When I die, bury me at home in Africa! U.S African immigrants’ preference for burial in ancestral land

Authors

• Wilfred Luke Komakech University of Tennessee

Abstract

African immigrants highly regard their ancestral land and many of them are faced with a longing for home in the native country, the need to maintain their African identity, as well as adapt to American life. Many African Immigrants are committed to their ancestral land as can be seen by the extent to which many of them prefer the bodies of their loved ones and themselves to be buried in their ancestral lands upon their death in their diaspora homes. The location of burial is important with attached symbolic significance to African practices. Many communities in Africa place great emphasis on burial location as the basis for asserting land rights, origin, identity and belonging.

This article explored the perceptions of burial in ancestral land. It exposed a greater understanding of and answers to where African Immigrants prefer to be buried and why, the meanings African immigrants attach to their preference of burial location and how has African Immigrants, who have lost their relatives through death handled the experiences of burial, given the fact that they are in another continent. The majority of African Immigrants expressed the preference for burial in their ancestral land due to cultural, religious, social and economic factors.

I used ethnographic participant observation and unstructured interviews to collect and analyze data during fieldwork. My level of participation in the daily activities of the African immigrants was moderate, a balance between participation and observation, or outsider and insider. To facilitate my entry into the community and build rapport with immigrants, I live in a residence belonging to a Liberian immigrant in the Eastern Knoxville which has the highest concentrations of African immigrants. I build a good rapport that enhanced a comfortable relationship that encouraged informants to talk freely and to eventually confide in me because they trusted me and I was able to ask sensitive personal questions. I actively engaged in the activities of African immigrants to gain an understanding of their daily life experiences in Knoxville. I accompanied my informants to the Churches where they go for prayers. I will frequent social establishments of African immigrants like University of Tennessee African Students Association, as well as agencies that deliver services to the immigrant community.

I used open-ended semi-structured interviews to allow for minimum control of informants’ responses, asked the same questions to ease comparison across informants. All the interviews were tape recorded with the permission of each informant. I used various techniques to record my observations. I carefully documented daily observations, conversations and informal interviews by tape recording interviews and events with the permission of informants to supplement my field notes. I maintained a detailed record of both my objective observations and my subjective feelings in my field notes.