Kennedy Lumwamu
4 July 2002
A witness yesterday told an Eldoret court that no Tugen has ever been buried outside the community's ancestral land.
Mr Marko Komen, 71, a village elder and pastor, claimed that the spirits of dead people lingered in the ancestral land and would haunt the community if people were buried elsewhere.
Mzee Komen, who was testifying in a case in which the widow of Dr Sammy Chebii Cherogony, Beatrice, has gone to court seeking orders to allow her to bury her husband in their Molo farm, said: "The dead have to be buried near our ancestors so that they can easily talk to one another."
Dr Cherogony, who worked in Kabarnet, Kisii and Marakwet districts as a medical officer of health, died on May 19 at the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital.
His widow has taken her father-in-law, Mr Cherogony Kandie, and step-sons Julius Kandie and Luka Kangogo to court after they insisted that he be buried at Tiriondonin village, Kabartonjo Division in Baringo District.
The late Dr Cherogony correctly diagnosed yellow fever, which hit many parts of the country in the 1990s, leaving several people dead. At one time, he worked for the World Health Organisation.
His daughter, Ms Patricia Chebii, told the court that she was opposed to having her father buried in Molo because it was far from their home village. "It is like throwing him away."
Mzee Komen said in Tugen tradition, it was "poison" to even allow a woman to collect the body of a man and that women were not allowed to bury men.
He further told the court that he and the local councillor were chased away from Dr Cherogony's Kabarnet town house by the widow for opposing her burial plans.
The witnesses said the doctor was staying in Kabarnet before his death, adding that the family had left fMolo, where it had stayed from 1982 to 1991 following the tribal clashes.
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