Desperate relatives’ "brilliant idea" to get body home for burial

African beliefs are such that the dead are more respected than the living. And this means that when a person dies, it is unthinkable for most folks to bury that person far away from home to at least save on expenses. Instead they will indulge in endless fund raising efforts to raise the king’s ransom required to transport a body home for burial.

This belief is what caused a most bizarre incident to take place in a public bus a few years ago that left passengers numb with the shock. This family of a deceased person tried everything they could to raise enough cash to transport a body to Western Kenya, but failed.
The committee sat down and racked their collective brains but could still not find a solution. That was until one of them came up with the craziest of ideas. At first close friends and relatives of the deceased laughed it off, however with the mortuary fees accumulating daily and the funds running low, they did not laugh for long.

The corpse was heavily dressed and a hat put over the head. The conductor of the night bus to a popular Western Kenya destination was told that "the man" being carried into the bus was very sick (but nothing contagious).

Sadly in those days there were no seat belts which would have greatly assisted in the success of this mission impossible. So the "escort" sat next to the corpse and tried his best to look calm and collected as the bus made its’ way out of Nairobi headed for that popular Western Kenya destination. Had this crazy mission succeeded, friends and relatives of the deceased would have saved themselves a fortune that they did not have.

But alas, the escort seated next to the corpse got tired along the way and dozed off or was not as alert as they should have been. So when the bus driver applied emergency brakes, the corpse ended up on the floor. The cold body touched this lady’s legs under the seats and she screamed loudly in the bus.

Passengers were horrified to discover that the bus was carrying a corpse amongst living passengers. In fact they were so infuriated that they ordered the bus driver to drive into the nearest police station which was in Naivasha where "the escort" and his corpse were dropped off as the bus continued on its’ journey. Our informant never found out what became of the corpse and its’ escort because the story never even appeared in the daily newspapers. Which means that chances are that nobody was charged with anything.

Talk about desperate measures for desperate situations.