ebbs and flows into another. Life on life.  So much to learn from such a people, though it might just cost my individual success and gains. There’s a sadness in that too, in the losing of self to the collective.  I wonder where my own cultural norms will give way to new ones, and where old ones will remain. Only time will tell. For now, I will just marvel at the differences.

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