OUR
GHOSTS
WERE
ONCE
PEOPLE
Stories on Death and Dying
Edited by
Bongani Kona
Jonathan Ball Publishers
JOHANNESBURG âą CAPE TOWN âą LONDON
It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
â Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Robert Bly)
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to all the contributors in this anthology and to colleagues and friends: Mathapelo Mofokeng, Leanne Brady, Huda Tayob, Thandi Loewenson, Julie Nxadi, Uhuru Phalafala, Masande Ntshanga, Ben Verghese, Lerato Maduna, Sindiswa Busuku, Imraan Coovadia, Mads BrĂŒgger, Nadia Davids, Robert Berold, Neelika Jayawardane, Robyn Khoza, Rustum Kozain, Lidudumalingani, Kagure Mugo, Khanyo Mjamba, Yewande Omotoso, Lindokuhle Nkosi, Nick Mulgrew, Ratik Asokan, Rejoice Modiba, Barbara Kilian, Kwanele Sosibo, Natasha Himmelman, Ben Stanwix, Dominique Edwards, Kimathi Mafafo, Hugh Byrne, Sivan Zeffertt, Anna van der Ploeg, Amber Moir and Inga Somdyala.
Heartfelt thanks as well to Annie Olivier and the wonderful team at Jonathan Ball Publishers: Paul Wise, Janita Low, Patricia Mzimba, Nicole Duncan, Sean Robertson and Johan Koortzen, and to my family, for their love and support.
Contents
Title page
Motto
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Neither Here nor There â Mary Watson
The Favourite â Karin Schimke
Visiting â Sindiswa Busuku
The Used-Car Salesman â Sindiswa Busuku
All the Dead â Lucienne Bestall
A Death and Life Experience â Khadija Patel
This Nightmare of a Place: A Doctorâs Story â Shrikant Peters
Ferryman â Sudirman Adi Makmur
The Grief of Strangers â Lidudumalingani
How to Kill a Man â Paula Ihozo Akugizibwe
The Pattern of Trees: A Story â Stacy Hardy
A Man, a Fire, a Corpse â Rofhiwa Maneta
Investigation Pieces â Madeleine Fullard
The Descendants â Bongani Kona
What the Township Did to Us â Musawenkosi Khanyile
Habeni â Musawenkosi Khanyile
Living as Ghosts Do â Simone Haysom
Kukithi La: This House Is Not for Sale â Thato Monare
Spiralling â Malika Ndlovu
the girl who then feared to sleep â Angifi Dladla
The Mystery of Death â Nick Mulgrew
Death and Dying in a Brutal World â Ishtiyaq Shukri
Story of a Name â Tariq Hoosen
Brief Encounters â Shubnum Khan
Record Keeping â Catherine Boulle
Skull â Tatamkhulu Afrika
A Postbox on the Corner of Eternity â Dela Gwala
Small Animals â Anna Hartford
Death and the Inner Wildlife â Dawn Garisch
The Great Dying â Hedley Twidle
we become women when our mothers die â Toni Giselle Stuart
Years and Years â Sisonke Msimang
I Forget to Look â Gabeba Baderoon
The Pen â Gabeba Baderoon
A Phone Call from Craig â Barry Christianson
Ancestral Wealth â Vonani Bila
Afterlives â Khanya Mtshali
My Death â Robert
Permissions
About the Book
Imprint page
Introduction
WHEN WE GOT THE NEWS that my cousin Yâs cancer had come back a second time, it didnât cross my mind that she would die. I thought she would survive it; she was only 40 years old, but the cancer had spread all over and her condition deteriorated rapidly. She died in the night-time, holding her motherâs hand. This was weeks after the country had been placed on lockdown Alert Level 5, and because we couldnât travel, my mother and I watched the funeral on Zoom. This, as the old saying goes, is how we live now.
This has been a time of unremitting grief. People have lost loved ones, homes, jobs, and suffered all kinds of setbacks, large and small. At a time like this, the promise literature holds out to us is that weâre never alone. During a phone conversation in the early days of South Africaâs lockdown with the writer and audio producer Catherine Boulle, one of the contributors to this book, we discovered that weâd each been turning to Svetlana Alexievichâs Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future â an oral history of the nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 â to make sense of the times. As we stared out onto the wide, empty streets from our respective homes, Alexievichâs words resounded in our ears like a prophecy: âWe now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun.â
In one of the essays contained in this book, the novelist Ishtiyaq Shukri remembers sitting with friends at a coffee shop in central London days before the World Health Organisation declared coronavirus a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. Echoing the misplaced optimism of those early days, Shukri writes, âconsensus around the table was that the virus would probably be under control by June [2020].â That the number of Covid-19 deaths in South Africa, a year later, would total more than 50 000 (at the time of writing), was something that lay beyond the reach of our imaginations. Who would have foreseen that millions of us would live in a state of almost permanent low-grade anxiety and fear of contracting the virus and possibly dying from it?
While this is not a book about the pandemic, there has been no escaping its mark on our world. âIn April 2020, when my father was diagnosed with cancer and admitted to hospital, I couldnât travel home,â Mary Watson writes in the essay which opens this collection, âNeither Here nor Thereâ. âBoth Ireland and South Africa were in lockdown, and even if I could, it would have been irresponsible to travel ten thousand kilometres to visit a sick man in the middle of a pandemic.â
The writers in this anthology wrestle with the idea of death and dying, seldom an easy task, and I am grateful to each of the contributors. In her breath-taking memoir, Men We Reaped, which chronicles the deaths of five black men, including her younger brother, Jesmyn Ward writes: âTo say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing Iâve ever done. But my ghosts were once people, and I cannot forget that.â
Wardâs memoir shapes the heaviness of grief into something readers can find meaning in. This book attempts to do something similar.
In âThe Grief of Strangersâ, Lidudumalingani draws us into the world of Imiphanga, a radio show on Umhlobo Wenene that reads out death notices and that for years formed the background noise of his childhood. âFor the duration of the show,â Lidudumalingani remembers, âit seemed as if the world outside had paused, its shutters closed, at least to my mother. Sheâd always sit right in front of the radio, hunched over the table, listening, holding a space for the bereaved.â Lidudumalinganiâs essay then leaps forward in time to our present age where âthe image of a lifeless body lying on the streets can be shared on social media even before loved ones hear of it.â
The Missing Persons Task Team is a unit in the National Prosecuting Authority set up on the recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to trace the fate and whereabouts of those who were âdisappearedâ or went missing in political circumstances between 1960 and 1994, and tries to recover their remains. âOur cases may be decades old,â Madeleine Fullard, the head of the task team, writes in her essay, âInvestigative Piecesâ, âbut we are in a breathless race against time.â Then later she writes: âMost fragile and impermanent ar...