By David Maillu
Published September 4, 2023
In Kikamba language there is a word, “wiu.” You hear in Akamba tradition
that no burial in the family should take place during the “wiu” condition.
Although the word means “blackness,” it refers to menstruation. That is,
if someone has died in the family, the family has to find out whether any
woman in the family has menstruation. It is the duty of women to give the
report. Since menstruation is related to female fertility, that fertility
may be tampered with by a burial. Burying the body implies burying the
fertility.
Other African communities may exercise the same thing in different
manners. But the meaning is the same, that sex has a religious chapter in
addressing life and death.
If death of a fertile woman occurs in the Luo community whereby the
husband feels he had denied his wife sexual intimacy, hence offending
ancestral spirits, some sexual action must be done on the body by a man to
compensate the departing spirit and also to appease other family spirits.
There is belief that if such a thing is not carried out there would be bad
consequences to the family.
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It is widely spread in traditional Africa that sex and plant fertility
have relationship. Life is created by man and woman having sex. Equally,
crops are created by planting seeds in the soil. Soil or earth, therefore,
is a mother. To mother earth, seeds are equivalent to what a child is to
woman and man. On the ground, this religious relationship between soil and
woman is expressed during planting season whereby sowing seeds is preceded
by the couple having sex. This is done under the belief that the energy
created by man and woman having sex together will further fertilize the
seeds for better yield.
When a man and woman come together sexually, it is believed that the
action creates an active energy or force which is capable of having good
or bad consequences. Among Akamba honey gatherers, if the gatherer has a
plan to do the job, he avoids having sex within specified time in order to
neutralize the militancy of the bees. If he is preparing to take an oath
in defence of something, he is forbidden from having sex within specified
time.
When a family wants to shift its dwelling from one place to another, after
the location has been identified, the couple must have sex before any
construction is done. If a man has been away from the family for a long
time due to one reason or another, he is forbidden from having sex with
his wife before a cleansing is done on him in order to ward off any bad
spirits he might have picked up away from home. Having sex with his wife
has got shrine implication to the family.
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When there is a bull-fight contest among the Luiyah community of Kenya,
the bull owner in the contest is forbidden from having sex a week before
the competition because the sex energy he creates can affect the strength
of the bull during the competition. The bull owner can also use witchcraft
to neutralize the fighting power of the competitor’s bull. He does so
secretly by using any woman’s unwashed under pant with which he hits at
the competitor bull on the head. That explains why the owner must make
sure that nobody comes close to the bull during preparation for the
competition. Woman’s under pant, as well as menstruation blood, have been
used by witches to achieve certain goals.
In the western culture, having sex is just that and that alone, without
any religious significance. It’s the sheer bodily enjoyment from the act
of making love which matters. That is the style of living the colonial
culture sold to Africans aggressively.