Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe Lewis H. Mates DRAFT VERSION: The final version of this was published in Douglas Davies with Lewis H. Mates, The Encyclopedia of Cremation (Ashgate, 2005), pp.424-428 The ancient sub-Saharan tradition of burial meant that cremation was not practised by the majority native population of Rhodesia, nor, indeed, by that of any part of Southern Africa (a vast area including the Roman Catholic former Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola). Cremation was introduced into Southern Africa in modern times when, in the nineteenth century, Indians came to work on the sugar cane plantations in Natal, South Africa. By the mid-twentieth century there were small communities of Indians in all the larger towns in Rhodesia, as well as in Malawi, Zambia and, of course, South Africa itself. As Hindus, these people brought their custom of cremation, normally performed on an open, wood-fuelled pyre, with them. Though this method of disposal was not compulsory in their religion, few were not cremated. There was evidence before the Second World War that Europeans also wanted access to cremation as, in 1938, a congress of the Federation of Women’s Institutes in Gwelo passed a resolution stating that the practice should be made possible in the country. The experience of Bulawayo was, according to cremationist Dr Alan Dods, typical of that of the larger towns in Southern Africa. In the municipal cemetery, there was a basic open-air construction with a corrugated-iron roof that served as the site for Hindu wood-pyre cremations. Though initially used solely by Hindus, increasing requests to use the facilities were being made by Europeans after 1945. This was despite the fact that the process was a long one, especially for Hindus who were obliged to sit for between four and five hours until the corpse was completely reduced to ashes. In 1954, external developments triggered action. A new railway bridge with a commanding view over the cremation facilities abruptly removed any possibility of privacy for ceremonies held there. A visit of a British cremationist at around the same time sparked Dods’ interest in cremation. Those concerned by the plight of the cremation facilities wrote to Bulawayo’s town clerk asking that fencing be erected to restore their privacy and preclude any public outcry. This act, which was successful due to the town clerk’s helpful attitude, was the first of what, some four years later, would become the Cremation Society of Rhodesia. Yet, in 1956, before the cremation society was firmly established, the first ‘western’ crematorium in Rhodesia was built three hundred miles to the north-east of Bulawayo in the capital, Salisbury (now Harare). As with Bulawayo, before this development, Hindus had had their own cremating facilities. Salisbury municipality was responsible for building a ‘fine’ crematorium, which was located in a tranquil woodland landscape seven miles from the city centre. It took another two years before, on 14 April 1958, a handful of people met in Bulawayo City Hall to discuss forming a cremation society. This idea came to fruition at a public meeting chaired by the mayor of Bulawayo on 5 September 1958, the result of which being the founding of the ‘Cremation Society of Matabeleland’ (the area around Bulawayo). The new society had two main aims: to encourage Bulawayo municipality to build a crematorium and to promote cremation by means of propaganda. It also desired to join the International Cremation Federation (ICF) and avail itself of the experience and propaganda of other member countries. Only four years after its founding, the cremation society secured its main goal when, in 1962, Bulawayo municipality built a crematorium near the city centre. The British cremator manufacturing company Dowson and Mason supplied the hardware to fit out the committal, cremator and fan rooms. The cremator itself was oil-fired, with a single large burner supplied by a 500-gallon tank located in a pit below ground level outside the building. A second electric 1 pump supplied service tank of 100-gallons capacity was placed on the roof. In discussion with the city council’s public health committee, it was decided that there should be no columbarium in the garden of remembrance, and that the only form of memorial should be a book of remembrance. The influence of British practices was clear in both this and in the decision over the mode of ash disposal, it being noted that in England at that time some ninety-five percent of ashes were scattered. One unnamed religious sect wanted to inter ashes, so the cremation society suggested that a part of cemetery be used for the burial of ashes and urns. This allowed the garden of remembrance, which surrounded the crematorium, to remain free of memorials. By 1961 the Cremation Society of Matabeleland was producing its own newsletter. It had joined the ICF, received much help from the British Cremation Society and Pharos was widely circulated amongst the society. Some members had asked whether, now the