In some cultures, one person's death at the right moment is believed to keep the whole order of things intact, guiding a dead ruler's spirit across to the ancestors. If that death fails to happen, the people believe they are condemned, the universe falls out of order, and their future is in doubt. The duty is personal, but the stakes are cosmic and shared by everyone.
A person facing a sacred, fixed end can treat the final day as license to take every pleasure: a new bride, feasting, dancing. That last grab at earthly life becomes the very thing that delays and spoils the duty, tarnishing a legacy that the death itself was meant to secure.
An outside authority can step in to stop what looks to it like a needless death, never grasping that the death is what holds the local world together. Acting to save one life, it causes a calamity for a whole people. Its intervention rests on no authority that the people it governs recognise.
When two value systems meet that are each complete and each certain they are right, the collision itself produces tragedy, not any single villain. The worst breach comes from inside the community, from its own member failing his part, and the outsider's meddling only exposes and speeds it. So the blame is never simply black and white.
A child educated in the colonizer's land can thrive there without ever truly belonging. Such a person may hold tighter to the duties of their ancestors than those who never left. Distance from home can sharpen the sense of being the keeper of an inherited legacy rather than dissolve it.