Wambui grave stirs old rivalries

“I, Wambui Otieno, hereby declare that I shall be laid to rest in this enclosed ground when I eventually die to guard this memorial to my late husband, SM Otieno even in death.”

This wish cast in concrete 22 years ago on the mausoleum of the prominent lawyer on their six-acre farm at Upper Matasia perhaps best captures the character of the 75-year-old former freedom fighter who died on Tuesday. (Read: Wambui had dug her grave 20 years ago)

The wish was her way of carrying on with the protracted legal battle which pitted her against the Umera Kager clan.

Ever defiant and controversial, she constructed the mausoleum, complete with a statue of the legendary lawyer, after he was buried 500km away at Nyalgunga in Siaya County.

The grave is at the entrance of the mausoleum she built in memory of her husband, SM Otieno — a prominent criminal lawyer who died on December 20, 1986.

A Nation team that visited the home yesterday found preparing the compound for the funeral.

After much persuasion, Mr Nicolas Muema, the caretaker of the home, opened the four by four metre room which he said had never been opened to the public except when Mrs Otieno made her customary annual commemoration.

In the mausoleum lies a stately concrete-sealed grave, which the caretakers said contained a statue of SM Otieno.

And on the wall were inscribed the immortal words of her love for her husband: “MSAJA (Luo for most honourable), SM, MR. I loved you. My love for you will never die. I fought to fulfill your expressed wishes to the bitter end.”

Perhaps to justify her unwavering resolve to the cause were the biblical words: “A man shall leave his mother and father and shall be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24)

In front of the grave lies a huge statue of the case that pitted her against the Umira Kager clan.

Ingrained in the book-like statue are the words: The Court of Appeal Kenya civil appeal no. 31 of 1987 Wambui Otieno-appealant vs Joash Ochieng Ougo and others.

“Wambui prepared her resting place exactly three years after her husband died. She, perhaps, wanted to avoid burial controversies that characterised her husbands’ death,” Mr Nicholas Muema, the caretaker of the family home in Upper Matasia told the Nation on Thursday.