Not all Kenyans have the same story, the idea that “my rural home is X or Y, so I’ll be buried in X or Y ancestral home” doesn’t apply in Leonard Mambo Mbotela’s case.
If you want Mbotela to be buried at his ancestral home that would mean flying his body to the Village of Mpanda on the shores of Lake Malawi in Malawi.
Mbotela unlike most assumed was not an Indigenous of the Coast..eg Mijikenda Swahili, etc He is an ethnic Yao and a descendant of a freed slave Mzee Mbotela who was rescued from an Arab slave dhow heading to Arabia to be sold in some slave market in the 1860s.
The freed slave Mbotela married a fellow Malawian she met at the Freretown freed settlement her name is Ida Halima from the Kamtunda clan in the village of Mpanda Malawi.
The two had a son Juma Mbotela who later married a freed slave from Seychelles Grace David who was the Sultan of Zanzibar slave in the early 1900s this was Mbotela’s grandfather from the son of Juma and Grace, James Mbotela. If you watched the ROOTS this is the Kenyan version
A settlement was established in 1864 in Mombasa called Freretown that became home to hundreds of these freed slaves mainly from Malawi(Wanyasa) and some from India (Bombay Africans).
The tribes here were numerous including Oromo/Ethiopian and Seychelloise and Malagasy. Some were settled at Rabai while some runaway slaves established several independent maroon villages in Kilifi and Lamu counties after fleeing Arab-owned plantations
Mbotela’s ancestor wrote a captivating memoir “The Freeing of the Slaves” or “Uhuru wa Watumwa” back in the late 50s.
Mbotela family are an urbanite Kenyan family and most of his relatives are buried in the public cemetery at Freretown Mombasa where many of the ex-slaves and their Church leaders were laid to rest.
A community similar to the Creoles in Freetown Sierra Leone and Monrovia Liberia..Christianised Urbanite Africans their lives intertwined with the history of St Emmanuel Church which was built by the freed African slaves from India(Bombay Africans) ..to most of them the concept of mashamba na maprot maguta maguta is not deeply rooted.
Its the family’s decision to have the legend buried at Langata…kwetu ni to respect that decision.
Kenyans we assume we are all the same but believe me kuna wengine hata ID kupata ni shida eg the Wanyasa (Malawians) of Freretown who are yet to be recognised as a Kenyan tribe at least Mbotela was a celebrity he could make ways…some are forced to adopt Mijikenda names just to get an ID. We recently had the Nubians(Sudan), Shona (Zimbabweans) Makonde(Mozambicans) and Pembas (TZ) recognised as Kenyan tribes
And by the way, this may shock you, Slavery was abolished in Kenya as recently as 1907, and bythe 1950s there were still ex-slaves in Mombasa Lamu Malindi living with their former masters
