Uncomfortable alliance of villagers and corpses as part of families live on cemetery land

For 30 years, some 75 landless families in Mbeere South Sub-county, Meru County, have uncomfortably lived among the dead, sharing all their intimate moments with beings long transcended into another world.

Driven there by desperation, the families that have called Karuku Cemetery home now reveal their harrowing tales of life next to the dead.

They recount waking up to the sight of tombstones and the smell of freshly dug up soil from new graves every morning, once in a while stumbling over skeletons and corpses in various stages of decay during the mundane acts of daily life like digging pit latrines or wells.

“The fact that our children see the crosses daily and even play with them may have some psychological impact on them. It haunts them,” says Monicah Njeri who has lived at the cemetery for many years.

Her fears are shared by Judy Wachira, a mother of six, who blamed her partial blindness on the graves, saying she was disturbed every time she saw a corpse that had been unintentionally exhumed.

“Some fresh graves are shallow and heavy downpour digs out the corpses. It troubles us a lot,” says Wachira.

Sospeter Irungu, the village chairman, says the village has often been visited by the spirits of the dead in the still of the night, disturbing the villagers’ sleep.

The three-decade-old village was not purposefully set up among the dead.

“We were among the first people to settle and develop the Makutano Junction market. Government officials relocated us, ‘temporarily’ to Karuku cemetery to pave way for land surveying. We realised we were duped after our land at Makutano was occupied by some politicians,” says Irungu.

The years after that saw them grow their families and see their children play with crosses for toys, and forge an unnatural ease with their surroundings.

Njeri says every election year, aspirants for various political seats would promise them that once in office they would resettle them in a new place, but that did not happen.

Majority of the residents are orphans, widows and very poor families with no other place to call home.

But this year started on a high note for them. Area MP Geoffrey King’ang’i gave a number of families an eighth of an acre each, courtesy of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF).

Presenting the land, the MP said previous attempts to resettle the villagers had failed after the land earmarked for the purpose and acquired at a cost of Sh2 million was grabbed by politically connected individuals.

Not all of them were moved though, a section remains in the cemetery. Their dalliance with both worlds will go on for a while longer as more funds are sought to purchase additional land for them.