Silvano Melea Otieno

Who was Silvano Melea Otieno?

Silvano Melea Otieno was a leading criminal lawyer in Nairobi whose death gave rise to a significant legal controversy regarding the tension between customary and common law in Kenya.

Otieno was born at Nyalgunga, Nyamila village, Siaya, in Nyanza Province of western Kenya.

After his death, he became a cause célèbre in Kenya due to an action fought in an appeal court over the disposition of his body. He had been a Luo of the Umira Kager clan of Nyanza Province, but had married a Kikuyu woman, sister of the then Foreign Minister of Kenya. She claimed that he had wanted to be buried at his farm at Ngong on the outskirts of Nairobi. His family claimed the body themselves asserting longstanding tribal custom.

Both husband and wife had been highly educated Kenyans who had lived their lives largely independent of the old ethnic norms. The case was seen as a test case and exemplar of the debate between customary law as against the statuary law that had been imposed in Africa during the colonial period and partially retained after independence. It emerged that narrowly ethnic interests still prevailed in Kenyan family and inheritance law and he was finally buried at Nyamila on 23 May 1987.