The loudspeakers crackle. Like dry bones. One, two, testing… One, two, testing… One, two. One two…
Murmurs from the crowd peter out as a male emcee’s voice comes over the speaker.
Let’s pray, the voice says.
The sound of feet shuffling. Hundreds of feet. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. Such a big crowd for the loser I was.
Lord, the MC continues, death has smiled on our community, on a man whose flesh and blood you blended; whose soul and spirit… His voice swells to a crescendo, the sound echoing inside my head. Unfamiliar words to my skepticism. He speaks of the now life, the life everlasting, and the beyond. I can almost see his veins bulging; sweat dripping down his face. After a while, his tone softens, then trails off to a dead silence that lasts for a minute.
When he speaks again, his voice is deep like that of a veteran TV evangelist. He summons the choir this time. A lead bass and a female chorus. And as unrefined as the song is, it touches the very bones that hold me together and breaks my heart into a million pieces. Tears well up in my eyes. The only other time I remember crying was the day my grandfather drowned in our pit latrine. The structure’s rotten wooden slab had caved under his weight as he squatted, sending him into the dark depths of Shitworld. He was alone when it happened (when death wants you, it cuts you from the rest of the world).
Grandpa must have choked on our collective feces because he was bloated when they managed to pull him out.
Grandpa, the only person in the world who understood why I had to be who I was. I had cried for him, and for myself, for I had loved him; our friendship stretching back to when I was just a small boy, and long before the world turned on me. I’d accompany him down to his farm to harvest honey, or to town to buy tobacco, or when he needed someone to carry his kivila-stool.
“A man should live his name,” he’d say to me. “Makau means war. So, you should always fight to keep your name.”
They held no funeral ceremony for Grandpa. He hated burials. So, they wrapped him up nicely in a blanket and threw him into a grave that my father and uncle had dug on the farm.
Now, as the choir’s song fades out and the MC picks up the microphone to call for a photo session, I wonder what Grandpa feared about a public burial: having people sing and cry for him.
One by one, they come and line up beside the coffin. I can almost smell their sweat. Almost touch them.
Parents! The MC booms. Have those cameras ready.
More shuffling of feet. A click.
Siblings! Click.
Uncles and aunties! Click.
Cousins! Click.
Friends! No friends? Haya basi.
My mother and little sister sobbed through the photo session. My two brothers, too, though I doubt the genuineness of their tears. After all, with my death—and with no family of my own to inherit me—my share of family land will be divided among them. Life is a balance sheet.
By the time the photo session concludes, the MC’s voice is as familiar to my ears as the darkness inside the coffin. His name is Kilonzo, and we grew up together. He was my classmate, too, and had our peckers clipped the same time. With all that, you’d think we were great friends, but that was not the case. I detested him (and he knew it), and in return, he avoided me. Perhaps I was jealous of the five-acre piece of land he owned, the Toyota Hilux pickup he drove, and his hundred-person church. Or perhaps I was jealous of his well-pressed suits that made girls ogle him. In contrast, the only valuable things I ever owned were the clothes on my body and my itchy fingers.
Worse still, the man I ostracized would be the voice I’d hear on my last day above ground. He probably thought he was doing a favor to an old friend…
It hits me with a sudden, chilling clarity. Why would Kilonzo, of all the people, want to MC for his enemy? Why, unless he had something to say about me? About my life? Would he really dance at my funeral?
Despite our mutual hatred, it had never crossed my mind that my former classmate would orchestrate a revenge on a dead me. Grandpa was right about burials: it was the most vulnerable event for the dead.
My uneasiness about his intentions intensifies the moment he clears his throat and starts reading my eulogy: This is the story of the deceased, Mr. Lazarus Makau Mbiti, he reads. Mr. Lazarus was born in 1984, the year of the great drought, the year of death…
That is right. I was born in 1984, the year of death. I brought illness to the country, is what Kilonzo implies. Well, I survived the fucking famine and lived to forty, unlike the Jesus he preaches in his church.
Kilonzo proceeds to say that I helped my parents on the farm, and was a darling of my grandpa. As a by the way, he adds that the reason I had to walk with a limp for the rest of my life is because a tree branch once fell on me while tending to the cows, which is untrue because I got the limp when I fell from a tree while I was hustling Grandpa’s beehive. I had lied because my father would have killed me.
And that, according to Kilonzo, was my early life. Summarized in three sentences as if I lived for an hour and grew into an adult the next. There was no mention of Grandpa’s stories by the fire, our daring swims in swollen syanda waters, the adult movies at Cha’s kiosk, or the day I hunted down a rabbit and we made a roast by the river.
He was one of the lucky students to join Alliance Boys High School, he continues, his voice rising.
