Land Transfers, the Dark Side
Today I bribed a grave-digger.
The City Council owns the land and photographs can only be taken with written permission from them. A promise not to publish the photos in Zimbabwe, an agreement not to photograph the six other grave-diggers hacking as many new holes as daylight permitted, and $500 bought his smile and assent.
The fields which are the Granville Cemetary were once a white man's farm. "Did he sell the land to the Government?" I asked Nevet, the taxi driver: "I don't think so," he laughed. The fast-track land reforms taking place ostensibly give the land back to the people from whom it was stolen during colonization. This particular farm has been given to those who have died of AIDS. In addition to his own daughter, Nevet tells us that "one million" people are buried here -- the vague enormity of the number seems legitimate when accompanied by the rumor that they have begun to layer the newly dead on those longer passed. Nevet estimates that people have been buried here since 1998 or 1999; a European doctor claims that it opened in October 2001. Zimbabwe is one of the rare places on Earth with a projected negative population growth.
As far as the eye can see, on both sides of the broken road, mounds of earth are marked with sticks forming crosses and painted signs bearing names and dates. In one row, a rectangular hole questions the sky, less than a meter deep, filled with something charred.
Nevet takes us to another area, for the babies, he tells us. Traditionally, when a child dies before it has teeth, it is buried on the banks of a river --the infant is still so close to water, he explains, since its birth was so closely followed by death. This is what he tells me, without further explanation.
He drives us by another field of graves which is on fire. Flames taller than the car chatter ceaselessly as we drive past. To make digging the ground easier, the grasses are being burnt away. Through the orange light and dark smoke, mounds of dirt seem to float. The names painted on the signs curl off in black flakes.
We have seen only a bit of the cemetary. We can't see its end. Nevet does not want to visit the grave of his daughter, he tells us, it will make him look back into the past. The past here is a fleeting target, at any rate, becoming lost under the new wave of bodies and the tide of flames.
- Nicole
June 30, 2002 • Harare, Zimbabwe
Click to see more photos from Granville Cemetary