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Фото автораНика Давыдова

All for the love of Kamau… and the sweet fruits of his sweat

Blame Wambui Otieno and the Umira Kager clan for making this trendy.

You can even throw in Justice (rtd) Richard Otieno Kwach and lawyer John Khaminwa to advance your argument.

Maybe it used to happen, but it only became a case study after the legendary case of 1985 when the Umira Kager clan and Wambui Otieno went to court over the remains of lawyer SM Otieno.

The clan wanted him buried at home in Nyalgunga, while the wife wanted him buried in their home in Matasia.

The tussle over home and house went on for months until home triumphed and the body was sent to Nyalgunga.

Wambui boycotted the burial.

Before then, Kenyans used to respect (and even fear) the dead, but nowadays whenever someone (prominent) passes on, the first thing people ask is when the family will start wrangling over the body.

In the SM Otieno saga — which made matatu drivers rename the City Mortuary bus stop ‘Kwa SM’ — hitherto unknown fathers, children and wives never came out of the woodwork.

But that saga taught Kenyans something very important: to rush to court whenever there was a (burial) dispute.

Nowadays it is the norm, so much so that even when there is no dispute, families will create one.

“Since people did not know him when he was alive, what about people knowing that he has died?” families seem to ask before rushing to court.

There have been situations where bodies have been kept for months awaiting a court ruling as family members get injunctions and counter-injunctions and counter-counter-injunctions barring the another from burying the deceased until the dispute is resolved.

So when and where will Samuel Kamau Wanjiru be buried?

No one seems to know for the case gets more complicated by the hour, what with the numerous fathers and wives laying claim to the World Champion who will now be remembered more for what happened after his death than what he accomplished when he was alive.

(SM Otieno was one of the best criminal lawyers Kenya ever had, but who remembers any case he won? Who even knows that he was known as Silvanus?).

At the rate which Wanjiru’s so many “fathers” and “wives” are coming out, we should not be surprised when another woman comes out and claims she is the real mother.

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