African Cultural Burial Rituals and Complicated Grief among Orphans: A case of the Luo Ethnic Group in Siaya County, Kenya.

Maureen O. Ngesa, Ph.D. Candidate in Clinical Psychology; Sylvia Tuikong, Ph.D; & Kennedy Ongaro, Ph.D., Daystar University.

Abstract

From an African cultural perspective, death is a transition from physical existence to a spiritual existence. Among the Luo ethnic group in Kenya, a structured mourning process and burial rituals are believed to aid the transition of the deceased into the spiritual form. The aim of this study was to establish if exposure to the intense Luo cultural burial practices could predispose a bereaved child to develop complicated grief. This study was conducted in Siaya County, Kenya, an area predominantly occupied by the Luo ethnic community. Multistage sampling consisting of cluster sampling, purposive, and simple random sampling techniques were used. The 241 participants used in this study were orphans enrolled in 12 public primary schools in Siaya County. Data was collected using the Brief Grief Questionnaire to screen for high grief scores. Participants who scored 50% on BGQ responded to the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) and a socio-demographic questionnaire capturing common burial practices among the Luo ethnic group. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics to check frequencies at which the participants indicated whether the individual factors bothered them; ANOVA test of variance was done to assess mean differences between those who said they were bothered by these cultural practices compared to those who indicated that the rituals did not bother them. Finally, a bivariate correlation was conducted between the cultural factors index and the complicated grief scores at baseline to test for linear relationships between the cultural practices and mean grief scores. The results showed that there was no significant difference observed in means of complicated grief (CG) against the individual cultural factors (p values>0.05). Similarly, there was no statistical significance in the correlation between cultural factors even when the factors were combined as a composite index (r=0.011, p =0.867). These results confirmed that even when participants were subjected to the majority of the cultural practices, no risk of developing CG was established. Based on the above results, it was concluded that the Luo burial rites did not predispose the bereaved children to maladaptive grief, but instead, the participants had psychologically adapted to these practices and therefore were not bothered or traumatized by the practices. With this knowledge, grief therapists need to have a culturally sensitive and adaptive approach to grief counseling with the cultural practices of the bereaved put into context.

Keywords: complicated grief, Luo cultural practices, mourning and bereavement, and Africa burial rites.