Tales of Nairobi's grave matters and greed of the living

Dead men are not supposed to tell any tales but there are thousands of unsettling stories surrounding Kenya's pioneers resting places.

Although some of the sages lived respectable lives and acted as moral compasses of the people who looked up to them, controversies still dog them.

There have been some stories since Kenya witnessed the January 14, 1900, interment of an employee of the Uganda Railways, Somerville.

His resting place was Nairobi's first cemetery, which was at the base of a hill overlooking the Industrial Area.

One of the most controversial burials, according to Alfred Tennyson, was that of the founder of the Africa Inland Mission at Nzaui, Rev Peter Cameron Scot who had died of fever in 1896.

After his death, the missionary was buried at Nzaui, the cradle of Africa Inland Church but later it was decided that his remains be relocated to Nairobi's first cemetery.

When Scot was exhumed, it was discovered that there were two skeletons and it was impossible to distinguish which belonged to the founder missionary. To solve the riddle, the team took half of the skeleton from each body and ferried it to Nairobi where they were interred and the grave marked as the final resting place of the missionary.

An almost-same fate also befell another prominent family, Tennyson wrote in his article published in Old Africa Magazine, when Florence Delamere died aged 36.

Initially, she was buried at the cemetery dedicated to the Delamere family in Nairobi but her remains were later exhumed in 1950 and relocated to Soysambu.

However, when the government established a brand new cemetery on a 117-acre plot in Lang'ata, a 74-year-old, Robert Lockhead, a retired railway engineer made history as the first guest in 1958.

A study conducted by Jennifer Murigu and Wallace Mbugua, Burying as an Interment Method and Its Impact in Kenyan Urban Areas: A Case Study of Lang'ata Cemetery in Nairobi published in September 2020 concluded that at the time, an acre of land in the area was worth Sh400 million, meaning if the cemetery was decommissioned, it could be worth a total of Sh446.8 billion.

The researchers made a case for cremating instead of burying, observing that Lang'ata cemetery land was capable of generating Sh1.1 billion in rates annually but bringing a paltry Sh30,500 per grave which translated to Sh47.5 million shillings for 99 years.