Our Ghosts Were Once People

Stories on Death and Dying

Bongani Kona, Bongani Kona

• Editore: Jonathan Ball
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776190676
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Social Science Biographies

'I would get out of the car at every shopping centre and want to ask the stranger walking by with their trolley: "Why are you still shopping? Someone I love has died."' – Dela Gwala

Death is a fact of life, but the experience of grief is unique to each of us. This timely collection brings together a range of voices to offer refl ections on death and dying, from individual losses to large scale catastrophes.

Karin Schimke revisits her troubled relationship with her late father, a Second World War survivor 'whose brain had been broken by violence'. Madeleine Fullard, the head of South Africa's Missing Persons Task Team, draws us into the search for activists who were 'disappeared' or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994. Caine Prize winner Lidudumalingani remembers his childhood in a small village in the Eastern Cape, and how his mother always listened to death notices read over the radio as a way of bearing witness to the grief of strangers.

The other contributors in this poignant and thought-provoking anthology turn their minds to subjects as varied as the ritual of washing the body of the deceased before burial, the ethics of killing small animals, and the extinction of humankind.

In a time of relentless grief, Our Ghosts Were Once People reminds us that one of the small consolations of literature is that all sorrows can be borne.

Sindiswa Busuku • Lucienne Bestall • Khadija Patel • Shrikant Peters • Sudirman Adi Makmur • Paula Ihozo Akugizibwe • Rofhiwa Maneta • Madeleine Fullard • Musawenkosi Khanyile • Simone Haysom • Thato Monare • Angifi Dladla • Nick Mulgrew • Tariq Hoosen • Catherine Boulle • Tatamkhulu Afrika • Dela Gwala •Anna Hartford • Gabeba Baderoon • Barry Christianson • Vonani Bila • Khanya Mtshali • Robert Berold

OUR

GHOSTS

WERE

ONCE

PEOPLE

Stories on Death and Dying

Edited by

Bongani Kona

Jonathan Ball Publishers

JOHANNESBURG • CAPE TOWN • LONDON

It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat

but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

– Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Robert Bly)

Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to all the contributors in this anthology and to colleagues and friends: Mathapelo Mofokeng, Leanne Brady, Huda Tayob, Thandi Loewenson, Julie Nxadi, Uhuru Phalafala, Masande Ntshanga, Ben Verghese, Lerato Maduna, Sindiswa Busuku, Imraan Coovadia, Mads Brügger, Nadia Davids, Robert Berold, Neelika Jayawardane, Robyn Khoza, Rustum Kozain, Lidudumalingani, Kagure Mugo, Khanyo Mjamba, Yewande Omotoso, Lindokuhle Nkosi, Nick Mulgrew, Ratik Asokan, Rejoice Modiba, Barbara Kilian, Kwanele Sosibo, Natasha Himmelman, Ben Stanwix, Dominique Edwards, Kimathi Mafafo, Hugh Byrne, Sivan Zeffertt, Anna van der Ploeg, Amber Moir and Inga Somdyala.

Heartfelt thanks as well to Annie Olivier and the wonderful team at Jonathan Ball Publishers: Paul Wise, Janita Low, Patricia Mzimba, Nicole Duncan, Sean Robertson and Johan Koortzen, and to my family, for their love and support.

Contents

Title page

Motto

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Neither Here nor There – Mary Watson

