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Please don’t die; we have no more trees for coffins
DAILY NATION
Publication Date: 2004/06/13
The French actor Jean Reno in the romantic comedy /Roseanna's Grave/ (1997), is married to this beautiful woman who has been diagnosed with a weak heart and has only a few weeks to live.
She makes one last wish – to be buried by her daughter’s side when she dies. But there is a problem. In this small Italian town, the cemetery has only three graves left, so if Roseanna is to have her wish, her husband must keep all the townspeople healthy so none expires ahead of her.
/Roseanna’s Grave/ is 98 minutes of typical Hollywood fluff: Reno snatching cigarettes from people’s mouths (these things will kill you!), Reno directing traffic (so people would not have accidents) and Reno driving drunk customers home from his restaurant (so they don’t kill themselves or others in their drunken stupors). In its contrived and round-about way though, /Roseanna’s Grave/ has a moral: dying is a huge inconvenience–for those left behind.
In India they mostly cremate their dead on open fires and scatter the ashes in the Ganges, which must make it the world’s most polluted river. In the west, dying is costly business, what with hiring morticians, funeral homes, a suit for the dead man, a hearse to take him on his last drive, an expensive coffin, etc.
Fortunately, most parts of Africa do not have such elaborate and expensive dispatches. In fact, years ago, the packaging of choice in central Uganda was bark-cloth (material extracted from the bark of a tree which would preserve the body for a long time). With modernity, most Ugandans have migrated to wood coffins and the world has not been the same since.
Road-side vendors in down-town Kampala usually have bold signs that proclaim: /Sanduuko z’abafu/ (coffins for dead people) and dare anyone to contradict them. Uganda’s solitary funeral home Uganda Funeral Services is so expensive that only the dead of the high and mighty can afford it. Most of us make do with ad hoc funeral arrangements.
When someone dies, clarion calls are made on radio; friends, relatives and in-laws chip in towards a fund from which a pick-up truck is hired and driven to the aforementioned coffin vendors. Most can only afford the ugliest piece of pine, so they get that and off they go. Day after day, after week, after month after year. But while one must feel for the dead; and for the bereaved, one only wonders what must go on with the forests whose numbers have to felled to make the coffins.
Isn’t it a bit dumb to have the most skilful artisans dishing out gold embossed cards that declare that they are coffin carpenters? "What does your son do Mr Othieno?" someone asks. "Oh he makes coffins back in Nakuru," Othieno answers. "He’s a fine lad that one. I only wish he could get married."
Along with porn stars, embalmers and the hangman, coffin-making is one heck of a monkey business. The more people choke on bones, the better your business. If people are too healthy, your business takes a knock. Also think about the mechanics. You craft this beautiful 8ft piece of art, scrub it down with sandpaper, apply oils and the most expensive vanish, screw on gold handles and in-lay it with the softest velvet. All for what? Just so that some sightless guy with no idea where he is can lie in it? Just so the funeral procession can quietly marvel at his expensive send-off box?
At least people elsewhere get to spend some time with these works of art. In Uganda, mourners only have the church service and a repeat prayer ritual by the grave-side; all in one afternoon. After that, it’s earth-to-earth, ash-to-ash. And barring an eventuality, that should be the last anyone hears of or sees the expensive mahogany.
Now fast forward 30 years. John Doe’s flesh, sinew and skin have fallen off his bones, the suit has moulded, and his box has rotted and fallen away. He is finally R.I.P (Resting In Pit). What, you may wonder, was all the elaborate fuss about during the funeral? Why do people waste so much energy and money on a guy who cannot sue?
Why do we strike up these awe-struck relationships with dead people? It is those who have been left behind who should be pampered. It is they who do the screaming and tearing at their hair. If he had been a breadwinner, it’s they who will go hungry, drop out of school and fail to pay for their diabetes medication. It is they for whom life is not fair.
Plus there is the little problem of grave space. In Uganda, only the Asian community has a designated cemetery where they intern all their dead. The rest of the dead are scattered all over in small family holdings, literally making Uganda one large cemetery. But lately, economic development has started clashing with this backward practice.
See, because of this strange fear of the dead, a man will abandon the last (and most expensive) plot of land in the city’s choicest suburb if it has a grave. The buyer will often be threatened with tales of ghosts and the hereafter. If he’s a tough cookie, he will probably remove the bones anyway. But not before organising a bizarre cleansing ritual involving anything from a spotless white chicken, a bearded goat, to a spotted lamb. Occasionally, a pipe-smoking medicine man will preside.
The feint-hearted will abandon the land all together. But this cannot go on forever. Already in South Africa, the pressures of modern living–and dying–are forcing people to abandon the obsession with a pine coffins and with the traditional six-foot hole. The HIV/AIDS pandemic (projected to claim 350,000 victims this year) has forced many cemeteries to post "We Are Full" signs at their gates. The commercial capital, Johannesburg had 27 cemeteries when Nelson Mandela took office in 1994. It has just 13 today. They are projected to close by 2010–ironically South Africa’s year of the World Cup.
Anyway, modernity is certain to force us to devise new ways of disposing off our dead.
The Indian cremation is actually OK, as long as we don’t dump the ashes in Lake Victoria (we all remember how turned off we were from fish after bodies washed up into the lake during the 1994 Rwanda genocide). When people stopped worshipping in England, city councils around the country converted the churches into bars and started collecting taxes from them.
When Manchester, England’s third largest city ran out of municipal space a few years ago, they razed nearly half of their largest cemetery and built a big shopping mall. People were given the choice of extremely expensive slots in what was left of the cemetery, or free cremation and an urn. No prizes for guessing the most popular choice. So if cremation and burying in walls has become standard practice elsewhere, shouldn’t we dare to pray that this shade of modernity creeps upon Africa as quickly as possible?
There are some among us who have more useful business with those trees than making
coffins.
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