After a long absence, the first ritual of returning home, even before embracing eager relatives or sitting down to lunch, is to ask: ‘Where are their graves?’ It’s a tradition to stand by the graves of those whose funerals you couldn’t attend, to finally pay your last respects. These aren’t just simple courtesies; they are drawn from a deep-seated impulse, a core part of one’s being.

My older brother is a devoted martial artist and a huge Bruce Lee fan. When he got a chance to visit in the US, he made the trip to Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, and took  a picture by the graveside of his icon. I know a friend, a Rumba enthusiast, who treasures a picture taken, in the Nsele Necropolis cemetery in Kinshasa where the Congolese Rumba greats lie, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Papa Wemba, Tshala Muana, Lutumba Simaro and General Defao.

In 1990, Nelson Mandela on just his 5th month of freedom after a 27 years imprisonment spell landed on Kenyan soil, and his first, unyielding demand wasn’t for a state banquet, but for something infinitely more elusive: the grave of his icon, Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. At the time, still in high school, I saw only the irony of a prominent street and a later statue in Nairobi but I couldn’t grasp the profound shame it cast upon a nation that celebrated its hero in stone, but hid his resting place like a dirty secret. Kimathi’s remains were believed to be somewhere on the grounds of Kamiti maximum prison, the exact location a mystery to this date. How many revolutionaries would have followed Mandela’s example, traveling from across the world to stand by that grave?

My inherent reverence for the dead traveled with me to the Netherlands, and there, I instinctively extended that solemn respect to its cemeteries. My preconceived notions of European burial grounds, fed by gothic tales of eerie moonlight and crumbling stone, were shattered when I discovered serene green oases integrated into the city’s landscape. This realisation happened quite by accident. 

I had made a few visits to the African-dominated English service church in Amsterdam, nestled next to a quaint park, before I realised it was adjacent to a cemetery hiding in plain sight. One Sunday, needing space for my fussy daughter to roam, I stepped out, and there they were – rows of well-maintained grave sites, openly accessible. I was struck by how one could just walk through uninterrupted, almost like browsing a mall, gazing at the ‘displays’ of lives lived. My curiosity eventually led me to wander these grounds like a tourist, not merely observing, but mesmerised by their orderly arrangement and the profound dedication to preservation. It was an orderliness that whispered of generations, a silent agreement to remember.

I have since walked through many cemeteries, gazing at the tombstones, trying to make out their stories from the epitaphs. The manicured lawns, the uniform headstones, the aged dates. I have walked on gravel paths, delicately, as though I do not want to disturb the dead. Passing by  rows of granite lined up like soldiers awaiting inspection in a parade, each one with just a few lines to tell a silent story. 

They carried no discernible scent, no must of age or earth. If I could describe the smell, I would say it is the smell of sterile serenity. I once had a meeting with an acquaintance, an Italian journalist in the Amsterdam South neighbourhood. She asked whether I wanted to meet outdoors in the good weather and suggested a nice spot. We met at a forested park and it was only after the meeting that I realised we had been chilling among the dead, and for a moment, I thought, how impossible it would be to convince my relatives back home that I hadn’t unwittingly stumbled into some clandestine, ritualistic gathering.

In my own neighbourhood, I have seen three cemeteries within a 3 km radius. Some of those graves have been around for a long time. I remember the name Johannes, born in 1904 and died in 1971. Whole lives lived and departed even before I had started mine. The ones I encountered in the churchyards, dated even further back. 1880! Those were my great grandfather’s age mates. I had no idea where the father of my grandfather was buried. It never even crossed my mind to ask.

As the seasoned traveler knows, sometimes you have to leave home to truly see it. And from this distance, in Holland’s solemn, orderly grave sites, I could now see my own people’s evolving customs with a stark new clarity. My village in Siaya was indeed littered with private cemeteries, often grotesque cement slabs and prominent crosses that declared their presence at the very entrance of homes. The more prominent the family name, the bigger and grander the private mausoleums, dominating the homestead’s mood, a sense of tragedy lingering, especially where graves seemed better kept than the homes they served.

I grew up amidst the famous court battle over lawyer S.M. Otieno’s remains, pitting his wife Wambui Otieno and his ancestral Umira Kager Clan. The cultural imperative was to return the body to the ancestral homeland, irrespective of where he had chosen to reside and settle in a different part of the country. It was a customary duty, driven by the belief that the departed would not rest easy unless reunited with their spiritual landscape. But I watched this spiritual truth, this profound reverence among my people, become reduced to a blatant status symbol, morphing into a commercial industry that has now made the cost of dying an exorbitant burden.

These monuments to the past, tragically, have become more important than the people themselves. We are now stuck with what Ngugi wa Thiong’o captured in the anecdote of the Mercedes funeral: the opulence of the funeral service, in stark, jarring contrast to the poverty and struggles of the common people. The spectacles, I’ve observed, have become like meticulously curated weddings for Instagram pages, solemnity overshadowed by pomp, spiritual function either lost or reduced to a pitiful mimicry – a sacred dirge, like Oliver Mtukudzi’s ‘Todii,’ misheard as a party anthem, its profound meaning lost in translation. 

