Lizeka Mda: CITY LIMITS
It’s Saturday and the Avalon cemetery in Soweto is full of life. As usual, more than 100 funerals are going to take place before the afternoon is over. Dozens more will take place at Dobsonville and Roodepoort cemeteries. Saturday belongs to the dead in Soweto.
The hearses – flamboyant stretch limousines, or Toyota Ventures with trailers – cruise down Potchefstroom Road with sirens wailing. Several undertakers seem to have cornered the market: Kupane Funerals, City Funerals, Poonees and Mageza.
Endless cortges take over the road. It is generally understood in Soweto that unless you cannot avoid it, Potchefstroom Road belongs to hearses and mourners between 10am and 3pm on Saturday.
Just inside the gates of the cemetery, soldiers are a very visible presence. They are here to deter gangsters from shenanigans like shooting in the air, spinning cars or hijacking a poor mourner’s luxury car only to burn it as a send-off for one of their kind.
In the 26 years the Avalon has been open, funerals have undergone numerous changes. Today mourners no longer turn up in black, some say because mourning has taken a back seat to being seen. The cost of some of the outfits worn would easily feed a starving village in one of the poorer rural provinces.
Designer sunglasses are very much in evidence, in the style of Jack Nicholson, and so are cellular phones, many of which are not switched off and ring frequently.
Avalon has also seen the number of funerals increase dramatically. There are as many as 300 funerals in one day. And now that winter is here, says Alan Duff, Greater Johannesburg’s city manager for cemeteries, many more people will die, from bronchitis, pneumonia and flu. The majority will be buried at Avalon.
Even Duff does not know exactly how many people are buried at the cemetery, but he says more than 40% of the 15 000 burials that take place in Johannesburg each year take place at Avalon. The cemetery has a capacity for 500E000 graves and still has a good 15 years left.
Of Greater Johannesburg’s cemeteries, Avalon, along with Dobsonville and Alexandra, have the lowest grade – D. Burial plots cost R110, as opposed to those in an A-grade cemetery like West Park or Brixton, where plots cost R770.
Duff says a lot of finance has gone into developing Avalon. Trees have been planted along the main avenue, which is tarred. To solve the problem of tall grass and weeds, gravel stones have been placed among the gravestones in the older sections.
To an observer there does not seem to be any order at all to the allocation of graves, but Duff insists the cemetery is divided according to denominations, and has a general section. However, a request for a map at the Avalon administration offices prompted a fruitless search.
And here, unlike at West Park for instance, the family does not choose where a grave should be. In many cases those details are arranged by the undertakers.
On this Saturday, some sections have as many as eight burials within a few metres of each other at the same time. Some seem to involve Zionist Christian Church members, while others could be Methodist or Catholic. Later arrivals are at a disadvantage because of all the competing songs and prayers.
”Avalon is so disruptive,” says Anastasia Mudau, whose father was recently buried at the cemetery. ”You cannot have a proper service. With all that commotion with funerals all around you, you cannot say your goodbyes properly to your loved one because everyone just wants to get the whole thing over and done with.”
Inside the cemetery, the speed limit is supposed to be 15kph, and the cortge complies when going in only because the hearse is leading and the rest of the drivers do not know where the grave is. As a result, many a lost mourner has ended up taking part in the burial of a complete stranger, singing along to Guide Me, Oh Jehovah when the relevant friend is going down with Nearer My God to Thee.
But once the coffin is in the ground and the priest has blessed the proceedings, the cars race out of the cemetery at 100kph or more. What’s the rush?
The cynical answer is that they want to be at the front of the queue outside the home of the dead, where women are dishing up plates of food. The standard fare is ting (a sorghum dish eaten in the Northern Province) or samp and beans, rice, beetroot salad, butternut, coleslaw, potato salad and braised beef. These are accompanied by a packet of three scones and a glass of cooldrink.
As for the monuments that are left behind at Avalon, the most distinguishing feature of the majority of gravestones, particularly in the newer sections of the cemetery, is how poorly they are made.
If these meet the regulations on quality as set out in the cemetery by-laws, which have been standardised, according to Duff, the standards need to be revised.
While there is some vandalism in the cemeteries, many of the stones seem to keel over at the slightest breeze. And while one understands the reasoning behind the low-lying burglar-proofing erected around many graves, it does not help the ambience of the cemetery.
On weekdays pupils from Klipspruit West High School walk through the cemetery on their way to and from their school and the Chiawelo train station. ”It’s the only way,” they chorus nonchalantly when asked why.
Are they not scared of ghosts who may not take kindly to their peace being disturbed? ”There are no ghosts!” They couldn’t be more indignant. ”That’s just something old people used to believe in.”
How late this reassurance comes for the little girl I used to be, who did believe and was scared of ghosts in the orchard, my grandmother’s wardrobe should I dare open it, and most definitely in the graveyard.
But these are smart modern kids who have to contend with different fears, like being jackrolled. This particular group cannot even name one famous person who is buried in the cemetery. A few metres away from their path is the grave Lilian Ngoyi, who died at 69 in 1980, shares with her friend Helen Joseph, whose death followed 12 years later.
Some distance away is ”Heroes Acre”, even if it is really so in name only. ”Nothing has been proclaimed as a Heroes Acre as far as I know,” says Duff. ”It’s just what some people call the area where Joe Slovo is buried.”
Slovo’s grave, with its white headstone carved in the hammer and sickle of the communist party, is in the same area as those of the Pan Africanist Congress’s Zeph Mothopeng and 1976 student leader Tsietsi Mashinini.
A remarkable plot in a good position that has nothing to do with heroes is the one reserved for Godfrey Moloi and family. Apparently, under a thin layer of soil the graves are constructed much like catacombs. The one in the north-eastern corner is Godfrey’s, who is very much alive and runs the Blue Fountain tavern, one of the most popular in the township.
Moloi, who has the preparedness of a boy scout, bought his coffin as early as the late 1970s and checks every now and then whether he still fits in it, inviting photographers to snap him while he lies grinning inside.
It is almost a good thing the flamboyant Moloi booked this plot when he did. As it is, he may just be the only one of Soweto’s successful entrepreneurs to lie there. Marina Maponya is buried at West Park. So is Dombolo Tshabalala. Her father, ET, who built an empire that extended all the way to Swaziland, was buried in Roodepoort in April.
Because of the absence of proper monuments at Avalon, future generations may never learn of the people who contributed to the weaving of the rich tapestry that is Soweto.