NDUMISO NGCOBO | Let’s bury the long goodbye

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Opens in new windowOpens in new windowEnter fullscreen mode displaying this image.ExpandOne of many theories is that there is a correlation between the length of speeches at funerals and how close the next election is, says the writer. Stock photo: 123rf/dolgachov Story audio is generated using AI

Death is already way too serious, without the melodrama on display at black people’s funerals.

Allow me to issue a disclaimer for that sweeping statement. Apartheid is enjoying an unprecedented wave of nostalgic appreciation among Homo sapiens blacksouthafricanus. It is nearly impossible to wade through the cesspool that the internet has become without one black South African or another extolling the virtues of aparte ontwikkeling or separate development (“at least there was law and order during apartheid”). DF Malan must be beaming with posthumous pride from whichever afterlife place he ended up.

When we’re done with the Madlanga commission, the president needs to set up a national indaba on black funerals as a matter of urgency. Things are getting out of hand there by Buryville in our townships and villages. It is bad enough that a significant portion of our population seems to have no weekend pastimes that don’t involve several hours in stuffy, black formal clothing inside poorly ventilated community halls or marquees.

A few years ago I started noticing that each time I asked one of my friends what he was up to over any given weekend, his answer was almost inevitably that he was attending a funeral. Concerned, I asked if he had an unusually large family scattered across KwaZulu-Natal, with a high fatality rate. In the exchange that followed it emerged that he didn’t know at least 80% of the people he was burying every weekend.

I had to conclude that he was attending funerals compulsively, the way some people try out a different golf course every weekend. The difference, of course, being that instead of sinking balls into cup-size holes, he was watching coffins going into somewhat bigger cavities.

For anyone not from either the Kingdom of the Zulu or the Eastern Cape, my observation may seem a tad extreme. To those people, all I can offer is: “Oh ye of poor orientation to the funeral culture in these provinces.”

Proceedings are deliberately dragged out until at least a dozen diabetics have keeled over from low blood sugar and general exhaustion

You see, in the rest of South Africa, if you run into someone at the mall at 9.30am and they are clad in funeral attire, you ask which funeral they have just come from. If you meet a similarly attired person at Gateway in Umhlanga, the question is, which funeral they are headed to. In Shakaland our funerals start at about 11am and last deep into the afternoon, 4pm-ish. Your staying power and dedication to the internment ceremony are tested to the limit.

If the deceased is umnumzane (a married male) the delay in the ceremony is by design. There is this notion with dubious “cultural origins” that the remains of an umnumzane cannot be lowered into the ground until people’s “shadows are long”. To ensure this, proceedings are deliberately dragged out until at least a dozen diabetics have keeled over from low blood sugar and general exhaustion.

Speeches will be delivered by everyone from the immediate family (including poorly written “poetry” from the grandchildren) to friends from church, friends from his stokvel, neighbours from the seven different places he has lived, colleagues from all the workplaces he’s been and even some isicathamiya group from his favourite hole.

One of many theories is that there is a correlation between the length of speeches at funerals and how close the next election is. Between now and November 4, I estimate that funerals in hotly contested wards will increase on average by about two hours and 14 minutes. I have attended two funerals this year, and at both there was a human hollow drum who spoke for almost an hour without saying anything relevantg to the deceased. I found myself wondering if politicians are wandering the streets searching for random funerals to crash and put unsuspecting communities to slumber.

If the powers that be heed my call for a summit on black funerals, I know exactly what my submissions will be. And no, it’s not what you would expect. I will not question black people’s unreflected insistence on Victorian black garb. I will not have anything to say about obscene amounts spent on the shiny boxes we stick into the ground, leaving families tens of thousands of rand in debt.

My submission will be guided by the wisdom of a boss from the Netherlands I worked under during my former life in the corporate world. He insisted that at any meeting, everyone present had to remain standing. I predict that if a law is passed prohibiting chairs at funerals, these events will last no longer than an hour or two at the most.

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