CHOLERA OUTBREAK: HARARE – NOEL Nefitali died of cholera on December 28th at the age of 35, though no one passing by his grave would know that.
The cheapest chipboard coffin and funeral parlour fees alone had sent his family far into debt, making a $10 painted grave- marker seem a luxury item. With regret, they flagged the dirt mound with a jagged chunk of concrete scavenged from the street.
“I don’t think he is happy,” Nefitali’s son, Gilbert, said in the back yard of the township house where he and 10 other jobless relatives survived on his late father’s income from hawking sweets at a market. “Because he was buried like a bandit.”
The family’s story is another example of the twisted arithmetic of crumbling Zimbabwe. In a nation where life expectancy is in the mid-30s, graveyards fill more quickly than ever, spurred by a collapsed healthcare system, hunger, Aids and a raging cholera outbreak. But massive unemployment and the world’s highest inflation rate are pushing burial costs out of reach and causing proud funeral traditions to wither.
Some Zimbabweans turn to overseas relatives or elected officials for help, but for many, gone are the things that once seemed crucial for a dignified farewell. No more flowers or fancy coffins. No more engraved granite tombstones, which now cost the equivalent of hundreds of dollars and are often stolen. No more mourning for a week over meals of warm cabbage, soft cornmeal and freshly slaughtered beef.
For the Nefitali family, it meant no white gown for Noel’s body or blankets to lay over it and under the coffin, according to tradition.
Not even tea for visitors.
His death was a brutal and swift blow, emotionally and financially.
However meagre his earnings, Noel was the family’s breadwinner.
On Christmas Day, he went to a party. The next day, the vomiting and diarrhoea started. On the 28th, severely dehydrated, he died. Though cholera has been coursing through their suburb, Mabvuku, where sewage collects in streetside pools, the family did not consider that it had infected Noel, his son said.
On a recent hot afternoon, Noel’s father reached into his thick cardigan and pulled out the crinkled blue receipt from Angel Light Funeral Services: Body removal, $60. Administrative fee, $40. Mortuary charge, $120. Undertaker’s fee, $50. Total: $270.
Then, a note at the bottom: Paid $50 and “left phone Samsung Slide”. The family had one week to pay the balance or they would lose one of their prized possessions, a cellphone. To the coffin shop, they owed an additional $40, Gilbert Nefitali said.
Two decades ago, before Zimbabwe’s enviable infrastructure and robust economy broke down under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe, the average lifespan was 60 years. Now, according to the United Nations, about 20 per cent of adults are HIV-positive. In five months, cholera – a disease easily preventable with clean water and good sanitation – has killed nearly 1,800 people. Public hospitals have shut, and private health care is an impossibility for the 80 per cent of people estimated to be jobless.
Cemeteries tell part of the story. Noel Nefitali was buried in a row of fresh mounds amid a weedy field of graves over which grass has not had time to grow. One grave is flagged only with a yellow Zimbabwean licence plate.
Nearby, according to metal markers painted with block letters, lie Pinos Muchakazi, dead December 29th at 17; Sheila Jayiro, dead August 2nd at 44; and Virginia Njeku, dead November 16th at 19.
“You can go to any of our cemeteries at any time of day, on any day of the week, and you will see two, three, sometimes four or five funerals taking place,” said David Coltart, an opposition party senator. “Our hospitals should be full to overflowing, and yet they’re empty. People are at home, dying.”
In the economy of teeming Chitungwiza, a suburb south of Harare, the capital, death is a clear player. Funeral parlour signs, roadside headstone carvers and coffin workshops are common sights. But they are not necessarily flourishing.
One longtime carpenter, Mazakwatira Kafera, got into the coffin-making business last year. He said many customers must barter for the plain, $100 pine coffins that take him 30 minutes to assemble. A young tombstone carver said business has dropped since granite prices forced him to quintuple the cost of his simplest model, to $200.
KC Funerals prepares few lavish ceremonies now, making most of its revenue from its mortuary, which handles overflow from packed hospital morgues.
“The funeral industry seems to be the only viable industry at the moment . . . . The death rate is high,” manager Tapiwa Chitekeshe said from behind his front counter, above which hung a framed poster of Mugabe. But, he added, “situations are very, very hard. People will break down their wardrobe to make a coffin.“
The burial indignities extend to the public sector. One health official who works in the lone cholera treatment centre in Chitungwiza, where the illness had killed 148 people as of January 5th, said the government long ago ran out of body bags. Now cholera victims, whose bodies and graves must be sprayed with disinfectant, are interred in three plastic rubbish bags — one each for the head, torso and feet. “Some of my colleagues, witnessing people in dire poverty, they just bury them in plastic,” said one official. “It’s not allowed.”
Tragedy could hit the Nefitali family again. Of the 11 remaining household members, four were ill from cholera on a recent afternoon. Three were in the hospital, but the family could not afford the bus ride to visit, and the cellphone is at the funeral parlour. Inside the dark house, Gilbert Nefitali's grandmother lay ill under a heap of blankets, but there was no money to take her to hospital.(– LA Times-Washington Post)