It wasn’t always like this. In my own village, finding a grave dated before 1970, before the pervasive culture of the cemented grave, is difficult. Before then, graves were marked by the land itself – the planting of a tree, the placement of rocks. I have a brother who died in infancy long before I was born; His grave is unmarked, known only because a gigantic Mama Mutere tree grew from that spot, its enduring roots a silent testament to the life lived. 

We no longer do that. We may ‘spew dust to dust’ with our lips, but we ensure the spot is sealed in cement, striving for a permanence that defies the very essence of decay. Even if the home disintegrates around it, these graves stand as rigid markers of former occupants, like the stark facades of Black faces from the Golden Age I see on Amsterdam’s canal district buildings, reminders of lives from another era.

What does it mean for a burial site to be part of the living landscape? My grandmother made the explicit request to not have her grave cemented. The spot where was laid to rest, is now overgrown and were it not for the cement family graves around it, one would never be the wiser. 

I know, I am part of a grave obsessed generation. The permanence of graves is our language of love, our attempt to control legacy and pushback against the ephemeral nature of life.

It’s such an ingrained custom that I remember a friend who was on research trip in Pokot country, north west Kenya and as he moved from homestead to homestead, it struck him, that he had not seen any tombstones, no crosses and he had to ask, where are your graves, to which he was told of the custom of burying the prominent a man in a cattle kraal, and others in a simple grave. 

How do I teach my children, growing up away from home, how to remember the dead if they have no access to physical markers to visit?

I can name my grandfather’s siblings even though I was born after they all died and can only recall one grave. But I have their stories and I carry their names. It is how we remembered, orally, collectively. It is a naming system I inherited and also passed down. My children are named after our dearly departed, and one day, they will also begin their own investigation and ask about their names and remember. Beyond the meticulous paperwork of wills and the bureaucracy of burial permissions, my end-of-life strategy must evolve. 

So the task of remembering correctly is on us, that we can revisit what ancestral veneration really meant and why libations were so important. What does it mean to live with ancestors? To accept that the physical absence doesn’t connote separation but simply a change of form, where they move to the spiritual realms remaining as ever present actors in the lives of the living. 

Now we think of the unmarked grave as the forgotten, yet this is essentially our destiny; for we too shall eventually be forgotten in the long arc of history, a consequence of the individual life’s inevitable ephemeral nature.

There is no right way to remember and in the spectrum of humanity, influence is contagious. In the Netherlands, I stare at our nation’s future. Kenya’s largest burial site, the Lang’ata cemetery in Nairobi was declared full nearly two decades ago in 2008, and still every month, news arrives of burials taking place there. Despite its dire state, Lang’ata remains the preferred choice for many Nairobi residents due to its convenient location and accessibility compared to the city’s eight other public cemeteries. How long before we too like the Dutch, prioritize the efficiency of disposal and change our ways. The Netherlands now boasts cremation rates that have reached over 60%.

For me, I turned to writing, to telling stories, so that my family would read about those who went before us and that it would inspire others to find and tell their own stories, setting off a chain reaction, the sacredness of the story, passed down, from one generation to the next. Ultimately, we can only build our own sorrow archives, curated by ourselves for ourselves. 

So these silent rows of the Dutch cemetery speak to a universal yearning, for connection after life, for meaning, across the veil of time and we have a great technology. This is why we no longer say rest in peace. Instead, we say, journey on, to the land of the ancestors and for us too, some day will join the collective and in that simple understanding, the limitations of these separations are revealed. Death not as an end but as a transition. 

I began to understand what philosopher John S Mbiti called the ‘living dead’ – those whom we knew, whose stories we still carry, who remain with us in a palpable present even after their physical departure. And beyond them, the deeper ‘past,’ the collective immortality of ancestors who become part of the very soil and the spiritual heritage of the community.

I finally understood my late grandmother, Wahonya. In her late 60s, she’d cajole a teenager like me, calling me ‘my husband,’ reminding me that the spirit I embodied transcended the individual, linking me instead to a powerful spiritual lineage.

It forces me to look at the earth differently, like a return to the source of life, making the obsession over a grave seem utterly pointless. We say ‘dust to dust,’ but do we truly grasp that the earth literally reabsorbs us? Unlike a plastic bottle that outlives our bones, we give a whole new spin to environmental awareness when you realize that in the long arc, no matter how grand you think you are, you’re just manure, plant food. Like a leaf falling from a tree, we decompose, returning nutrients to the soil, becoming the very ground from which new life springs. Our interconnectivity stretches beyond humanity, embracing all life forms. Perhaps the Buddhists, in their eternal wisdom, when they speak of all beings, truly received the right memo.

My late uncle Kamil Oluoch Kamili, used to say, Piny osiko, to ok sike, the earth is eternal but our lives are not. 

As the global African community spreads to settle in far flung places, they must carry their living dead with them for when their time arrives, geographical distance won’t be a hindrance for those who cannot visit their graves, and we won’t ever say they were lost, to the west but rather, they are still here with us, accessible, though the veneration of our rituals and the power of our imagination. 

P.S. This reflection on remembrance is drawn from my meditations on death, grief, and healing. It forms part of a series of insights drawn from my upcoming book, Strength and Sorrow, where I delve deeper into these universal experiences and the pathways to finding healing amidst loss.