Alliance High School. AHS. The best school in the country and my biggest achievement in life are mentioned in passing. Come on, man, not everyone goes to Alliance! That school is for the very best. What’s so hard about recognizing this? Yet, when Kilonzo reaches the part about my expulsion from the same school, he paints me not as a flawed boy but as a picture of a fox gulping down a harmless lamb.
After a student unrest, Mr. Lazarus was expelled after the disciplinary committee found him culpable. It was obvious that the then-young Lazarus lacked basic discipline and that his rebellious and out-of-control behaviors were unparalleled in the school’s long history. Thus, with this minor act of stupidity, the little light in Mr. Lazarus’ life was extinguished, leaving him a vagabond and a liability to his family, friends, and community.
Kilonzo, the virtuous MC, has declared war on the dead! Such a slanderous tongue needs to be chopped off. If only I could get out of this wooden box. If only I could have the power to curse. Man of God, my ass!
Get out of my funeral, all of you! I scream at the gathered mourners, but only in my head, because the mourners are already entranced by Kilonzo’s charms and wouldn’t care about my feelings even if they heard my voice, which they can’t. Their world and mine have long parted ways.
Marriage! Kilonzo announces, his voice drowning my anger.
What marriage is he talking about? I never got to marry, and had in fact no hope of ever getting a wife. Not that I had anything against women. The thing is, I never got to attract any—and for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on.
Despite the deceased having attained the age for family life, Kilonzo continues, he clung to bachelorhood for dear life. Whether he was infertile, we can only speculate. All we can do is hope our merciful God has saved a wife for him in the afterlife, albeit before He judges him, for Lazarus was not a man who walked in the light.
The bastard’s words hurt. He no longer hides his disdain for me. If only I could resurrect…
…Truth be told, he continues, his voice now a whisper. Lazarus’s very existence has done this village more harm than good, a truth his mother would agree with. All those perennial break-ins, missing chickens, the muggings; we couldn’t even send our children to the shop because he’d ambush them and steal the money. Such terrible things he did, but like all of us here, he was human, and his mistakes were human. Will God forgive him for his crimes, or will he be one of Satan’s most distinguished guests?
Kilonzo allows a moment of silence. A silence that eats every nerve in my rotting body. It’s obvious he’s no longer reading the eulogy. He has become the eulogy itself, and now speaks his unfiltered mind. What a saint!
Sickness and death! Mr. Saint jolts me from my livid thoughts.
Grandpa used to say that people die of sickness, accidents, or of old age. But my death was none of that. I was murdered, and by the people I grew up with, and lived with. Yes, it wasn’t much of a harmonious mutual co-existence, but that was no reason to touch me while I slept in my house, and in the dead of night. They had accused me of stealing their poverty, and that they’d only prosper when I was dead, as if poverty were a lonely sailor.
Yet, despite the dripping blood in their hands, the crafter of the eulogy (read Kilonzo) had decided the word ‘disease’ was a better fit. Sickness and death. Sick of a flaming fire? What an archaic brain locked in his head!
Well, I’ll not allow him to lie on my big day. If he won’t tell the truth, then I’ve got to tell my side of the story to you, my dear reader.
This is what happened: They came in the night and knocked on my door. I refused them entry. They knocked again. I told them off. This was my house, and I had the right of admission. But they wouldn’t go away. Instead, they set my house on fire. As you might as well know, a wooden house is no match for a gallon of petrol and a matchstick. When I tried to open the door to escape the blaze, the door wouldn’t open. They had barricaded it from the outside. I couldn’t get out, and they couldn’t get in, and the stalemate ended with one burned corpse and a jubilant people. And they call that disease? Sickness? That’s murder, clear as the sky in January.
Tributes!
I don’t even get to name the perpetrators of my death before Kilonzo calls for tributes. Still, hearing a different voice from his can only bring relief to my soul.
Chief Mutongoi is the first to take up the mic. I can tell he’s clad in his government-issued coat because I have never seen him otherwise. I wouldn’t even picture him any other way.
I knew this boy from when he was a tiny thing, the chief says. Harmless until he wasn’t. In my line of work, and in his line of work, we’ve had a few meets, but what is a man if he can’t outrun himself? Isn’t having a thief better than a fool?
The Chief speaks in rhetoric. So much so, I doubt if the mourners grasp what he’s saying. When he mentions a man outrunning himself, I feel a sense of vindication. “Makau means a warrior,” is what Grandpa had told me. That I was born a fighter. But to fight what? Poverty? For a place in the community? If I were a fighter, why had it led me to ashes? What then had the Chief implied? That we all eventually die despite whatever path we take?
My mind is still jumbled long after the Chief leaves and Uncle Munyao comes to the stage. With my uncle, hell breaks loose. Not that I expected any praise from him, but for him to stand before all those people and talk that way…
I told him weed was immoral… I told him to keep off bad company… I told him to work for his daily bread… I told him, but he didn’t listen. Now see what has happened. We even had to smear his backside with ash because no woman would want him!
