by OP | Jul 17, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
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.
by OP | Jul 10, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
My father’s death, when I was a teenager, brought a gradual awakening to the constant presence of death around us. Before this, death was only for the old, those whose time had arrived. My grandfathers were my only reference; I had buried both when I was young, recalling their funerals merely as family gatherings. Within the Luo cultural context, my early association with funerals was a family reunion; I met several relatives for the first time at such events. As a child, I thought death happened only to others; my most significant people were still alive and thriving. My father’s death split that curtain open. I saw what it was to sit on the family row during a funeral service, staring at the coffin as the gathering stared back in pity. His death revealed how much of life’s harshness and death’s indignity we had come to accept as ‘normal’.
I could now fully grasp empathy, no longer seeing the funeral as a single moment of a family dressed in black gathered around a freshly dug grave for final rites. I was exposed to the full spectrum: receiving the news, the panic, frantic planning, the spectacle of mourning, and the silence that follows as one navigates grief’s dark corridors alone. This experience changed my attitude, prompting me to pay attention to who else was mourning around me.
My curiosity led me to attend funerals beyond my familial circle, of people I had no blood relationship with. Mostly, this was motivated by solidarity. My father, a farmer, had cultivated friendships with the men who helped him grow crops. So, when Sore told me his cousin had died across the valley, I eagerly volunteered to help.
Initially, I didn’t understand why my presence at these humble gatherings seemed unusual. The village, like the rest of the country, recognized class; I was seen as belonging to the modern group that had lost touch with custom and tradition. Despite my urban upbringing, I wanted to belong, to be seen as part of this wider community. As a student with no income, I found novel ways to participate, contribute, and share in sorrow, as I had seen so many do for us. My solution was labor. Help was always welcome, and extra hands, especially those who came with no demands, were greatly appreciated.
Thus, I became a regular grave digger, part of a reliable cast of young men entrusted with the responsibility. Usually an overnight activity, digging a six-foot deep grave in our rocky region required skill and stamina; organized teamwork made a great difference. In the hierarchy of funeral caterers, grave diggers were typically at the pyramid’s bottom, often appeased with alcohol and food to ensure the grave was ready before the ceremony. In those days, no professional grave diggers existed; only relatives, neighbours, and friends—the men—came together as a last act of honour and duty.
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by OP | Jul 2, 2025 | Reflections On The Ones We Lost
My son, I look at you now, with that same hopeful glint in your eyes, and a part of me aches, knowing what shadows might yet fall across your path. I suspect I know your despair, for I too was once there. In 1982, I first discovered Kenya was not special. The illusion of an island of peace shattered, and the country spiraled. I remember the silence that fell over our streets, the distant burst of gunfire and the frantic whispers of my parents. It was then, seeing the raw terror in their once-assured eyes, the whisper of civil war, a phantom thought, rooted itself in my young mind. The idea that even neighbours could turn in a moment of rapture. The 1982 coup attempt burst my bubble of assumption; I saw real terror and helplessness in my parents.
After ’82, a heavy, unspoken blanket descended upon our home, and indeed, the whole country. It wasn’t just that no one spoke of it; it was the way conversations would abruptly cease when a certain date was mentioned, the way our elders’ eyes would glaze over with a pained look while watching a political rally on TV. The most potent memory: a history of hangings, the death penalty, and broken men returning as ghosts.
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by OP | Jun 25, 2025 | Articles, Reflections On The Ones We Lost
He was now just a number – a telephone line that could no longer be located. What do you do with the chat history? When someone close to you dies, the first instinct now is to rush to their social media accounts, to catch their last posts, to wonder if there was a final message or tell-tale sign of their impending end. We turn into digital archaeologists, Browse through curated profiles, transforming into investigators of a life lived online. Unlike the physical pages of Anne Frank’s famous diary in the Netherlands, our Kenyan Gen Zs are leaving behind an entire digital universe.
This reality was vividly underscored in the run-up to the June 25th anniversary of last year’s Finance Bill protests. Watching videos of the dramatic moments of June 25th, 2024, I was struck by the reincarnation of fallen comrades like Rex Maasai and Eric Shieni as AI avatars, marching to freedom protests. The names of those lost—Denzel Omondi, Kennedy Onyango, Matthew Njoroge, David Chege, Beasley Kogi—resurfaced, mostly through their personal records, videos of young lives streamed online. In this year’s mobilisation, I came across several accounts of young Kenyans recording their own last testaments, anticipating death by state violence, ensuring their stories remained intact. Some even sent money to a mortician and wrote their own eulogies. Call it the audacity of youth, but self-memorialization is now a digital reality.
This June 25th anniversary reveals a generation manifesting a coordinated digital remembrance. I’ve witnessed a flood of tribute posts, shared photos, and curated video montages set to musical compositions inspired by the Sarafina line, “Freedom is coming tomorrow.” While my generation might perceive this as mere public posturing, I’ve observed the deep empathy and genuine communal memory expressed in this new format.
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by OP | Jun 18, 2025 | Reflections On The Ones We Lost
Dries van Agt, the former Dutch Prime Minister, made headlines in February 2024 for how he died: by euthanasia, hand-in-hand with his wife. Van Agt served as PM from 1977 to 1982, preceding Mark Rutte, who would later dominate Dutch politics for over a decade.
News reports indicated Van Agt had been in fragile health since a 2019 brain hemorrhage, from which he never fully recovered. His wife’s health was also deteriorating, leading them to make the mutual decision to undergo euthanasia. When I discussed it with a Dutch colleague, she noted the widespread respect for their choice, considering it quite remarkable. This respect underscores a core tenet of Dutch society: the belief in a right to choose a good death when suffering becomes unbearable
The Netherlands, known for its liberal legal reforms like same-sex unions, regulated coffee shops, and the famous Red Light District, was also the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia in 2002. I decided to look up the law, the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act. It states that euthanasia is technically a criminal offense but a physician is exempt from prosecution if they adhere to extremely strict “due care criteria.” The core justification for this exception is to alleviate unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement. It is a delicate balancing act between the protection of life with a patient’s autonomy and dignity in the face of insurmountable medical hardship.
That word dignity. To be accorded mercy. Those two words are never in association with the deaths of ordinary people.
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