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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Staff Writer

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a cathedral of words

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G21 AFRICA - A TOWNSHIP FUNERAL: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI shares reflects of his recent loss with us before deciding to move on to Capt .

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - It was always going to be a long day, the day we buried my first cousin. She was the only girl older than myself in our family rugby squad. Another death from the AIDS pandamic, hitting close to home this time.

[E]vil things in robes of sorrow (Edgar Allan Poe). I feel old enough to see the end of my own life.

The hectic morning came as no surprise; running around making the last errands, like organizing ice blocks for the cold drinks to be served the people after the funeral procession. And, when we were about to leave for the funeral parlour, we realized readers for the wreaths at the service hadn't been organised, so we had to promptly decide on doing it ourselves.

For some reason, I'm running out of black friends and acquiring more white ones, mostly foreign. Monroe, originally from the Netherlands, and I go to Mass; he came to offer moral support. He was the first one to betray signs of restlessness at church when the service was going beyond the three-hour limit. Being used to what he calls 'the silence of theological faith and hidden streams that flow with Gregorian chants,' the time delaying corybantic chanting jarred on him slightly.

I was one of the pallbearers. It is difficult to follow scriptural readings and act holy when you're one of the six people carrying the casket. Dead people are deadly heavy. They weigh on your body and on your conscience. You keep thinking about things you should have done, the time you wasted in not telling them what they mean to you. It's a daunting task to suddenly realise that a lifetime is not that long. It hits you from every direction with a dead weight. I felt irritated with all the grating silences that follow imposed singing.

As for the familiar scriptures, they take on an urgent, intensified pathos on top of the grave: I, the resurrection, I the life. It's worse when you hear them read in your mother tongue after a long time. It collaborates in bringing the days of your childhood innocence and the ethos of Sunday morning township church worship back to you with force. The days when you usde to run amok at church and your older sister, now dead in your arms, reprimanded you.

The first five Bob to buy my first beer, I got it from her. I don't know why that crossed my mind on top of her grave. The creeping mist concealed and blended us together.

Xhosa (my mother tongue) shares the classical frugality of the ancient Roman language that lends urgency to our Lord's tone on this saying. Instead of the familiar: I'm the resurrection and I'm the life, which most English translations render, there's: Ndim' uvuko, Ndim' ubomi. (I, the resurrection, I the life), which violently shakes you from indifference of the familiar to the sublime region of mystery. It connects prayer to personal anguish.

I've often heard it said that the leitmotif for preaching good news for contemporary Africa should emphasise on awakening in Africans a realisation that they're people of the Resurrection. Until my heart burnt on the top of that grave like the travellers' to Emmaus, I was a little chary of this message.

In my own vision of the scriptures, I've always understood Africa rather as Simon of Cyrene, who, though fate assigned him the burden of carrying the cross of Christ to the place of skulls, afraid of the Romans and the Jews, was reluctant to have much to do with Christ.

I never went beyond the hill of Golgotha concerning us Africans, the race of burden. The stumbling block, even now, are the skulls from the scourge of AIDS, poverty, crime and so forth. But Christ accompanied me under the weight of my dead sister, explaining to me the hidden design of things through his Word. Africa, dying, tottering, doubting, confounded by her fears and problems has no means, alone, to overcome them. The wound has gone too deep. She has no other hope but to meet the resurrected Lord in Galilee.

The concluding part of township funerals is controversial. It includes an invidious custom that compels unnecessary expenses on the bereaved family. I was so light that day that I even found space to forgive these misdirected social imperatives. Even those who wait for the funeral procession in the sheebeens, to join only for the meal part, strangely appeared to me as guests in Christ's parables of the vineyard workers and the wedding feast. Who was I to question God's generosity? If there were those without proper dress, that is His business, not mine. My clumsy censoring efforts, well meaning as they might be, may run the risk of failing to distinguish weed from wheat, I thought.

But Monroe made a remark, more like a challenge, as we sat exhausted under the tree in the evening, about this ill-founded ways of our burial custom.

I shared his opinion before that afternoon.

My childhood friend answered him in a toneless, almost cold and insular voice "You're being censorious of things you don't understand. We who grew up in the valley of township shadows know how people here live. Most of their lives are dogged by poverty. If it takes death to celebrate life a little for them, then let it be. Do you really think avoiding a one day trench of expenses will make any difference on our financial situation? The source of our poverty is not our imprudent spending on funerals. You cannot save what you do not have."

On our way back home, sitting in silence with my friend and his wife, I could feel they felt let down by my non-support back there when that topic was raised.

I kept wondering if Martha got a feeling that Christ was coldly insular when He would not reprimand Marry for not carrying her load in the house preparations for their guest. What my friend said back there sounded more Christ-like to me. Won't we always have the poor with us?

We need a quality of discrimination and comparative judgement to avoid Judas' holy fuss. What's the breaking of an alabaster bottle and pouring of its perfumed oil if not to honour one whose life has meant so much to us?

But as a person who does not really release his soul from his mouth, I couldn't come up with a way of making my friends understand my thoughts. Words always fail me during intense moments. All I could manage was a Hamlet-like statement: "Not everything can be reasoned and disposed of in the neat tidiness of an Aristotlean logic, Monroe."

We're like unarmed soldiers marching towards an invisible enemy that's mowing us down at will, yet some of us are still here, reporting from the front, the last of what's left in Tupac's launguage. I'm sitting at the park as I write this, making final preparations to leave this city with my dangerous restlessness having woken the dark night of my soul. The homeless people all around with their rancous laughter: the idler and the melancholly man shall ever wander the deserts. I feel tired with ancient weariness.