A muffled roar ensues from the gathered crowd, then it breaks out into loud, prolonged laughter.
Did they really do that to me? I always thought the tradition of smearing an unmarried man’s bum with ash was a hoax; a way to scare young men into marrying. Of all the things that have been said of me today, that is the most demeaning. I’m seething. No, I’m burning with fury. If I ever ghost back from death, I’ll ensure Uncle Munyao gets a mega-smearing deep into his asshole. Please just bury me already!
But they are not done with me. Every speaker seems to have something wicked to say about me, and if they don’t, they conjure something up. So much condemnation for someone who can’t raise an eyebrow. Bile disguised as praise for the ‘departed’. They remember a chicken stolen, a house broken into, a farm harvested in the night. With every word uttered, I die all over again. So, when they finally carry me the short distance to the grave, I thank the gods of patience, for any minute longer and I would have broken out of the coffin and made them shit air.
Now the coffin swings forward and comes to a rest on the ground. The mourners are eerily silent, and in the silence, one of the pallbearers whispers, “He smells bad.”
Of course I smell bad. They don’t have to say it out loud. Better if they were done with this charade so that I can rest. Still, I like their gentleness with the coffin; otherwise, the cheap thing could give way under my weight, and then everyone would see my naked body with ash gleaming in my butt crack. Naked because one of the men who sprinkled ash on my buttocks took away my clothes.
They take their time with unnecessary rituals by the grave. Stupid prayers for a certified sinner headed for eternal fire. Why do they have to beg God to receive me when God Himself had not requested for me? Were they not the ones who forced me into His arms?
And then the graveside gibberish is over, and I find myself descending. Slowly, as if it would hurt my back if they let the coffin fall. So slow I can smell the fresh soil: nostalgic and scary at the same time. I reach out to touch its dampness and the worms that live in it, but my hand remains by my side. That too is scary. In the background, the drums come alive: the music of the dead.
When I die, I die angry
When I die, I die tearless and frozen
When I die, I wear a warm suit; and then they’ll live in my house
And eat my food
When I die, I’ll fly like a ram.
The lyrics make little sense, just like death. Could be I’m too scared. Could be the dead don’t hear well. Could be I’m really dead.
The song is now coming from a faraway place. Another world.
Final of the final song.
Down and down I go, the scent of soil overpowering in a good way. When the coffin comes to a rest, the music fades out and a momentary silence follows. Am I okay here, dear reader, with this thing called death? This thing that awaits you?
From down here, Kilonzo’s voice sounds like metal in my ears. He talks of repentance and the afterlife and the endless fire. He is the Earth god.
A momentary pause. A heavy thud on the coffin. Soil.
Its force brings me to the present and forces me to release a fart I have been holding, and there goes the last piece of my dignity.
Another thud, this time louder. Somehow, my memories become now: to the sun rising above the Yatta, below which clouds float like discarded hair. The blackjack behind Grandpa’s house. Puddles of rainwater on a road. A child’s cry. Mutua’s blue Peugeot. The malodorous odor of Wambua’s latrine. Syombua making yeast dough at her back shop…
More memories. This time, other people’s memories. Chief Mutongoi’s patch of bhang behind his house; my uncle’s wife directing a charged mob to my house; MC Kilonzo fondling a Sunday school girl’s breast; the decomposing body inside Nguni Dispensary’s nurse’s house; my older brother plotting to disinherit my younger brother from his share of the family land. Everybody surviving the best way they can (just like me) in a world where right and wrong could easily be interchanged, and it would feel all right.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Memories flee. The roof of the coffin sags. Soon it’ll collapse on me.
The heat is unbearable. Like hell…
Chief Mutongoi will get away with the patch of bhang when the authorities discover it. Connections. My uncle’s wife will give birth to a baby boy and name him Lazarus. Guilt. Kilonzo will die old and wealthy. Life. Once she comes to her senses, the nurse will dismember the body of her lover and dispose of it by the river. Cycle of life.
My elder brother will die a month from now before he can orchestrate his evil plan. Fate.
Crack!
The coffin is struggling to hold the weight of the soil.
Craaaack!
Now or never. Another fart blows through my asshole, leaving me all alone.
Memories dissipate, and an emptiness befalls me. An emptiness devoid of time. And dark silence. How long to the afterlife?
Silence.
What’s the afterlife?
Silence.
Is this darkness the end, or will the sun shine again on my back?
Silence.
What of the people up there—will they remember me in their dreams?
Silence.
Will the grass I trudged on keep my footprints?
Silence. Silence. Silence.
Too much silence here.
Who’ll breathe, speak, and sleep for me up there? Is darkness to be my only companion, loneliness my acquaintance? Is the sound of my rotting bones my only comfort?
Will thunder remain a faraway dream?
Is this, then, the end?
The coffin breaks.
Is the end, then, such an anticlimax?
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Image: ChatGPT remixed