I got a letter in my mail. Would I consider becoming an organ donor? I did not pay the letter much mind and tossed it into the pile of white envelopes filled with frequent solicitations. Where I kept the important but not urgent mail for record. Organ donations belonged there.

I should have paid attention to those letters. In the Netherlands, every adult above 18 is automatically added to the Donor Register. Those letters that I ignored were a prompt for consent. By not answering, I had already consented and said yes, to let doctors use my organs after death. That is the law. My ignorance had signed the contract.

It took just three plain white envelopes to determine my body’s fate. 

Almost a year later, when I checked the donor registry online, my name sat there. No objection. I had consented without my awareness. I had the option of opting out and stating an explicit No! Leave my remains alone. The choices to be made. Say yes, and donate all organs or choose what to donate, refuse entirely or let the family decide. 

My finger hovered over the boxes.

No! was my ready response. I remember why I thought of this as a natural decision when the first letters arrived. I am from a cultural and religious background where you do not make those kinds of after-death decisions. That was the role of family and the community. It was custom to bury bodies whole, to return to the maker intact and we paid keen attention to appearance, ensuring that the body of the deceased was embalmed well enough to look good in the final photographs. We wanted our dead to look like they had fallen into a deep slumber. It was taboo to disturb the dead.  

I remembered a visit to a morgue in Kampala, three years ago now, to retrieve the body of a loved one. We stood on a pavilion in Mulago hospital facing the entrance, a sombre group of men standing next to a hearse waiting for the body to be released for funeral, as a group of medical students in scrubs finished a tour, looking about as nonchalant as tourists walking out the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. If you had asked me at the time, whether I would consider the prospect of my body ending up as a sample for medical students, my response would be written on my face. 

Yet here I was, thinking about volunteering to have my body disassembled. 

I could track back where my initial resistance came from. Coloniality is like living with a phantom limb. The limb may be gone but pain returns every time you remember. The colonial ghosts came racing, as though summoned by my thoughts. Sara Baartman’s freak show exhibitions, the Khokhoi woman who was snatched from Africa and brought to Europe to be displayed. After her death, her body was  dissected and displayed in a Parisian museum. 

I remember a tour guide walking us through Amsterdam, revealing the darker shades of eminent names from the Dutch Golden Age that remained etched on buildings, museums, universities and streets. Petrus Camper who measured skulls of stolen Africans and engaged in scientific racism. Camper performed public dissections in the Waag, and among his recorded subjects was a 12 year old Angolan boy in 1756. The building is located in Nieuwmarkt in the center of Amsterdam and it has a restaurant that I visited many times.

Gerardus Vrolik and the Museum named after him, whose shelves were stacked with bones of colonised subjects displayed as trophies. So many of our ancestors’ bones had suffered this fate, sitting behind glass displays in foreign capitals, permanent trophies of conquest.

The limb twitched and I grimaced. Black bodies are still viewed as commodities. What some might call an ethical donation follows the same colonial logic of extraction of African resources. This is a present reality. The global organ supply demand makes Africa an active extraction site. I recalled a DW documentary investigation in April, 2025, that uncovered a transnational criminal syndicate. The Mediheal hospital in Eldoret where brokers traded kidneys for motorbikes in Oyugis and donors signed  consent forms they did not understand. Wealthy foreigners arrived as medical tourists in search of good body parts from the poor who had more pressing survival needs that one less kidney could solve.

The page was still open, the cursor blinking, my eyes darted back to No, before I returned and clicked, Yes!. There was a list of organs and tissues that I could elect to donate. I thought about the heart and kidney as valued organs, but  why was I saving the rest of my body parts, so I checked the whole list. I was now an organ donor. I had committed to save a life after my passing. 

It is different to think of a body as holding spare parts and that I had the choice between burying a good liver or donating, to a stranger, a new lease of life. Someone would live better because I lived.

This was a long road down from my previous impressions of donations, basically, hospital blood banks and only in response to a recurring blood drive campaign or a medical emergency of someone close. Before this, ‘organ donors’ was a sarcastic term directed at the new wave of boda boda riders who paid no attention to safety protocols and ended up filling the emergency wings of public hospitals. 

I knew of a friend who was on organ waitlist for months before he got a match. He was one of the lucky ones. I have lost other friends, who were not so lucky. They stayed on the waitlist a little too long and succumbed to an opportunistic infection. The reality was no longer far and removed.

I first encountered the idea of organ donation in Colors magazine’s “Death” issue. One of the spreads about donating the cadaver to science, mapped human bodies to industries, tires, shampoo, skates, shoes. They urged us to think of an alternative disposal method for our bodies such as turning into a processed commodity. Recycle yourself. This was so Western and twenty years later, I was saying Yes.

Dutch pragmatism curved its logic into law and it is not difficult to see the moral imperative of a donation as a shared societal responsibility that can save lives. In the end, trauma can become compassion through conscious choice. 

My ancestors would say,

The body is not yours to keep, it was only a loan,

So take my eyes but see my humanity. 

Take my heart but let it beat compassion into your bones.

So tend this vessel, anoint it with struggle.

P.S. This reflection on organ donation is drawn from my meditations on death, grief, and healing. It forms part of a series of Reflections on the ones we lost, drawn from my upcoming book, Strength and Sorrow, where I delve deeper into these universal experiences and the pathways to finding healing amidst loss.