crematorium was in existence, a cremation society was still necessary. Dods was clear that it was, as in countries without cremation societies cremation numbers remained static, whereas they increased where there was an active cremation society. Three years later, on 10 June 1965, an adjacent crematorium chapel was formally opened in Bulawayo. With the new building, the original entrance to the crematorium now formed an alcove containing a cataflaque. The cremator chimney became less prominent as it now formed the buttress in the gable end of the chapel. The chapel’s opening ceremony was an important event as it saw leaders of the Protestant Christian churches, Hindus and ‘Reformed Jews’ all reading out short relevant passages of their respective scriptures. To allow the Hindu community ease of use, the crematorium possessed no religious symbols. Another advantage was that the crematorium grounds had a stream running through it, particularly good for Hindus, who traditionally scatter ashes on running water. Regarding the disposal of ashes, in 1974 around fifty percent were scattered, another twenty-five percent were placed in columbaria, fifteen percent were buried and the remaining ten percent taken elsewhere. The cremation society’s membership in its first year was only seventeen. It was thought that this figure would not appreciably increase unless there were tangible benefits to membership. The skilful persuasion of the society’s chairman, Mr Verity Amm, managed to convince Bulawayo funeral directors to agree an almost forty percent reduction in the cremation charge for society members, as well as a fifty percent discount in transportation costs for corpses that had to be carried some distance to the crematorium. Though these considerable benefits were well advertised in the national press, there was a smaller than anticipated membership growth in the first decade. By 1968 the membership of the only active cremation society in Southern Africa was 111. At that time around fifteen percent of the members were based in Salisbury and other Rhodesian towns. The society therefore changed its name, at a special meeting on 6 February 1968, to the ‘Cremation Society of Rhodesia’. It then began to amend its constitution to enable branches to be established elsewhere. In addition to internal restructuring, and in an attempt to widen its influence, the society that year also produced a landscape plan for Bulawayo crematorium since the existing garden was regarded as ‘too formal’ (Dods 1968:68). It also encouraged local churches to inaugurate gardens of remembrance in their churchyards and, in dialogue with florists and funeral directors, sought to change the somewhat bizarre requirement in Bulawayo that all floral tributes should be cellophanewrapped. In less than a decade there was a significant increase in the percentages of Europeans and Asians cremated in Rhodesia. In 1958, twenty-one percent of these groups were cremated, by 1967 this figure had risen to almost forty-four percent. This success was obvious at Salisbury where, only twelve years after it was built, the columbarium already required extending and the space on the paths through the garden of remembrance allocated to plaque-memorials was almost exhausted. However, this success had come at the price of the beautiful wooded countryside leading up to the crematorium becoming the new municipal cemetery and being covered by stone memorials. Alan Dods thought that the cremation society needed to establish 2 an active branch in Salisbury in order to protect the crematorium, primarily by persuading the municipality to prevent further memorials and instead to provide only a book of remembrance. A final and, given the potential, vital task for the cremation society in 1968 was to approach Bulawayo municipality regarding the use of the crematorium by Africans. Though rural Africans were still very much opposed to cremation, it appeared that, as in South Africa, urban Africans were ‘adopting the white man’s ways very rapidly’ (Dods 1968:68). In 1968, Bulawayo’s population was composed of 55,000 Asians and Europeans and 155,000 Africans. The increasing movement of Africans from the ‘kraals’, where, incidentally, land for burial was plentiful, into urban areas was a relatively new phenomenon. Dods and his wife were ‘personally aware of educated Africans who have expressed a wish to be cremated, but have regarded the crematorium as a preserve of the European’ (Dods 1968:69). Recently, he had spoken on cremation to the older, and well-educated pupils of an Anglican African secondary school and only a handful had heard of cremation. Some pupils expressed the traditional fear of possibly angering the spirits of the dead and incurring their wrath by cremating their body. Dods countered this by noting that cremations were only performed on those who had expressed the desire to have their bodies disposed of in that way. He thought that if the opinions he heard at the school were typical, then cremation would slowly gain acceptance amongst the African population. He was