Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

Some people really know how to live.  Others know how to die.  “The Tennessean,” September 23, 1985:

NAIROBI, Kenya (UPI) This time Musyoka Mututa stayed in the ground when he was buried in his home village of Kitui. 

It was his fourth and final funeral. 

Mututa, 60, was buried without fanfare or publicity in a simple ceremony at Kitui, about 100 miles east of Nairobi, the Kenyan News Agency said yesterday. 

Mututa was a legend in Kenya, known as the man who had cheated death. Three times he was pronounced dead only to disrupt his own funeral and rise minutes before burial. He last "rose" from the dead in May. 

His last and apparently final death was about 12 days ago. The exact cause of death was not disclosed. 

"We had no expectations of another miracle. He told me that the fourth time would be for good," his brother Timothy Mututa said. 

Timothy Mututa said his brother had been disappointed because Pope John Paul II refused to grant him an audience during his visit to Kenya in August. 

Mututa's third death came in May. The Kitui district surgeon pronounced him dead after a short illness suspected to be cholera. 

But when the pallbearers came to fetch his body and sprayed it with insecticide to ward off flies, Mututa revived after a day of lying in state and demanded a drink of water. 

Mututa, a shepherd, first "died" at the age of three. His body had been wrapped in sheets and blankets and was being lowered into the ground when he let out a cry and was hauled back to the surface. 

He died again 19 years later when, after a search of six days, his apparently lifeless body was found. Mututa forced open his coffin lid as it was being lowered into the ground.

For Mr. Mututa’s sake, let’s hope this last time he was, for once, well and truly dead.