Living life to the fullest among the dead

AT THE Brixton Cemetery in Joburg, men, women and their children live among the dead. Cheek by jowl.

What was originally intended as a tombstone in memory of the dead is now a bed for the living.

At 12 degrees Celsius, Friday was among the coldest days in Joburg, and the folks of Brixton Cemetery, those who can still walk and feel the chill in their bones, were gathered around an open fire.

Like a normal place anywhere else that people call home, a myriad activities were playing themselves out on the day. A man was taking a bath, another was washing his clothes, while others were out in the streets, eking out a semblance of a living.

There’s a common thread that runs through the stories of the living – they all fell out of society. Their hard luck tales follow the same script.

A 44-year-old man says he was a forklift driver at a factory in town. When he lost his job, going back home to Mpumalanga was not an option. “Go back to what?” he asks rhetorically. “There is no life for me there,” he says. He is a handsome man, and the question of his bathing routine almost asks itself. “There is enough water to do everything other people do; we bath, we drink, and we cook with it.”

The next man to volunteer his life story says: “I’m just from here.” Home is Orlando West, Soweto.

He left home after falling out with a girlfriend, “just after I had lost my job”. Staying home proved unattractive.

“I was not going to ask them for anything I wanted,” he says.

“I decided to go make my own life away from home. I used to go back, visit when the trains were still running. Not anymore.”

It is amazing how many of them give the impression that they have cut ties with their families. Easily.

In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie writes: “Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what.”

The men here say there are no ghosts. “What is that? The dead are dead,” says one man.

The Orlando chap says he’s been at the cemetery for five years. “I have proved it to myself. There are no ghosts. Otherwise, I’d not be here.”

The men say the local residents seem to want to fill up the graveyard as they chase the homeless off the streets. They tell people to come here, says another cemetery resident.

“Of their own volition, some people just come set up home here rather than face the threats of being assaulted in the streets and have guns pointed in their faces,” says the man from Orlando.

The metro police and the SAPS are a constant menace to the graveyard folk. “They always threaten to drive us out.”

There are about 200 to 250 of them in the cemetery, the men say. In response to a question, one says, and he is echoed by the others: “Shelters will not work. The City of Johannesburg tried moving people to shelters last year, but they came back. Shelters have rules and regulations.

“They keep you confined. They will tell you not to drink alcohol. Many of us want the freedom to go out into the streets to fend for ourselves. It is not cool to be penned in like an animal, being told when to sleep.”

The only viable solution to the problem of vagrancy, another opines, is if they were to be moved to an informal settlement where one can go as one deems fit. “We are used to that life – of making ends meet.”

On a good day, he can make as much as R200, says the man from Orlando.

A brazier is afire further down, water boiling. “Maybe they will bathe or cook,” someone says.

Many people here lost their jobs. It was Evan Esar who said: “The only place where you can find equality is in the cemetery.”

The Brixton Cemetery is a case in point.

Poor black men living a life of poverty share their living space with the whites laid to rest here, who may have led wealthier lives.

The Jewish and Chinese sections are closed off to the vagrants.

As for the rest of the dead, they prove Esar right – at par with the poor homeless black folk.