ABSTRACT
For many people, death and the dying process arouse thoughts of pain, discomfort, loss of control, separation from loved ones, and resoundingly the cessation of all form of physical experiencing. indeed the emotions associated with death make it necessary that the individual and collective units of a social group will seriously reflect on their very personhood and identity. For the Babukusu, in many ways, every death seems to shatter and rattle the core of self-belief and self-definition of both personal and collective identities. More importantly, the corporeal reality of an actual corpse is always an unsettling and disarming reminder of the sheer destructibility of the human body. Part of the reason for such morbid restlessness and trepidation associated with death emanates from the traditional and religious beliefs that lay claim to the view that a dead person turns into a spirit that roams in the ethereal presence of the society until it is properly appeased through a proper burial and performance of the necessary rituals. This view is underlined by Robert Hertz’s analysis of African thanatology in which he argues that:
[t]he corpse is feared because until its reconstruction in the life beyond is complete, part of its spiritual essence remains behind, where it menaces the living with the threat of further death. Thus the death of any person causes anxiety and fear; but this reaction varies in scale depending on the social status of the deceased (1960: 70).
