daniel chigunwe
THE illegal attempt by some Harare City Council officials to create a private cemetery over the main water trunk pipeline at Prince Edward water works near Seke Dam has, quite correctly, been blocked by the Government on several grounds.
While other cemeteries are found near rivers and streams, there is negligible health danger, since the sealed graves are never disturbed. However, in this area, all it needs is a pipeline burst, and there is potential contamination of treated water plus waste water washing body parts into the dam.
In any case, any repairs to the pipeline would require digging up graves as a matter of routine, a highly undesirable outcome at any time and dangerous with decomposing bodies. All this is in addition to the effects on the families of the dead buried there, and the high risk of molesting the graves.
But the sheer effrontery of the officials in creating a private cemetery highlights the growing problem of finding land for burials within the municipal area, a problem that will continue to grow.
Almost all remaining public open space is now in the form of wetlands and school sites, and while these are fine for recreation and parks, they obviously cannot be used for graves.
New cemeteries outside the municipal area will require the use of State land, and that would in turn mean moving farmers, something that can be done once appropriate compensation is paid and new land found when a mining company needs to open a new mine or the Government needs to build a new dam. But it is more problematic to move farmers to make way for graves.
In any case, even if ever more land was continually made available for cemeteries, we would still face the problem of more and more farmland, which we need for growing our food, being set aside permanently for graves.
Zimbabwe does not have much spare land, and most efforts in the agriculture sector are centred on making sure that all farmland is properly and fully used.
Other countries have faced this problem and have found solutions that range from redeveloping cemeteries when bodies have been buried for a century, to stacking coffins up in high-rise cemeteries, to cremation.
We see cremation, with the addition of proper mini-graves and gravestones for the ashes, as the best solution and requiring the least modification of custom and family preferences.
We start from the position that the modern permanent and marked grave is actually a fairly recent, although highly desired, concept.
Very few Zimbabweans can point to the rural graves of their ancestors of more than a century ago although most can now identify more recent graves and often are able to lay flowers or something similar on tombstones.
But permanent graves, even on family farms, cannot chew up space forever and at some stage there will be problems.
In other countries laws have had to be passed that renounce permanent graves for most people. Britain, for example, has changed the freehold of the many new cemeteries established in Victorian times to 99-year-leases.
Those new cemeteries were to replace the recycled churchyards, where graves would be dug from one end to the other, and then redug many decades later starting from the original end. Nothing permanent and now the replacement cemeteries are not regarded as permanent.
Some mainly Catholic countries, such as Italy, that faced the Catholic ban on cremation until this was changed in the 1960s, created thick wall cemeteries, that have niches for coffins ascending many metres high, so you can get up to a dozen coffins stacked one above the other with a row of bricks between each.
China has also largely switched to cremation, there simply being no room for new conventional cemeteries especially in the crowded coastal provinces and along the great rivers, and traditional Chinese culture places importance on graves and respect for the dead and has found cremation does answer the concerns.
Cremation converts a body into a small bag or box or urn of ashes and ensures that there is no health risk to the living. Over much of Europe cremation was banned until the very late 19th century, but the cultures quickly overcame the change and cremation is now the norm.
There are some families and individuals who want ashes of those cremated scattered, or dumped in the ocean or a lake or a river, but many prefer a final resting place.
And we cannot imagine that any Zimbabwean would want their ashes scattered, but that many would in time accept a small permanent grave with a proper gravestone.
A couple of such cemeteries were created in Harare. The cloisters of the Anglican Cathedral in the city centre hold the graves of several hundred people, their ashes buried under the paving stones.
Those paving stones, about a quarter metre on a side, are all replaced by a small carved flat gravestone with the name, dates and sometime a line of verse, carved over them.
These are permanent graves. Because ashes are totally inert, there was never a health hazard.
The Warren Hills cemetery has a wall of remembrance with niches for ashes or urns, each covered by a small stone tombstone carrying the name, dates and verse or message of the person interred there.
There has been little expansion in recent years, because of perceived cultural reluctance, but we would imagine that many families, if the concept was carefully explained and accompanied by the option of a permanent marked grave, would accept the change.
This would also allow some churches and private concerns to open cemeteries far closer to where families live. When you can place 16 graves on a single square metre you can bury several thousand people on a single hectare, and still leave room for paths, trees and gardens. A wall around such a mini cemetery could also have niches for more urns of ashes, each behind a marked gravestone.
It would also be possible to have family plots. An area now occupied by a single grave in a conventional cemetery would hold the ashes in individual marked graves, or niches in walls of some sort of mausoleum, of many generations of a large family and still leave room for a memorial monument or tree.
Cremation thus seems to be the best solution to allow families to bury their loved ones properly, each in their own permanent and marked grave, without having to spread our cemeteries across ever more square kilometres of farmland or, far worse, reach the stage when we have to dig up old cemeteries to make room for the newer dead.
Online Reporter
