Belonging and Identity

The futility of denying the reality of tribal existence is rarely so graphically and emotionally exposed as in the Otieno Affair in Kenya ¹ – a 6-month legal struggle to determine the place of burial of Silvanus Otieno, waged between the members of his immediate family (his wife and children) and his tribal relatives (mainly a brother). The affair riveted the attention of the people of Kenya as argument and counter-argument, facts and opinions and their countervailing facts and opinions, were placed before the judges in a number of courts. The local media ² extended full coverage to a story pregnant with social meaning and perhaps even personal relevance to many and fraught with emotional human tension, as days, then weeks and months, passed, while the deceased's nuclear family struggled against his extended tribal family, for the legal right to determine where he would find his eternal rest – in a cemetery near where he had lived and worked, had married and raised his children, or in the ancestral tribal lands, in the area where he had been born and bred. Otieno, a successful Nairobi lawyer, a member of the Luo Tribe, had married a wife from another tribe, and their children had been brought up in an urban environment (including some schooling in England), with only minimum ties to either of the tribes of their parents.