A young man hangs around the dump site of Dandora looking for trash to collect. He will resell them later. He gets around 1 dollar a day to work in this highly polluted area of Nairobi.

Dandora, a suburb in eastern Nairobi, has to date been famous, (if it has been famous at all) for being ‘one of the most polluted sites in the world’, home to Nairobi’s main dumping site (one of Africa’s biggest and most toxic) and the capitol’s main sewage works. It’s also a centre for Kenyan Hip Hop, would you believe. And now its fame is set to spread thanks to a tale of a zombie…

Zombie in Nairobi suburb, Kenya

Picture the recent scene in Dandora as a coffin was being transported on top of a small bus. The accompanying mourners looked up in fear and shock as the supposedly dead man inside the coffin started to kick up a fuss, that is, try and kick his way out of his entombment.

At this point some of the mourners took the coffin off the bus whereupon the man inside kicked open the lid, got out, sat down by the wayside, and by some accounts, undid his tie.

Phew, that was a close escape you might think. Er… well not as events transpired it wasn’t.

Perhaps not surprisingly many of the mourners fled the scene but after a while they returned, convinced that the man must be a zombie – the living dead!

So what did they do? Well, they killed him with sticks and stones, put him back in the coffin and continued on their way to the cemetery, ‘praying loudly for his departed soul’ (The Standard, April 17).

To die once is of course unfortunate but in the nature of things. To die twice seems like carelessness (with acknowledgement to Oscar Wilde). Or as The Standard noted in its ‘Pointblank’ page, in this instance, it was murder…