Unsafe, unkempt and undignified

The task of burying our dead has been practiced for thousands of years in almost every culture in the world. However if you mean to show respect for those who have passed on, the last thing you should think of doing is lay them to rest in an eMalahleni cemetery.

Weeds and tall grass grow out of control and tombstones lay broken next to the graves or are missing completely, carried off by thieves. A local resident remembers when she laid her husband to rest in 2002 when the state of the cemetery was already slipping and in more than a decade things have not improved.
When they buried him she decided not to put up a tombstone because grave robbers were so common by that time already that it was only a matter of time before it got dragged away as well.

The state of the cemeteries in eMalahleni.

They have only been back once after that to visit the grave and even she asked several people to accompany them just so that they would feel safer.

Residents in Ga-Nala have taken it upon themselves to clean their own cemetery and that inspires us, but is there any hope of seeing such initiative in eMalahleni?

The Pretoria Memorial Cemetery is the responsibility of the municipality to maintain but fixing a problem that seems to be almost two decades old would require more than just a lawnmower.

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