She said, they cried ugly. I knew what she meant. Four African women, attending a Gaza memorial in Amsterdam as a man on the sidelines read out victims’ names for three hours without pause throughout the event. In the end, they could hold it in no longer. The moment they saw each other—black women with a kindred spirit—there was no pretending. In that instant of greeting, they simply started to cry, gushing into wailing, balling. It was ugly. I could imagine. 

She was talking about real tears, the kind that come from deep inside and discombobulate us, casting aside all pretence of decency and control. For one raw moment, repression refuses, and we release. This in a society where silence is expected, where dignity is found in suppression. I knew this unruly grief intimately. I just never thought I had permission to express it—the kind that doesn’t care for manners or sensibilities. It’s the Gen Z grief, born from the unexpected brutality against innocent youthful exuberance.

There was a young nephew, the son of kin from my village. I didn’t know him well, though his father was a cousin I’d grown up with. It had been years since we’d seen each other. His boy had grown into a strapping young man, eking out a living on the outskirts of Nairobi, in Kitengela—a regular hustler. Now, I stared at the picture of a dead man. News of his death reached me during the first wave of the Gen Z protests. Shot by a police bullet. They said he was part of a gang that tried to raid a supermarket in the moment of chaos. Died so young. I cried inside for his father.

What had happened to us? How did we get so broken that we forgot how to hold hands?

I was added to a WhatsApp group, populated by his peers. They had mobilised and organised, unsupervised, figuring out a way to transport the body. They needed donations. These young people took it upon themselves to act. They raised money, brought him home for a heroes’ send-off. It was their funeral, their burden. There was no pretense in how they were feeling. It was an unruly funeral. Tens of young men, high on something, angry, loud, demanding, bringing his body home in a convoy ready to fight anyone who got in the way of their feelings. Cousin Samuel said as much: ‘Ne gi biro gi noma.’

I understood. I remember Fridays when I lived in shags, going to Luanda market and inevitably bumping into a funeral convoy. Bodies retrieved from the Rabour mortuary, going home for an overnight vigil before burial. The bodabodas would crowd the road, riding recklessly, pillion passengers upright, no helmets, brandishing twigs and whistles—a ruckus. Ugly scenes. Often, I was told, it was outrage for yet another accident statistic—a fellow rider who had died ugly.

It’s 1989. Baba is dead. We are taking his body home. We arrived at the Luanda market where he used to have a clinic. The market comes to a standstill. It’s chaos, it’s ugly. People I do not even know throwing themselves on the ground, mourning my own father. Why wasn’t I like them, yet I suffered the greater loss?

How come I didn’t know how to cry ugly?

I knew the showmen, the professional mourners. They had the funeral schedule, up-to-date with the obituary of the month, always on the move; there was much crying to be done. I remember the first time I truly paid attention to a performance. My brother Oti and I were chilling under the shade of a mature Ober tree by the road to the home. 

He had just lit a cigarette when a familiar face approached. He offered a warm greeting, asked for a cigarette, then made some banter about never smoking an Embassy Kings, so he needed another stick. Oti gave him two more, which he wrapped delicately and inserted into an inner jacket pocket. He then walked a short distance to the gate. As soon as he hit the gate, he broke down into a sorrowful dirge and raised such a ruckus, people seated inside the house stood up to see who those wails belonged to. By the time we walked back, fifteen minutes later, we found him in the back of the house, around the kitchen, seated on a bench, holding a heaped plate, replenishing.

When my uncle died, young in his 20s, full of vim, only to collapse in a gym working out, in a foreign country, and they brought his body home, it was ugly. All our madness was on display. No one was contained. I was only four years old, yet I grew into adulthood hearing these words, “Ne wa ywago Apollo,” We cried ugly for Apollo. 

I remember the first proper ugly cry, in high school. I didn’t even know this young lad very well; he was a few classes behind me in the school called Lelbionet, nestled in the lush green rolling valleys of Elgeyo Marakwet county. It was an emergency on the weekend. No teachers around. He had to be rushed to a hospital in Eldoret. Someone had to accompany him. I volunteered, still in my track pants and a vest, as we marshalled Chebii, the sole matatu driver who plied the Chepkorio route. He was admitted. Meningitis, they said. High fever. 

I stayed overnight by his bedside. He couldn’t talk. Then in the morning, I woke up to the scene of hush hush the nurses—the clean-up crew—avoiding my eyes. Nobody wanted to tell me. They were scared of how I’d react. I had fallen asleep next to a man I believed to be on the brink of recovery because we’d made it to the hospital in time. 

“What do you mean he died?” 

