Less Expensive Life-Crises Rituals

Partly as a result of their limited economic resources, some of the opulent life-crises rituals that once characterized the community (Prins 1967:104–105, Stroebel 1979:8–13) have paled and others have vanished. Group members still talk about these rituals with a mixture of nostalgia (for the glory) and sorrow (for the great expense).

Funerals, especially those for prominent persons, are still attended by hundreds upon hundreds, but the spendthrift days of feeding this multitude for days and weeks have come to an end. Birth is now the occasion for only a relatively modest celebration by a few score women relatives and neighbors. Circumcision, once an occasion for a major feast, is no longer publicly celebrated. Weddings were lavish occasions to which the entire community was invited as recently as the late 1970s, but now they are less opulent and much smaller, and attendance by more than one hundred is rather unusual.^[12]

As of the 1980s, some weddings and other life crises are marked only by a maulidi (reading of the life of the Prophet followed by light refreshments) to which only kin and neighbors are invited. The expenses involved in the grand rituals were enormous: as much as five years' earnings were spent on a wedding or a funeral. As one walks through Old Town, one is shown houses that families mortgaged and lost to pay for these rituals. But expense is not the only reason these rituals have declined in frequency and opulence.

One is that Mombasa, including the Old Town section, has gone the way of cities everywhere: crime has increased, while generally acceptable behavior has decreased. Robberies and murders, although still rare by the standards of Nairobi and most American cities, have increased sharply since the latter years of the 1970s as rural migrants streamed into the city. Now many community members have well-founded uneasiness about walking through the streets of Old Town at night. Because of this, attendance at prayer in the

mosques at the predawn, alfaquiri, prayer and the nighttime, isha, prayers has declined, with more men (women do not enter Swahili mosques) praying at home. The celebration of rituals was and is held in the streets adjacent to the house of the family involved, and as crime increases, community members are less and less enthusiastic about being out of their homes after dark.

Further difficulty comes from that fact that wahuni, rowdy boys and young men, some of them Swahili, are far more plentiful than they were and, many say, more unrestrained in their behavior. Uneasiness about celebrations being ruined by fighting and vandalism has a substantial basis in experience. It was traditional for the groom to be escorted to his bride's house for the wedding night and for his entrance to be opposed by neighborhood boys and young men. After disarranging his clothes and making some noise, they let him in—sometimes after being given a token gift of money. Lately, however, these boys and young men have sometimes become rowdy and even dangerous, seriously beating the groom and his escorts and breaking windows and furniture in the house of the bride's family.

Even more important, perhaps, is the decline in the community discussed earlier. Men are heard to say that money spent on lavish entertainment is wasted and that people are only impressed with the foolishness of someone who provides an elaborate wedding or other ritual for the community at large. Men have long taken this view but have yielded to their wives' wishes to stage impressive rituals (Swartz 1982b, 1983).

It may be that women are no longer as motivated as they were just a decade ago to spend an important part of their family's wealth on one or two rituals as well as slightly less able to influence their husbands. The reasons for this are complex and will be addressed in chapter 10. For the moment, it is enough to say that the social relations that played the central role in the women wanting to hold expensive rituals and, at the same time, provided them a source of freedom in dealing with their husbands have decreased in importance for them as the community's overall integration has declined.

This is not to say that the rituals have stopped. They continue, if on a reduced scale, and give every evidence of accomplishing the ends of life-crises rites as set out long ago by Van Gennep. Like the community, they are still effective but reduced in social scale and toned down in their opulence.

The culture of the Mombasa Swahili is still effective and still guides the activity of most community members, most of the time. The center of their lives has always focused around kinship and the household group, and whatever changes have taken place and are occurring have not and do not alter that fact.