Today it was one year ago since I was robbed in the street for my camera. After receiving knife wounds in my back and blow to my head I didn’t do anything with a camera anymore. Today I went out with my son Rijk when the light was nice to do some relaxing street. Nothing that needs a long relationship, just light, my brain and finger in on line. Feels good to press the shutter again.
Avalon Cemetery is one of the largest graveyards in South Africa. It was opened in 1972, during the height of apartheid, as a graveyard exclusively for blacks. More than 300,000 people are buried on its 430 acres, the graves less than two feet apart. This year 2010 the cemetery is expected to be at capacity, largely because of AIDS deaths. In Africa, death tends to be the most important rite of passage. AIDS victims who don’t live long enough to marry are left with a funeral as their only major ceremony. Families will do whatever is necessary to ensure a comfortable journey for their loved ones into the world of ancestors. The dead are often called on by the living for guidance and inspiration. Funerals that attract 500 people or more are common. The mourners are not necessarily close friends or relatives. They are often friends of friends, and sometimes people the deceased might have met once or perhaps not at all.In return for their efforts to mourn the dead, the living believe they will be similarly blessed with a large crowd at their funerals.The standard for huge funerals was set in the 1970s and 1980s, during the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. Thousands of students boycotted school, adopted the slogan “liberation before education” and took to the streets in protest. They inevitably clashed with police, and the death toll grew each week.The funerals for the victims became one of the most powerful expressions of defiance against the apartheid government. More than 10,000 people, some dressed in military fatigues and armed with wooden rifles, would flock to a cemetery to demonstrate their solidarity in the struggle. When there were not enough buses to drive them to the cemetery, the protesters stopped motorists and forced the drivers to give them a lift. By the end of the day, the funerals often generated new victims of the struggle to be buried the next week. The moment I took this picture, 150 funerals were proceeding at the same time, from horizon to horizon.
In South Africa, death is perceived as the beginning of a person’s deeper relationship with all of creation, the complementing of life and the beginning of the communication between the visible and the invisible worlds. The goal of life is to become an ancestor after death. This is why every person who dies must be given a “correct” funeral, supported by a number of religious ceremonies. If this is not done, the dead person may become a wandering ghost, unable to “live” properly after death and therefore a danger to those who remain alive. It might be argued that “proper” death rites are more a guarantee of protection for the living than to secure a safe passage for the dying. There is ambivalence about attitudes to the recent dead, which fluctuate between love and respect on the one hand and dread and despair on the other, particularly because it is believed that the dead have power over the living. Many African peoples have a custom of removing a dead body through a hole in the wall of a house, and not through the door. The reason for this seems to be that this will make it difficult (or even impossible) for the dead person to remember the way back to the living, as the hole in the wall is immediately closed. Sometimes the corpse is removed feet first, symbolically pointing away from the former place of residence. A zigzag path may be taken to the burial site, or thorns strewn along the way, or a barrier erected at the grave itself because the dead are also believed to strengthen the living. Many people believe that death is the loss of a soul, or souls. Although there is recognition of the difference between the physical person that is buried and the nonphysical person who lives on, this must not be confused with a Western dualism that separates “physical” from “spiritual.” When a person dies, there is not some “part” of that person that lives on—it is the whole person who continues to live in the spirit world, receiving a new body identical to the earthly body, but with enhanced powers to move about as an ancestor.
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