Cohen, David and Atieno Odhiambo Burying SM.

The Politics of Knowledge and Sociology

of Power in Africa, Portsmouth and London, 1992.
Juan Carlos Callirgos

Burying SM is a fascinating book on the controversial case of a Kenyan lawyer, S. M.

Otieno, who died in 1986 without having legally specified where he was to be buried. His death
set off a ferocious and highly publicized legal battle between his Kikuyu wife and his Luo clan
over the site and the way of his sepulture. Why did such contest become a national obsession?
What was really at stake? The six-month struggle raised an extraordinarily broad number of
issues contested in postcolonial Kenya: the risks of intertribal marriage, the meaning of death
and the purposes of burial, the nature of the body as material property, the authority of customary
law in a national, cosmopolitan society, the social perceptions of what is tradition and
what is modern, the meanings of ethnic identity, and the production (invention?,
construction?) of history and culture. SMs case is a prism through which explore such issues.
The authors approach reflects their desire to distance themselves from any claim of
authority, hence one will not find answers.

Their intriguing account offers a chorus of

conflicting voices that actively create (not merely reflect) Luo culture as well as Kenyan
postcolonial predicaments. Cohen and Odhiambo tackle culture as a subjective
reality-in-the-making. Ethnographies are constructed in the courtroom, as questions of cultural
authenticity, exotism vis-a-vis modernity, and identity promote reduced, comprehensible,
essential (invented?, constructed?) realities. The Luo are constructed in court in order to be
discredited as senseless and primitive, but also instrumentally to claim uniqueness,
ancientness, authenticity. The authors deconstruct and display the accounts: the participants in

the trial litigants, witnesses, counsel, and jurist constructed themselves, their testimonies, and
SM, as the Kenyan public, in the process, constructed new meanings of history, ethnicity,
modernity and tradition. Are we to recognize the existence of history, and culture, or should we
believe in the existence of constructed versions of history and culture?
Each detail of SMs life is under scrutiny, its meaning magnified in contest. Labels of
identity were given to his acts: what he ate and where, what he wore, the names he had given to
his children, his gestures, religiosity, were brought to court as proof os his modernity,
Luo-ness, or cosmopolitanism. These labels and their use were also challenged and
undermined. In fact, was he a (male) Luo? Had he not become a prominent Luo by leaving
Siaya and being a successful (male) Kenyan attorney for whom Luo-nesss place was a museum?
But the struggles are also over who determines what is Luo, Kenyan, or
cosmopolitan. Who has the authority to inscribe record of the past, or the description of
culture?

Odera Oruka, whose authority comes, at least in part, from his degree obtained in

Sweden?, or Albert Ongango, whose authority comes, at least in part, from his age, his candid,
pitiful appearance on a hospitals bed, and his connections with the earth of the grave? (Does
the court not get his authority, at least in part, from its reminiscence to the colonial tribunals?)
The court recognized the Luo customary rights within the framework of the Kenyan
nation, thus giving them the prerogative to bury SM against the will of SMs wife, but what are
the limits of customary law in relation to the nation-states legal system? Do legal systems not
need to freeze ethnicity (sometimes territorially, when establishing physical limits to the
operation of different jurisdictions), or erase it (when a legal system does not recognize
differences)? In general, how do we acknowledge difference without constructing it? Without
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dissolving it under the aegis of the nation?