The Favourite – Karin Schimke

Visiting – Sindiswa Busuku

The Used-Car Salesman – Sindiswa Busuku

All the Dead – Lucienne Bestall

A Death and Life Experience – Khadija Patel

This Nightmare of a Place: A Doctor’s Story – Shrikant Peters

Ferryman – Sudirman Adi Makmur

The Grief of Strangers – Lidudumalingani

How to Kill a Man – Paula Ihozo Akugizibwe

The Pattern of Trees: A Story – Stacy Hardy

A Man, a Fire, a Corpse – Rofhiwa Maneta

Investigation Pieces – Madeleine Fullard

The Descendants – Bongani Kona

What the Township Did to Us – Musawenkosi Khanyile

Habeni – Musawenkosi Khanyile

Living as Ghosts Do – Simone Haysom

Kukithi La: This House Is Not for Sale – Thato Monare

Spiralling – Malika Ndlovu

the girl who then feared to sleep – Angifi Dladla

The Mystery of Death – Nick Mulgrew

Death and Dying in a Brutal World – Ishtiyaq Shukri

Story of a Name – Tariq Hoosen

Brief Encounters – Shubnum Khan

Record Keeping – Catherine Boulle

Skull – Tatamkhulu Afrika

A Postbox on the Corner of Eternity – Dela Gwala

Small Animals – Anna Hartford

Death and the Inner Wildlife – Dawn Garisch

The Great Dying – Hedley Twidle

we become women when our mothers die – Toni Giselle Stuart

Years and Years – Sisonke Msimang

I Forget to Look – Gabeba Baderoon

The Pen – Gabeba Baderoon

A Phone Call from Craig – Barry Christianson

Ancestral Wealth – Vonani Bila

Afterlives – Khanya Mtshali

My Death – Robert

Permissions

About the Book

Imprint page

Introduction

WHEN WE GOT THE NEWS that my cousin Y’s cancer had come back a second time, it didn’t cross my mind that she would die. I thought she would survive it; she was only 40 years old, but the cancer had spread all over and her condition deteriorated rapidly. She died in the night-time, holding her mother’s hand. This was weeks after the country had been placed on lockdown Alert Level 5, and because we couldn’t travel, my mother and I watched the funeral on Zoom. This, as the old saying goes, is how we live now.

This has been a time of unremitting grief. People have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, and suffered all kinds of setbacks, large and small. At a time like this, the promise literature holds out to us is that we’re never alone. During a phone conversation in the early days of South Africa’s lockdown with the writer and audio producer Catherine Boulle, one of the contributors to this book, we discovered that we’d each been turning to Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future – an oral history of the nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 – to make sense of the times. As we stared out onto the wide, empty streets from our respective homes, Alexievich’s words resounded in our ears like a prophecy: ‘We now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun.’

In one of the essays contained in this book, the novelist Ishtiyaq Shukri remembers sitting with friends at a coffee shop in central London days before the World Health Organisation declared coronavirus a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. Echoing the misplaced optimism of those early days, Shukri writes, ‘consensus around the table was that the virus would probably be under control by June [2020].’ That the number of Covid-19 deaths in South Africa, a year later, would total more than 50 000 (at the time of writing), was something that lay beyond the reach of our imaginations. Who would have foreseen that millions of us would live in a state of almost permanent low-grade anxiety and fear of contracting the virus and possibly dying from it?

While this is not a book about the pandemic, there has been no escaping its mark on our world. ‘In April 2020, when my father was diagnosed with cancer and admitted to hospital, I couldn’t travel home,’ Mary Watson writes in the essay which opens this collection, ‘Neither Here nor There’. ‘Both Ireland and South Africa were in lockdown, and even if I could, it would have been irresponsible to travel ten thousand kilometres to visit a sick man in the middle of a pandemic.’

The writers in this anthology wrestle with the idea of death and dying, seldom an easy task, and I am grateful to each of the contributors. In her breath-taking memoir, Men We Reaped, which chronicles the deaths of five black men, including her younger brother, Jesmyn Ward writes: ‘To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.’

Ward’s memoir shapes the heaviness of grief into something readers can find meaning in. This book attempts to do something similar.

In ‘The Grief of Strangers’, Lidudumalingani draws us into the world of Imiphanga, a radio show on Umhlobo Wenene that reads out death notices and that for years formed the background noise of his childhood. ‘For the duration of the show,’ Lidudumalingani remembers, ‘it seemed as if the world outside had paused, its shutters closed, at least to my mother. She’d always sit right in front of the radio, hunched over the table, listening, holding a space for the bereaved.’ Lidudumalingani’s essay then leaps forward in time to our present age where ‘the image of a lifeless body lying on the streets can be shared on social media even before loved ones hear of it.’

The Missing Persons Task Team is a unit in the National Prosecuting Authority set up on the recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to trace the fate and whereabouts of those who were ‘disappeared’ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994, and tries to recover their remains. ‘Our cases may be decades old,’ Madeleine Fullard, the head of the task team, writes in her essay, ‘Investigative Pieces’, ‘but we are in a breathless race against time.’ Then later she writes: ‘Most fragile and impermanent ar...