Issue 08
GRAVE IMPORTANCE
By Garth WalkerPhoto By Garth Walker
Illustration By Justin Miller
Death is universal, and yet we spend so little time thinking about our inevitable demise. It’s an uncomfortable topic, still taboo in most cultures. We intrinsically fear it. We don’t understand it.
Death is the punctuation mark of existence, leaving just a memory and the mortal shell of a human being. On some level, we all want to have made a difference, been someone famous, done something important to make the ending an exclamation.
Burial allows the bereaved a chance to mourn, mark the passing of a loved one, and find closure. It also offers a chance to demonstrate the deceased’s significance to a wider circle of friends, associates, contemporaries, and community. King Shaka’s despairing slaughter of thousands of subjects on the passing of his mother is legend, so too the paranoiac ritual of taking an entourage of slaves and servants to the afterlife. Napoleon’s Doric crypt in Paris is marked simply with an “N” – such was his eminence that anything more would have been superfluous. Today, the vainglorious mausoleums and tombs once standard for the uppermost echelons are rare; cremation and the scattering of ashes have become commonplace.
In South Africa, the clash of cultures meets nowhere more peculiarly than in its graveyards. While Apartheid’s war on multiculturalism is still very apparent in cemeteries across the nation, the burial places bear a cultural history that is as vivid and diverse as it is unique. There are those that, besides the thorny foliage, could be middle England, and others reminiscent of urban India, but most remarkable are the quite eccentric examples that can only be African.
Tragically, AIDS continues to take its toll. More and more families are left without the means to bury their dead with dignity, and cemeteries that have the space now feature a large informal section, where mounds of dirt adjoin without so much as a modest walkway. Some have crude crosses, but most are merely marked by a cube of concrete, imprinted with a number.
The funeral plan is ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa. The wealthy generally have theirs linked to provident funds and life insurance, while the less fortunate usually join funeral home “clubs.” Club membership costs only a few Rand a month and gets the signatory a major discount on the entire proceeding, from the casket to the hearse to the plot and gravestone. Allotment for the latter has yielded a culture of customized headstones that are a sight to behold.
In Chatsworth Cemetery, a traditionally Indian graveyard outside Durban, a magnificent polished granite stone features an 18-wheeler emblazoned with the Omo Washing Powder logo. The epitaph reads: “God chooses the best they say, and he certainly got the best on that fatal day.” A short distance away, a stone features a dartboard framed by a pair of darts, with the departed’s portrait looking on. In Vanderbijl Park, south of Johannesburg, a near-life-size granite replica of a Suzuki Superbike marks the final resting place of a young rider taken too soon, his image framed in ornate gold leaf.
There are many hundreds of similar examples dotted around the countryside, final resting places marked by seemingly arbitrary possessions. Though these are the symbols by which these individuals and their families chose to commemorate their lives, to strangers they appear as question marks rather than exclamations of the tomb occupant’s distinction. In their ostentation, they prompt us to ask, Which will be the greater spectacle of our existence: life or death?