The debate on Mr. James wuod Maggero continues and since opponents have been trying to twist the facts, I wish to state them once again because these facts form the basis of arguments presented in this contribution.
• Maggero passed away on the 4th of January 2007. After his death, the family kept the information to themselves and even Maggero’s family in Kenya have communicated through a lawyer saying that they first got the information on the 9th of January. Mr. Maggero’s death was discovered accidentally by Mr. Morre Petersson, a Kenyan who then blew the whistle.
• Maggero’s family in Kenya did not manage to send a representative to the funeral service which took place on Friday January 12th 2007. A written request that the funeral be delayed so that they could send two representatives was ignored by the family in Sweden.
• It was the plan of Maggero’s Swedish family to dispose of the body through cremation. From communications from Maggero’s family in Kenya, they wanted to be involved in the funeral arrangements. This did not happen.
• A plea by a section of the Kenyan community in Stockholm that Maggero’s funeral be delayed until members of his family in Kenya could arrive in Sweden was ignored. Another request that the cremation of Maggero’s body be delayed so that Kenyans could pay their last respects by viewing the body was also ignored. A plea that Kenyans be accorded an opportunity to mourn Mr. Maggero in accordance with Luo culture was also ignored.
WHO IS A “NEXT OF KIN”?
The Maggero debate pits those who believe that the whole affair is private and should be handled by the late Mzee’s “next of kin” ie Maggero’s wife and four daughters in Sweden while the opposition thinks that Maggero’s family in Kenya should have been allowed time to travel to Sweden to attend the funeral with or without cremation. Did Maggero have a “next of kin” of Dagmar’s caliber in Kenya?
For the four or so “liberated young Kenyans” out of the info loop, Mr. Maggero’s first wife is still alive in Kenya and she also qualifies as a “next of kin” because Maggero never divorced her in life. We will call her “Nyar Ugenya” as Maggero used to call her. It is true that Maggero did not spend much of his life with Nyar Ugenya but this does not relegate her to the level of a stranger. Nyar Ugenya is the mother of the late Owino (Maggero’s son) whose London based estranged wife spoke at Maggero’s Funeral service on behalf of Maggero’s Kenyan family on Friday last week.
If enough time had been allowed, the perfect representative of Maggero’s Kenyan family could have been “Nyar Ugenya”. Chi Owino could not have been the perfect representative of Maggero’s Kenyan family because she divorced Owino fifteen years before Owino’s death, moved to London and remarried a man from Zaire. Chi Owino’s three children are currently being taken care of by Nyar Ugenya. The woman is a devout Christian, never remarried and remained the Mzee’s wife until he passed away on 4th January 2007. A retired teacher, she is still strong and healthy and was in a position to travel.
The matrimonial relationship between the late Maggero and Nyar Ugenya is beyond challenge because she got wedded to Maggero in 1961. From our view, Nyar Ugenya should have traveled to Sweden to pay her last respects to her husband “according to her wish”. The couple got married in a colorful wedding that was presided over by Bishop Ajuoga of the Hera Church. Maggero’s best man at the wedding was Mr. Owili who was Maggero’s age-mate. Mr. Owili is also alive and is currently a Chief in Siranga where Maggero comes from. Maggero is himself the son of a Chief.
Nyar Ugenya still lives at the same house Maggero built for her at his home village in Siranga. After the marriage, Maggero left Kenya to study in Finland. Later he returned to Kenya then left for Sweden where he met Dagmar. This is not another “fabrication” by KSB as the group of four liberated young Kenyans would want people to believe. It is the fact of the matter.
Nyar Ugenya is not some abandoned woman in the village. Dagmar knows her and she has met her three times in Siranga on different occasions when she traveled with Maggero to Kenya. Nyar Ugenya is not someone Maggero tried to hide from Dagmar and when concerned Kenyans were calling for an extension of time so that Maggero’s family could send someone, it was not out of the blue.
The Swedish system does not recognize Nyar Ugenya but this does not obliterate the fact that she is also a next of kin of the late Maggero. According to Luo culture, she is even more senior than Dagmar on grounds that she was Maggero’s first wife. In summery, Maggero was a polygamist and concerns that were being raised were based on the fact that there is an African wife somewhere in Siranga who was left out of the funeral arrangements and whose right to be part of the decision on the contentious issue of cremation was also violated.
