KENYA’S FIRST PRESIDENT JOMO KENYATTA IS THE ONLY AFRICAN PRESIDENT AND ONE OF THE FEW WORLD LEADERS TO BE EMBALMED

Mzee Jomo Kenyatta passed away peacefully in his sleep on August 1978 at State House, Mombasa.

The death of the president sent Kenya into turmoil as leaders jostle over who to succeed him.

“We were confused, we were overwhelmed, this had never happened… What do we do with the body of the first President of this country?”  Mr Charles Njonjo, who served as Kenya’s first Attorney General for the 15 years Kenyatta was president told a local daily.

Upon his death, Mr Njonjo said a Cabinet sub-committee in which he was a member together with the then head of civil service, Mr Geoffrey Kariithi, was formed to decide on the founding father’s final resting place.

According to the former attorney general the government had never considered where the President would be buried if he died.

Some of the options were to bury Kenyatta at his Gatundu home or even in Mombasa where he had died in his sleep.

The sub-committee held discussions with the Kenyatta family and finally agreed on Parliament grounds as the burial site to reflect his national stature and also as an honour to the institution of Parliament.

“We felt that he should be buried in a Parliament that he created,”  Said Mr Njonjo.

Currently in the world there are at least ten other world leaders whose remains  were embalmed upon their deaths and are currently on display for all eternity.

Here are some of the world leaders who have been embalmed and remain on display up to today.

King Tutankhamun

One of the most famous of Egypt’s pharaohs, Tutankhamun, was embalmed and laid to rest around 1323 BC.

Hugo Chavez

When Venezuela President Hugo Chavez died on March 2013 it was announced that he would be embalmed effectively becoming the only second Latin American leader to be preserved for all eternity.

A few days later however, acting president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro  said it was highly unlikely that the body of the former president Hugo Chavez will be embalmed.

Ferdinand Marcos

The exiled Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who died in 1989, has lain embalmed in a public mausoleum in the northwest Philippines since the government allowed his body back into the country in 1993.

Vladimir Lenin

 

Communist leader Vladimir Lenin has rested, for all to see, in Moscow’s Red Square since his death in 1924.

Joseph Stalin

 

 

After his death in 1953, the body of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was displayed alongside that of Lenin, but it was later removed from the mausoleum and buried near the Kremlin wall

Eva Peron

 

The embalmed remains of Argentina’s former first lady, Eva Peron, were buried in a Milanese cemetery under a false name.