Dying tradition, as funeral customs abandoned

Dead bodies left unclaimed by their families in city mortuaries, the desecration of cemeteries and the abandonment of customary funeral rites are new trends marking a change in the reverence Swazis have traditionally had for their ancestors. "How societies treat their dead says a lot about the way we value ourselves and our heritage," Chief Malunge Dlamini told PlusNews. Last year, a national soul-searching ensued when over 60 corpses where unearthed from shallow graves, all women and children who had gone missing without raising widespread alarm from their families. They were the alleged victims of Swaziland's first mass-murderer, who confessed to the killings and led police to the graves in the Malkerns forest. Even in a nation with a telephone system still unaffordable to the majority of Swazis, there was debate about how the victims' families could allow their loved ones to vanish for months without reporting their absence to the authorities. "Their spirits were never properly put to rest, and to me this is as shocking as the killings," said Dlamini. This week over 200 unclaimed bodies, some of which had been kept for more than two years, were given paupers' funerals by the local mortuaries in Swaziland's largest town, Manzini, 35 km east of the capital, Mbabane. "Mortuary space is at a premium because of the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland. We hoped the families would come to claim their loved ones, and give them the customary burials. But we just ran out of room," an official at one mortuary told PlusNews. The bodies, from the town's two leading funeral homes, the government hospital and the National Psychiatric Centre in Manzini, were placed in plastic bags and buried in groups of five. This method of disposal alarmed callers to Swaziland's government-owned radio station: "The spirits of these people will never rest. How can they free themselves from the plastic?" asked one woman caller. "The families of the dead people should be ashamed of themselves. It is not Swazi to forsake your kin. Bad luck will befall the survivors," a man who identified himself as a pastor said. "This is a by-product of urbanisation, and the disintegration of the traditional Swazi homestead," said Thandie Malepe, director of the Manzini Psychiatric Centre. Several generations of Swazis often still reside at a single polygamous homestead, some never leaving the location. But while 80 percent of Swazis are listed in census figures as residents of rural chieftaincies, modern mobility and the lure of towns has largely broken up the traditional family system. "People lose touch with each other. This has caused much distress, because no mechanism has emerged to replace the support offered by the traditional homestead system," said Malepe. As a result, hundreds of people were now dying in anonymity. Many Swazis find this shocking for a small country of less than one million people, where culture is respected. The country's first crematorium is currently under construction in Manzini and traditionalists are appalled that bodies might be disposed of this way. Just as distressing is the new phenomenon of cemetery desecrations, reported in Mbabane, Manzini, and the provincial capitals Nhlangano and Siteki. Examining the wreckage of overturned gravestones and rubbish strewn across the gravesites at Manzini's municipal cemetery, former Swaziland police commissioner John Olivier, whose family members are buried there, said: "I've never known this in my fifty years in Swaziland. This is very unSwazi. Swazis have always respected the dead. African or white, it didn't matter." Manzini's Pioneer Cemetery, where colonial settlers were buried in the 1890s, is now a camping ground for the town's growing population of homeless people. Cardboard sleeping pallets covered by sheets of industrial plastic as protection against the weather are placed besides graves, and sometimes atop unmarked graves. While towns with limited budgets must prioritise the preservation of old cemeteries against the other pressing needs of residents, the Ministry of Transport and Public Works takes seriously family burial sites affected by infrastructure projects. "[The families] aren't holding out for more relocation money, they simply cannot accept the disturbance of their ancestors' remains," David Jele, an engineer with the public works ministry, told PlusNews. The construction of two major highways has been delayed for weeks because of residents' reluctance to move family graves.