Nyar Ugenya’s late son Owino once traveled to Sweden to visit his father and the Maggero Swedish family knows this. During his trip to Sweden, he met Kenyans like Gerry Midenyo before he returned to Kenya under very difficult circumstances which we will not go into here for the sake of decency but which are well known to Dagmar and her daughters. To dismiss Maggero’s Kenyan family as non entities or to cast them out of the “next of kin” bracket is unacceptable and inhumane. It was wrong even within the context of the “Swedish system” of doing things because Maggero’s Swedish family cannot claim “ignorance” about the existence of this family. If Nyar Ugenya is not a “next of kin”, who is she?
According to the Swedish law, any next of kin has a right to information about death and participation in funeral arrangements. The problem is that Maggero’s wife and surviving child in Kenya do not feature in the Swedish system. Does this cut them off from the family to an extent that they are considered irrelevant in the planning of the Mzee’s funeral?
ATTACKS ON KSB
There is a fact that has been manufactured and which has been used in several arguments to the effect that critics of the manner in which the Maggero funeral was organized wanted the body to be taken to Kenya for burial. This is not the case. Another lie being used in the arguments is that critics were opposed to the cremation of Maggero’s body. This is also not correct.
The concern centered around the exclusion of Maggero’s family (including his first wife) in Kenya from participating in the funeral arrangements and nothing else. If, for example, Maggero’s first wife (or any representative) had traveled to Sweden, held discussions with Maggero’s Swedish family and emerged to say that Maggero will be cremated, nobody could have questioned this. The problem is that the family in Kenya was strategically left out of the process.
Opponents of KSB appear to be having sleepless nights. They have turned to “demonizing” the blog site with unsubstantiated attacks because of forth-right reports on issues of interest to the Kenyan community in Stockholm. The problem with the Maggero stories is not that they have any serious factual errors. Without the Maggero story having been broken by KSB, the old man could probably have been cremated silently and without much ado. According to two family members who met Kenyans at Continental Hotel last week, their plan was to announce a “two days of mourning” after Maggero had been cremated!
When Mr. James Kiboi passed away in Norway in September last year, KSB faced virulent attacks because of exposures that surrounded the late diplomats death. Stories were dismissed as “false”, “fabricated” and so fourth. When APN picked up the matter, the revelations went even “deeper” but along the KSB lines. The revelations were so serious that KSB had to withdraw to leave APN to do its work.
Almost every fact that was published at KSB turned out to have been credible with APN adding the detail. It is during this period that APN was also consulting with KSB on the setting up of APN and we gave lots of valuable advice (emails on file). The initial site “Kenya Oslo blog”, failed to take off because “there wasn’t much happening around Kenyans in Oslo”.
Sometimes, the Kiboi revelations at APN bordered on “libel” and what we could do was to keep our fingers crossed. When KSB critics noticed that this blog site was simply “scratching the surface” on the Kiboi revelations and that there was much more to the tragedy, they retreated into their “spider holes” as APN continued to feast on the story. We wrote that Kiboi was last seen with three women (who were named) at Masawa bar in Oslo and critics went wild. When APN wrote that the number of women were actually five, KSB critics took a boat trip to Finland to contemplate their empty attacks on KSB in a moment of shame.
Today, Maggero’s first wife in Kenya is in the process of being “wiped out” of the map of “next of kin”. Why? The process of cremating her husband’s body was set in motion and finalized before she was even informed that her husband had passed away. Why? Do those trying to rubbish concerns by Kenyans in Stockholm know that the Mzee had a family in Kenya which also needs to be respected or is the “liberation” some people have undergone include trampling on the rights of Maggero’s family in Kenya simply because they are nobodies within the Swedish legal system?
KSB is in touch with Kenyans at the grass roots and the majority position is clear – Maggero’s family in Kenya should have been given the opportunity to participate in the funeral arrangements and represented in his final send off regardless of whether or not his body was going to be cremated. This position appears not to be changing.
Kenyans have and will continue to meet in Stockholm whenever one of us passes away to discuss the death and what needs to be done.
It is the responsibility of those who knew Mr. Maggero to raise issues on behalf of his sidelined family in Kenya and voices that are distorting the central issue of “family exclusion” are doing so as a matter of expediency and cheap propaganda. Maggero’s wife, child and family in Kenya should not be treated like “second class” family members because they are equal stake holders on the issue even though they are in Kenya. To suggest that they could not be involved in the process because they have no money to travel to Sweden was an abuse.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO – SATURDAY EVENING
Okoth Osewe
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