Landscapes of the dead are always, simultaneously, landscapes of the living. It is this coterminousness of life and death that gives the burial site its salience and emotional power. – Ken Worpole
Durban - High up on the Ridge in Durban’s Berea is a cemetery nestled next to the most beautiful little church. The cemetery has stimulated articles in local newspapers as it opens its gates to people eager to go on tours and get a sense of the history that lies underground.
I quickly phoned in to book my place. The first day was full, but there was a place on the second. I was excited for I know that cemeteries are archives. As Gaston Bachelard, in the brilliant Poetics of Space, put it “there will always be more things in a closed box than in an open box”.
Many of the people on the tour were relatives of those in the closed boxes. I tried to hide my enthusiasm with a concentrated look of piousness as we wended our way from gravestone to plaque to memorial.
An old Natalian sidled up to me and gave me a running commentary on the people that lay there; the social interconnections, the overlapping business interests. He knew his history.
The graveyard has been swept and spruced up over the last couple of years by a group of dedicated Anglicans keen to ensure that the very first of the flock rest in surroundings that affirm their pioneering status.
I saw names that had earned their place in history. The Acutts dominate the centre of the graveyard. Their name still resonates in the province as pre-eminent estate agents. They proudly advertise that they have been in the game since 1851. One wonders whose land they were selling in 1851.
Nearby, in the corner, is the grave of a McKenzie. This is a family name so associated with the butchery of Sir Duncan McKenzie that I am almost relieved to discover it is another relative and not the crypt of the son of the man himself. It did, however, encourage me to track down the grave of this Sir Duncan who earned his reputation during the Bhambatha Rebellion of 1906. The Rebellion was sparked by a one pound tax levied on all unmarried males over the age of 18 in 1905.
This followed a tax on dogs, a tax to marry, and a tax on huts. By then, the migrant labour system was feeding cheap African bodies to the mines.
Dispossession and taxes broke homes, decimated local economies, and put thousands of Africans on the move, many hanging on to the edge of cities where they eked out a pitiful existence.
So brutal was the settler response to the 1906 Rebellion that even arch-imperialist Winston Churchill, the British under-secretary of state, admonished settlers for their “disgusting butchery”. The leader of this butchery was Sir Duncan, overseeing public executions, looting of cattle, and the burning of homesteads that put women and children on the move to nowhere. This was a precursor of the Islamic State. It is instructive that Bhambatha had his head chopped off.
Rider Haggard, writing in 1914, reflected that the rebellion “… was suppressed with great cruelty… all quarter seems to have been refused even to those who threw down their arms and pleaded for mercy, as did the old chief Mehlokazulu, who held up his hands and said ‘please’ before they shot him”. Well, cruelty, bred of fear, is no new story in South Africa.
As I wrote these words, I heard a Marikana miner giving evidence of how he saw a fellow miner put up his arms to surrender only to be shot in the stomach. Again he asked to surrender, only to be shot one more time. Others we know were shot as they cowered behind rocks and bushes. But I digress.
I drove through the Midlands and arrived at St Andrew’s Church. Here, in the beautiful hills and valleys of Dargle, Sir Duncan lies. There are many McKenzies buried in the area and many farms with the surname still dot the landscape. Clearly not all the Anglicans in the area were people of blood. On the other side of the church are two graves with stark inscriptions: Florence Barnett (1877-1925) – “Blessed are the peacemakers” and Joseph Barnett (1918: 48 years) “Blessed is he, who has harmed no one by word or deed”. St Andrew’s is a handsome church that still holds services and Sunday school classes. Do they teach the history of the people that are buried in its grounds?
Back on the Ridge lies Brigadier-General James Scott Wylie (1861-1937), of the law firm Shepstone, Wylie & Binns, who also gained notoriety during the 1906 hunting expedition. His plaque reads “Ever and all things full of wise counsel and steadfast courage”.
Following his life’s trajectory it’s hard to actually discern these qualities. It is said he spent a lot of time looking after orphans in later life, as he had created so many in his earlier forays into Zululand. In fact, Wylie House is diagonally opposite the cemetery. How did Hilary Mantel put it? “His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, building, but it has taken years to sweep up the mess.”
As Jeff Guy has written in a meticulously researched history of the rebellion, Wylie then presided over a special court set up under martial law to try two chiefs, Mesenika Musi and Ndlovuka Thimuni. Both were sentenced to death by firing squad.
As a show of clemency, their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment by the court. But the bloodthirsty Brigadier-General Duncan McKenzie refused to accept this and wrote: “If you continue to upset death sentences our work will be pointless.”
The rising indignation of the tour guide startled me into the present.
One of the main problems, the guide tells us, is that thieves come across the fence and seek to steal copper and marble and anything else of value.
It struck me as ironic that those buried in the cemetery, who massacred, pillaged and pronounced death sentences, were now the victims of looting and scavenging.
Despite the best efforts of the Anglicans, one is reminded of Charles Dickens and The City of the Absent, “the illegible tomb-stones are all lop-sided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-Tree that was once a drysalter’s daughter and several common-councilmen, has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin overhangs the place”.
The guide gets suddenly animated when he relates that the Durban rickshaw bus passes the cemetery without telling any of its history. I wondered in silence which history would be told… the story of the great civilisers come to convert the barbarians or the barbarians come to sow fear and carnage?
You see, history is constantly changing as we debate, argue and dig up new bodies of evidence. Yet it is by going to cemeteries that one gets a sense of how full of life history is.
In KwaZulu-Natal right now, there are many histories; Boer and Brit, Zulu around Shaka and Indian around Gandhi. Most of it is lies.
How apposite are the words of Mantel whose award-winning book forms the title of this essay: “Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truths are pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”
l Desai is professor of sociology at the University of Johannesburg.
The Mercury