optimistic about the prospects of cremation in Rhodesia, saying that it was rapidly advancing there, certainly in comparison with South Africa. This was a slightly curious claim, given that South Africa got its first ‘western’ crematorium in 1918 and had nine by 1961. The following decade did not, however, justify Dod’s optimism. Though the cremation figures hit over fifty-five percent in 1970, this percentage did not change much throughout the decade. Moreover, the figures only referred to the Asian and European populations of the two main cities, and were thus unrepresentative of the entire population. Worse still, by 1978 the Rhodesian Cremation Society only had 142 members, fourteen lees than it had in 1972. The 1980s did, however, see some positive developments. The first was the presence of a Zimbabwean (as opposed to Rhodesian) delegate at the British Cremation Society annual conference. Mr Hodza, who was the curator of cemeteries and crematoria in Harare, was the first ever delegate from the country at this event. The second was the announcement, in 1986, that a new crematorium in Bulawayo would be operational by that July. Yet the cremation percentage amongst the European and Asian communities dropped considerably; cremation numbers declined at the same time as numbers of deaths rose quite considerably. Thus, in 1983 the two Zimbabwean crematoria performed 1,183 cremations (220 less than in 1979) in 7,819 deaths, a rate of only fifteen percent. (Bulawayo performed 386 cremations out of 3,117 deaths, a rate of thirteen percent, whilst Harare performed 797 cremations out of 4,702 deaths, a seventeen percent rate). The cremation society also appeared to have gone into stasis and was finally replaced by the Harare Department of Works as a source for statistics from the country in Pharos in 1991. That year, Harare crematorium performed just 686 cremations, a cremation rate of just under ten percent. By the end of the 1980s the cremation rate in Harare, with 772 cremations out of 11,414 deaths, was down to under seven percent. The peak year for numbers of cremations was 1979. This was also the last year of white rule of the country, and suggests that, despite Dod’s optimism, cremation had remained an almost exclusively white European and Hindu ritual. In recent times, cremation in Zimbabwe has been beset by more problems. In January 2003, there were the first indications of serious problems for the country’s cremation services engendered by the economic crisis. A foreign currency shortage led to an acute lack of liquefied petroleum gas, used to fire the cremators. This prevented the operation of Harare City Council’s crematorium at Warren Hills Cemetery in the Warren Park high-density suburb. Corpses were consequently piling up at the city’s funeral parlours, and in the midsummer heat their prolonged storage was proving difficult. There were cases of 3 Zimbabweans who had emigrated, returning to their country for the funerals of relatives and only then finding out that the cremations could not be performed. Many had to return to their new countries without having cremated their relatives. The city council’s supplier, Mobil, could not secure the necessary fuel as it did not have the foreign currency to import it from South Africa. According to a council representative, the crematorium was in working order and the council could buy the foreign currency, if it was made available. However, the dieselfired crematorium in Bulawayo was still operational. Located in West Park Cemetery, it remained the only crematorium in the city. By summer 2003, the situation had worsened and was now regarded as Zimbabwe’s ‘worst political and economic crisis since independence in 1980’ (The Guardian 2003). Massive inflation and a continued shortage of hard currency had stoked unemployment and led to shortages of fuel, medicine and food, crippling both private industry and the municipalities, which were finding it increasingly difficult to provide basic services. In June, Harare city council’s supply of gas for the cremators in the only municipal crematorium in the town once again ran out. Apparently, this shortage had recently worsened when ‘Noczim’ (the National Oil Company of Zimbabwe), which had been responsible for importing the gas, was wound up following the deregulation of the oil industry. Private funeral homes quickly accumulated almost one hundred corpses that were designated for cremation. An option some relatives took was to transport the corpses to Bulawayo crematorium, which was still operating. This was only a partial solution as Bulawayo’s by-laws made it difficult to cremate nonresidents. Though diesel was also in increasingly short supply, Bulawayo still had no fuel problem by the end of August. However, it was so swamped with corpses by this point that the authorities there had refused to accept any more from the capital. Another possible solution in Harare was to use the small Hindu crematorium at Pioneer Cemetery in Mbare, which was used by the majority of the small Hindu community in the city. In accordance