Burial: The Game of the Dead, Dying and Bereaved

Ridiculous power games.

A waste of human effort and time. These cities could be better used. Our communities could be better.

You don’t get it, cause you’re so safe. These privileged kids spitting the rhetoric of the 99%. Well let me tell you: 99% of you do not get it. Black people are fucking dying.

All the time.

Every day.

Do you get it now? Probably not any clearer than when I started this expose´. And by the way, in case you didn’t know. This is an expose´.  I’m exposing a gap inside you. You, South African, have a crevice in your comprehension.

More than any of you privileged, educated, safe and secure city dwellers, they are dying.  Why have we not destroyed the Township system yet? We’ve tried to develop it, apparently. A mall here, a gargantuan police station there. But we have not nullified a system built explicitly to imprison, kill and pollute the lives of a specific, select population.

But let’s sell to them. Old Mutual, AVBOB, Hollard Desmond Dube on your screen, selling people life and death cover (same difference?). They’re not talking to the rich, healthy and successful. They’re talking to the minimum wage earning populous who take loans, the people with no jobs but feeding 6 heads. The grans trying to make a grocery list with pension money. The HIV ridden young ladies who need to have this fiction of a future for their children reinforced. He’s selling to the diseased, dying and bereaved. But obviously we can do better, right?

 If you asked your maid, your garden boy or that boy packing your groceries how many people in his township died this week, you’d be blown away.

Let’s subsidize them a little, if we won’t make their broken lives disappear for good. Here’s a social experiment: request that a person holding a funeral this week stop by at their nearest major grocery store. Request that they bring the death certificate as proof, for an 8% reduction in meat, rice and other funeral necessities. Soon, and I hope it happens soon, you realize that you’re exposing gore. Mortality made capital. Other people do it. Capitalizing on death. Look at what you’d expose. The number of death certificates the cashiers would see in one day would show you the expanse of the gap in your understanding.

How many would come? How many would arrive to buy the supplies that have become a staple part of the township funeral? The social subtleties involved in burying one’s dead are a thing that isn’t displayed on SABC news. You won’t get the sheer toil and economic weight of a funeral like this. And how many of them occur in the space of a week?

You’re not there when we do these things. When we fell a cow for our dead. Over the years, as so many keep dying, we realize we’re not rich enough to slay a cow, or even a goat. We’re losing too many loved ones in one year. Next door, and at the house across the road, someone else died, too.

There are tents up, in the front or the back yard. A fire blazes from somewhere in the small yard. There is a choir of children, singing mourning songs they’ve had far too much practice in. They’re up all night, singing in a room with a coffin. They need food, but they won’t ask. They are waiting for the sun. The fire outside boils and broils the meat. uGogo makes Zulu beer in another 3 legged pot. Soon, the procession comes. 6 busses. Show up. Churning down the emaciated streets of Kwa Mashu. Spewing grey/black smoke.

Certified to carry 60 mourners. But there are over 90 people in there. Or in here. Where am I? Oh, I’m at another funeral.

Again?

Again.

Two in two weeks?

Yes. Again.

Who’s paying for all of these funerals anyway? So much catering and transport and time. Who’s replacing the dead family member, to keep this family together? No one. But you could sell to them. You can just keep milking that dead cow until they’re all dead. Do you know about the forced cremations that are coming? That there are too many Blacks dying? That, actually, KZN is short of land to bury them all? Oh, don’t forget that cremation prices have also risen from ZAR1150 to ZAR1400.

So there’s a way out. Increase life expectancy. Improve quality of life.  Give them the proper housing, sanitation and all that BS that these Blacks are always toyi-toying for. BUT! No.

Bayafa labantu. Awungizwa? Ngithi bayafa labantu.

Bantu

Ntu.

Nt.

I must be going nuts.

Thinking that you’ll get it. You want us – yes I’m talking to you successful man in suit and tie – you want us poor, diseased and dying. And you shall capitalize because that’s what happens. Of what help are these suits in power? They might as well take me up on CHECKERS BIG BONANZA FUNERAL SPECIAL. Might as well make some money from the kaffirs before they all eat dirt. 

When they return from the graveyard, where they won’t be going as much anymore once our municipality starts burning them, they return hungry. Over 100 mouths, some mourning, some just there for the free food and social scene. Funerals are a social scene. Do you get the verbose horror of this? That the rest of the days spent dying and burying friends are punctuated with large meetings of hungry, thirsty people who are starting to lose touch with what sad actually means. When one’s sympathy is worked so hard it’s worn thin and bone-dry.

Do you know what’s killing them? It’s not just the lack of money. People survive fine without it. Our people are dying from the structure of the environment. The politics of borders. Borders between streets and borders between townships and suburbs. That silly social game we’ve invented where one side of the street of Botanic Road has more property value than the other side. Why, when and who the hell decides where value ascends and descends?

Riddle me this; why are more people dying in Kwa Mashu, 6km away, while I have a higher life expectancy if I stay here in Morningside? How can we allow 3 miles of land to make such a stark difference?

I’ll tell you. You might get it. It’s the games. The games and illusions we run. We run them on targets, reinforce them again and again like some CSS security code. You deal with the township by forcing the township to continue. The Black, educated, healthy and alive is a danger to a system that is run by elite blacks and clandestine super-elite whites. Our government officials haven’t statistically achieved much besides billable hours and a high, really high Nandos spending habit. At the cost of lives It’s a waste of human effort and time. These cities could be better used. Our communities could be better.