Something snapped. Not knowing what to do, I went to the hospital yard and became crazy, picking up logs that functioned as seats and throwing them about desperate for something to smash. All the suppressed anger at deaths witnessed emerged. They told me to be careful not to break anything. That I shouldn’t be this angry. What was I going to tell his parents when they asked, “What happened to our boy?” 

It is the cruelty of it all that it is ugly, and that is what has to be confronted. Mere sadness is an insufficient response. Not with a grief that demands to be seen, heard, and acknowledged, pushing back against erasure. 

The kind of grief I am talking about is not orderly. It refuses to be neatly packaged or politely endured, especially in the face of deaths that feel deeply unjust or senseless. It’s a primal scream against the perceived violation of life and dignity. It is tero buru, a Luo funeral custom that reveals brokenness born from how torn we are inside. Those young men, I no longer see in the village, who staged a mock battle, brandishing spears and shields, raising the dust with their cows to “drive away” death’s lingering presence. 

I recognise some of that spunk in this new generation, flooding social media with photos, videos, memes and hashtags, staging a digital tero buru: a sorrow so potent, it demands state suppression for the crime of reclaiming agency in the face of helplessness—a small, defiant act of love in the shadow of loss. 

The official, solemn “memorials” are usually for sanctioned losses, those that died a good death. But what about the memorials for the ugly ones—the persistent, unruly grief for those the state might rather forget? 

This is grief that defies societal norms, expectations, and conventions; it’s loud when society demands quiet, prolonged when society demands closure, and public when society demands privacy. When the state desires the public to move on, to forget “inconvenient” deaths, and blocks the conventional channels for justice, unruly grief becomes a de facto form of civil disobedience. It is a constant reminder that something is fundamentally wrong and needs to be addressed.

It used to be custom. To drop everything, to mourn with your fellow. To pause a moment and raise your hat at a passing stranger lying in a hearse. We’d whisper, “May his soul rest in peace,” even if we were only hearing about the person for the first time during a death announcement. It was public therapy, a communal obligation, to stand alongside and give people the space to cry in the face of such immense, externally inflicted pain. With the loss of these social customs, we feel overwhelmed, helpless, compassion-fatigued. Yet, still, it persists, unwelcome pain—grief forced by the perpetual human suffering around us, demanding that we look. 

Yawaa! The sheer volume of suffering—Gaza is cruel. But save your tears for your own. Who is crying for Sudan? Does it ever end? Father to son, the demons stalk. So then, let us cry as a way to stay in touch with our humanity, so we don’t forget how to cry ugly. This ‘uncivilized’ anger is the final push back against indifference to injustice.

Going beyond words, finding language for the inexpressible. I know what was happening to those grown men in suits, prostrating on a hearse when the slain Tom Mboya was brought home to Rusinga. You don’t talk about distress; you show it, you bear witness to the depth of the loss, infusing the very air with the power of grief, making it impossible to ignore the pain expressed. 

Now I know: the rolling on the ground, the tearing at clothes, the dishevelment are all mirrors of confrontation with the internal chaos. The understanding that you must wade through the murk of your darkness to the clear waters of healing. 

I knew what my African sister in Amsterdam meant. We just needed to cry. We had to do something. We were not even pretending. We knew that sorrow. We all hailed from countries that had tested sorrow. We knew what it meant to be forgotten by humanity, and to be ignored.

Funerals here are often private affairs, swift, clinical—marked by the absence of public wailing. No one wants to linger there. It is easier to look away. If you don’t acknowledge it, it never happened. Inconsequential. Unseen. Unmournable. 

I am not so innocent. There was an accident, not far from where I live, within a suburban community in South Holland. At the edge of the road, a pile of flower bouquets, lit white candles. Two young girls, about twelve standing by. I had to ask them, “Has there been an accident?” “Yes,” they replied, “our friend, she died. Hit on a designated cycle path next to a zebra crossing.” She liked to dance. In a country where it’s unusual to wear a helmet on a bicycle, where children cycle to school daily, unsupervised, crossing highways. 

How many such accidents had I also left unseen? Moved on with my day, without so much as a second glance.

The internal struggle against numbness often raises the question: is this sustained grief futile? I suppose, it’s a human condition. You can only grieve if you have known loss, if you have learned to value the gift of life and lives. At some point, it is no longer possible to play normal. 

Allow people to grieve in the only way they know how. It is not a competition. Where it is genuine, it rehumanizes and demands a response. There is nothing irrational about unruly grief. It is a profoundly rational response to irrational, cruel death. 

My people call it Mirima, the concept of unruly grief. They would say of the relative who went crazy at a family funeral gathering, hurling insults, pointing fingers, and kicking a stray dog:  

“Mirima no ma ke.” The craziness got to him.

It brought out his ugly side, but we also saw his truth.

P.S. This reflection 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.