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Former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson describes America''s bankruptcy
South Africa 'Recycles' Graves for AIDS Victims
By Michael Wines
The New York Times
Thursday, July 29, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/international/africa/29durb.html
DURBAN, South Africa, July 23 -- At S Cemetery in Umlazi
Township, Innocent Gasa's handiwork is everywhere: endless
mounds of fresh red earth topped with headstones, unpainted
wooden crosses, or, for the most miserable, bricks bearing a
painted identifying number. Mr. Gasa has dug graves on this
lumpy, unkempt, Halloween-spooky hilltop for two years now,
five holes a week, 52 weeks a year, well over 500 holes in
all.
Which may seem peculiar, seeing as S Cemetery exhausted
its last space for new graves five years ago. City records sum
up its status succinctly, even dismissively: "Full."
But in Durban, "full" is a term of art. This city is being battered
by an AIDS pandemic so sweeping that people are dying faster
than the city can find space to bury them. And so gravediggers
like Mr. Gasa are reopening existing graves -- the city calls it
"recycling" -- and interring fresh bones atop the old ones.
The job gives Mr. Gasa nightmares. "I think it is not a good
thing, to take out the bones" for reburial, he said during a
break in his spadework. "But we have no choice."
Every time southern Africa's AIDS epidemic threatens to
exhaust its store of superlatives, some new, sobering
extreme rises to the fore. The latest is Durban, where 51
of the 53 municipal cemeteries are officially filled to
capacity, and a surging death rate threatens to overwhelm
the remaining two within a couple of years.
"Five years ago, we used to have about 120 funerals a
weekend, but this number has now jumped to 600,"
Thembinkosi Ngcobo, who heads the municipal
department of parks and cemeteries, said in an interview
this week. "In order to cope with the current rate of
mortality -- we hope it is not going to increase -- we will
need to have 12.1 hectares every year of new gravesites."
That is nearly 30 acres. "That would obviously turn
Durban and the whole country into one big graveyard if we
continue," he said.
The statistics offer little encouragement. Roughly one in
eight South Africans is H.I.V.-positive, and in Durban,
South Africa's third-largest city with about 3.5 million
people, a survey two years ago of women at pregnancy
clinics found about 35 percent were infected with H.I.V.
The city held a conference on the cemetery problem this
month and discovered that a host of other South African
graveyards -- in Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Port
Elizabeth -- are also filling up at alarming rates.
Durban's space crunch, says Mr. Ngcobo, defies a quick
or simple solution.
Cremation, cheaper and space-saving, is an obvious
option -- and an untenable one for many of the ethnic
Zulus who make up seven in 10 Durbanites. "It is not good
to burn the bones in Zulu culture," Mr. Gasa, the
gravedigger, explained. "Your ancestors are unhappy."
Mr. Ngcobo's office is campaigning to change the cultural
bias against cremation, even visiting schools to argue that
it can coexist with the Zulus' complex funeral rituals and
their deep reverence for the dead. But success so far is
limited; in five years, the share of Zulu burials by cremation
has doubled -- to 2 percent.
Recycling is but a temporary solution: many apartheid-era
graveyards once set aside for blacks are in poor or boggy
soil and are unsuited for their existing burials, much less
additions. No grave can be recycled for at least 10 years,
the span needed to reduce a corpse to bones, and survivors
can prevent a grave from being reused at all by renewing
their lease on the burial site.
In practice, Mr. Ngcobo said, most families consent to
recycling only under financial duress: using someone
else's grave costs 320 rand, or about $53, while acquiring
a new gravesite at Red Hill Cemetery, one of the two still
open, costs about $250. Families also resist interring a
loved one with anyone except a close relative.
Even then, he said, there are problems: some survivors
claim that the departed speak to them in dreams,
complaining, for instance, that their bunkmates have
pushed them so close to the surface that they get wet
when it rains.
Durban could also build new cemeteries, and, indeed,
the city is negotiating to buy a 100-acre site to do just
that. But it costs at least $1.25 million to build a
graveyard, and more to maintain it in perpetuity, money
the city does not have. And those 100 acres will last
only 3 1/2.
A deliberate man, Mr. Ngcobo says that simple
economics will lead families to the logical solution,
cremation. "It's not uncommon in a family to bury, say,
three people a year, and it is becoming very expensive,"
he said. "On average a funeral costs 15,000 rand" --
close to a year's average income. Cremation costs 375
rand.
He could be a highways official contemplating the effect
of toll roads on traffic density. But when he talks about
how the rising death toll has affected his own life, it is
clear that he is anything but detached.
"You are now required to go to funerals every weekend,"
he said. "At times, you go to funerals for eight weekends
nonstop. At times, you have two a day, so you have to
divide the family up so that one can go to one funeral,
and one to the other. If you live in a neighborhood, you
are sure to feel it."
Facts and figures do not do justice to Durban's plight.
For that, only visits to S Cemetery, which serves one
of Durban's most destitute neighborhoods, and Red Hill
Cemetery, one of the two municipal graveyards still
open, will do.
Opened in 1996, Red Hill was supposed to last 15 years.
Mr. Ngcobo now estimates that it will be full in 10. No
one who walks Red Hill's rows of recent burials, heap
after heap of dirt blowing slowly away in the Indian Ocean
breeze, can fail to be sobered by the havoc AIDS is
wreaking here.
Yet it is not the number of graves that stops a visitor
cold, but their markers. Some of the dead are
remembered with only a sheet of paper, shielded from
the elements by plastic wrap, listing names, dates of
birth and dates of death. For many more, the only
record is a few strips of plastic tape, imprinted by a
mortuary's label-maker and glued to a tiny plate.
At S Cemetery, the 37-year-old caretaker, Anton
Khumalo, bends over a succession of markers and
ticks off the ages of the dead: 31; 20; 38; 39; 26;
29;35; 31. "Most of the people -- maybe this one --
are 18 to 30," he says, peering at one marker. "You
hear from the relatives that they died of AIDS. They're
not ashamed. They say: 'Our kids don't listen. That's
why they died.'"
Mr. Gasa, the gravedigger, nods when asked whether
any of his friends have died from AIDS-related diseases.
"Too many," he says. "I can't count them. Too many."
Cemeteries here are all but deserted on weekdays. But
as the sun peaks overhead at S Cemetery, Judith
Dlamoni and her granddaughter, 4-year-old Phmelele,
pass through the rusted gate to visit the grave of
Phmelele's mother and Ms. Dlamoni's daughter,
Gutulethu Dlamoni.
Gutulethu Dlamoni died last October at 25 after
traditional healers failed to cure her. Her husband, an
ex-convict, does not live nearby. Judith Dlamoni, 73,
unemployed, divorced and broke, is now the sole
support of a 4-year-old.
At Red Hill, the only visitor is Siyada Tlatla, 22, who
is building a block wall around the grave of his uncle,
Phumalani Mkhwanaze. Mr. Mkhwanaze, he says,
"was into sport, very into sport."
"Cross country," he adds. "He ran marathons."
Mr. Mkhwanaze left a wife and a 1-year-old son. "He
got sick," the nephew says, not needing to say more.
He was 28.
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