Spirits fear crowded tombs
In South Africa, crowded graveyards make for heated spirits.
Want to share a grave? It's a blasphemy for South Africa's Zulus who
revere their ancestors, but overcrowding in Durban's cemeteries has
forced the city to begin "recyclying" tombs.
A graveyard that will be recycled by the Ethekwini (Durban)
Municipality at the Loon Street cemetry in Durban, South
Africa. AFP |
"We are forced to do so," says Pepe Dass, the city official who
oversees graveyards. "It is not only a question of space, but a question
of sustainability."
Durban is located in KwaZulu-Natal province which suffers the highest
HIV rate in the nation with the world's biggest burden of 5.2 million
AIDS cases. The death toll has soared for years, and cemeteries are
running out of space.
Urban graveyards reserved for whites only under apartheid have also
filled up since multi-racial democracy arrived in 1994.
With about 20,000 deaths a year, Durban would have to build several
new cemeteries to keep pace, with each costing 20 million rands (2.9
million dollars, 2.0 million euros). Dass says the city just does not
have the money.
So Durban has launched a pilot project at one graveyard, which will
eventually expand to all 60 in the city. Remains more than 10 years old
will be re-buried farther underground, with new corpses placed above.
But for many like Thandi, a 63-year-old widow visiting the grave of
her husband in Stella Wood, the city's biggest cemetery with no plots
left, the stacking solution is "a bad idea, very bad." "If they want to
recycle my husband's grave? I will stop them. No way."
In this predominantly Zulu region, her anger is widely shared.
"People communicate with the spirit of the ancestors. They don't want
anything to interfere in their relation with the ancestors," explains
Sihawu Ngubane, a professor of Zulu culture at the University of Durban.
If funeral rites are not followed properly, misfortune can befall the
family of the deceased, which creates concerns about how to venerate a
shared grave.
"They believe that if you recycle the graves, there can be a
confusion of the ancestors' spirits. There can be a clash between the
spirits. They will revolt against people who are alive," Ngubane says.
Durban says it has no choice, fearing the existing cemeteries will be
completely filled in two years. Land for new cemeteries is hard to come
by in this coastal city of four million people, squeezed between the
Indian Ocean and the hills of Zululand.
"If you look at the map, the land is not free. You have agriculture,
development programmes. Finding the ideal space for a cemetery is not
easy," Dass says.
A poorly placed cemetery could also pose problems for underground
water supplies, because of the risk of contamination from decomposing
corpses. AFP
|