with Hindu tradition the crematorium was wood-fired and could therefore be operated in the fuel crisis, but the Hindu community leaders had still to make a decision on whether to lift the religious requirements of cremation there. By the end of the August there were still over one hundred corpses in mortuaries awaiting cremation. Some of the corpses that had been waiting there for more than a month had begun decomposing. The problems for cremation remained confined largely to the Zimbabwean communities of Indian and European descent and was only one aspect of the larger problem of the disposal of Harare’s dead. The majority of the rural poor could still follow the African tradition of burying their dead on family plots in the countryside, but this option was not open to all urban dwellers. By early August, Harare Central Hospital Morgue was holding over three times its capacity of corpses, whose relatives could not afford to bury. By late August, in some of the public mortuaries, corpses had to be stacked on the trays, and some were even piled-up on the floors. The situation was even worse as most mortuaries were small. It was also exacerbated further by AIDS, which was killing at least 3,800 people a week. Due to the economic crisis, a normal urban burial, even at the black market rate, about a third of the ‘official’ rate, was still far beyond the financial reach of the average Zimbabwean. Yet even an ‘official’ rate burial was about half the price of a cremation, due to the high cost of imported gas. As in many cities in the developed world, other pressures seemed to be pushing Harare towards cremation. In 1999, six of Harare’s seven cemeteries were full, and the expanding city was running out of residential space. But even if cremation was made more easily available, and much cheaper than burial, it seems unlikely that many more poor black Zimbabweans are going to opt for it in the near future. This is largely due to the continued strength of the burial tradition. In 1999, even the crematorium attendants did not wish to be cremated, instead desiring burial with their clans in the countryside. As Professor Gordon Chavunduka (a 4 sociologist formerly of the University of Zimbabwe) explained: cremation ‘is totally against cultural traditions … The philosophy of death in Shona [local African] society says it takes about a year for a spirit to leave the body and join the spirits of the ancestors… If the body is cremated, that spirit would be blocked. Although it would remain alive, it would be angered that traditional burial rites had not been followed properly and could return to punish the family and community’ (Bartlett 1999). This strength of this belief can be illustrated by what happened after a white golfer had his cremated ashes scattered around the green of his club’s ninth hole, the site of his only ‘hole-inone’. Black golf club members who dropped shots on the ninth green began blaming the spirit of their former fellow club member. Groundsmen were also perturbed by what had happened; so-much-so, in fact, that what remained of the ashes were soon swept into ‘the rough’. The last cremation figures from Zimbabwe show that in 2000 there were 840 cremations out of 11,623 deaths in Harare, a cremation rate of just over seven percent. Given the combination of economic problems and the strength of traditional customs, this rate has very little prospect of increasing in the near future. And this is despite the fact that cremation offers Harare, at least, one way of dealing with some of the problems of disposal of the dead that beset all large cities. References Bartlett, Lawrence (1999, August 29), ‘Cremation a burning issue in Zimbabwe as AIDS toll http://www.aegis.com/news/ rises’, Agence France-Presse, located at: afp/1999/AF990835.html. Accessed: May 2004. Czujko Richard (2004), ‘No Use Complainin’: From a Zimbabwe Diary’, located at http://www.gowanusbooks.com/zimbabwe-diary.html. Accessed: May 2004. Dods, Dr. Alan S. (1968), ‘Cremation in Rhodesia and Southern Africa’, an address to the British Cremation Society’s annual conference, reproduced in Pharos 34(3):67-9. Mail and Guardian (2003, 30 August), message posted on the ‘online policy forum’, located at: http://forum.mg.co.za/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board=talkb&Number=86291 &page=0&view=collapsed&sb=7&o=&fpart=3. Accessed: May 2004. Pharos, 1934- present day, CRE/A/UK/19. The Daily News (2003, 8 January), ‘Fuel shortage hits the dead’, located at: www.zic.com.au/updates/2003/14january2003.htm. Accessed: May 2004. The Guardian, 2 August 2003, ‘Zimbabwe Economic Disaster Shows in Dead’, located at: http://www.aegis.com/news/ap/2003/AP030814.html. Sunday Times (South Africa) (2003, 12 January), ‘Bodies pile up at Harare mortuaries’, located at: http://www.suntimes.co.za/2003/01/12/news/africa/africa07. asp. Accessed: May 2004. Zim Standard (2003, 25 August), ‘Corpses pile-up. Cremation backlog as petroleum gas runs out’, located at: http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/aug25_2003.html#link7. 5