Zakes Mda: Ways of Dying

‘Miss, I am looking for my brother.’

‘Oh, is that so? I thought you were paying us a social visit, because I see you just standing there staring at me.’

She was led by a white-coated official to a corridor where there were a dozen corpses lying naked on the floor. None of these were her brother. She was led to another room, with more naked bodies on the floor. These, she was told, had just been delivered that morning. Altogether there were perhaps twenty bodies of old and young men and women, beautiful girls with stab wounds lying in grotesque positions, children who were barely in their teens, all victims of the raging war consuming our lives. ‘I tell you, mothers and fathers, there is death out there. Soon we shall experience the death of birth itself if we go on at this rate.’ People were not thrilled at the Nurse’s constant editorializing. They wanted her to get to the marrow of the story: how she got the corpse of this our brother. But she felt that these things had to be said nevertheless.

The white-coated official led her to another room with corpses in trays almost like oversized filing cabinets. It was a very cold room. The official said, ‘Most of these are the bodies of unidentified persons. I can only open two trays at a time, and then we must run away quickly to get to the warmth of the sun outside. If we don’t, we’ll freeze to death in here.’ And so he opened two trays, and she looked at the bodies. She shook her head, and they rushed out to stand in the sun. After a few minutes, they went inside again and repeated the process. It was obvious that this procedure was going to take many days. The fact that new corpses were brought in all the time, while others were taken out for burial, complicated things. But she was prepared to go through all the distress, even though her stomach was turning, and she was salivating, ready to throw up. It was late in the afternoon, and she had gone through the procedure more than ten times when a saviour came in the form of another white-coated official who looked senior both in years and in rank. ‘You can identify your brother by the clothes he was wearing,’ he said. He explained that all the clothes that the dead people were wearing were stacked in a room, with numbers on them corresponding to the numbers on the trays.

The sister did not know what clothes her brother was wearing. After phoning his wife, who described them to her, she went to the pile of clothes. She was relieved to find them there after just a few minutes of looking; relieved not because her brother was dead, but because at last the search was over. ‘These are the clothes my brother was wearing when he was last seen by his family,’ she told the official. They went back to the cold room, and the official pulled out the tray. But the body was not there. The tray was empty!

The white-coated official was concerned. On investigating the matter, he found that the body that had been in that tray had been released that morning, obviously by mistake, to a family which lived in another town. It had been given to their undertaker. It was late in the evening, and the only thing the sister could do was to go home and sleep.

The next morning, accompanied by a few male relatives, she got onto a train that took them to the town where her brother’s body had been dispatched. To their horror, the body was already in the graveyard, and a funeral service was in progress. A strange-looking man, the very man who could be seen sitting on the mound mourning with them today for their beloved brother, was sitting on a mound in that distant town, weeping softly. The body of their brother was about to be buried by strangers, when they got there and stopped the funeral service.

‘What is wrong with these people? What is their trouble?’

‘I tell you, people of God, it is a wrong body you are burying there. It is the body of my brother.’

‘Who are these people who want to steal our corpse?’

A fight nearly ensued, with the undertaker insisting that it was the right body, and that the madwoman accompanied by her mad delegation must be arrested for disrupting a solemn occasion. But the sister stood her ground. ‘Kill me if you will,’ she said. ‘I am not going away from here until you release the body of my brother.’ She was determined that if they refused, they should bury her there with him. The strange-looking man saved the day. ‘Please,’ he appealed to the indignant crowd, ‘let us not desecrate this place where the dead have their eternal sleep by fighting here. It is easy to solve this problem. Open the coffin to prove once and for all that this is the right body.’ The undertaker, supported by some members of the family that supposedly owned the corpse, refused and told the minister to continue with the funeral service. But some members of the crowd advised that the coffin be opened so as to avoid the scandal of a fight in the graveyard. The coffin was opened, and indeed this our brother was in it.

Before the delegation took the body home, the sister spoke with the strange-looking man who had helped them by suggesting that the coffin be opened.

‘Who are you, father, who have been so helpful?’

‘I am Toloki the Professional Mourner.’ Then he explained about his profession, and told them that, in fact, this was his very first job in this small town so far away from the city cemeteries where he regularly worked.

‘You are a good man. We shall engage your services for the funeral of this our brother.’

‘It will be my pleasure to mourn for him a second time.’

That was why they were seeing him there, mourning his heart out.

But this was not all that the Nurse wanted to say about this our brother. The sister had gone further in investigating who had brought her brother’s body to the mortuary. It was brought in by the police, she found. She went to the police station to inquire where the police had found her brother’s body. It was found, she was told, near a garage next to the hostels where migrant workers from distant villages lived. In the morning, the garage nightwatchman noticed something that was not there the previous night. He went closer and discovered a man’s body. The head had been hacked open, and the brain was hanging out. There were bullet wounds on the legs. He phoned the police, who came and took the body. They said more bodies with similar wounds had been found nearby. They were all packed into the police van and dumped in the mortuary.

‘Yes, it must be the migrant workers from the hostels,’ various people in the crowd shouted angrily. ‘They have killed a lot of our people, and all we do is sit here and keep on talking peace. Are we men or just scared rats?’

There was no one who did not know that the vicious migrants owed their allegiance to a tribal chief who ruled a distant village with an iron fist. They came to the city to work for their children, but the tribal chief armed them, and sent them out to harass the local residents. Sometimes they were even helped by the police, because it helped to suppress those who were fighting for freedom. Nobody seemed to know exactly why the tribal chief did these ugly things, or where his humanity had gone. But others in the crowd said that it was because he wanted to have power over all the land, instead of just his village. He wanted to rule everybody, not just his villagers, even though he did not have support from the people. Throughout the land people hated him and wished him dead. People knew who their real leaders were, the crowd said, and if the tribal chief wanted to play a rough game, then he would find himself facing his age-mates.

This politicking was interfering with Toloki’s inspired mourning. He calmed the crowd down, and told them to concentrate on the business of mourning. Although the issues that the people were angry about were important, they could always discuss them when they got back to the squatter camps and townships. They had grassroots leadership in the form of street committees, which had always been effective in calling meetings to discuss matters of survival and self-defence. Everybody in the crowd agreed with him. He felt very proud of the fact that people had listened to his advice. Perhaps he was gaining more importance in the eyes of the community. Before these incidents where he found himself actually acting in an advisory capacity, his role had been to mourn, and only to mourn. He must keep his priorities straight, however. The work of the Professional Mourner was to mourn, and not to intervene in any of the proceedings of the funeral. It would lower the dignity of the profession to be involved in human quarrels.