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Togara Sanyatwe was buried in the West Park cemetery on the edge of Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The headstone reveals nothing more about his life, but he would already have been considered an elder of his community at the time those who now lie around him were being born.

They include Zah Zah Ngwenya, who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Sanyatwe. A little further on lies Mabutho Njini, who died a fortnight shy of his 46th birthday, but he still enjoyed more years than Norah Manyati, who barely made it past 30.

Their graves sit at the beginning of a narrow road running through the newest part of the cemetery. Its length is a chronicle of Zimbabwe's surging death rate and plummeting life expectancy as political crisis and economic collapse have fused with rampant Aids to transform the graveyards from resting places for the elderly at the end of a full life to the premature final stop for a generation barely out of youth.

In Bulawayo, the cemeteries are filled to the point where there is now pressure to put two corpses in each grave.

Women in Zimbabwe live an average of 34 years and men manage just three years more, half of the life expectancy of little more than a decade ago. Prince Handina didn't even make that. He died at 20. Plan Ndebele, in the neighbouring grave, made it to 39.

The pair are buried just after the road passes the walled and padlocked Muslim cemetery. Here the graves begin in January 2004. The numbers buried each month are already rising, their ages dropping and the plots squeezed closer together.

A little further down the road, among the graves of 2005 and 2006, granite headstones, decorated with pictures, fond messages or biblical quotations, increasingly give way to black metal plates hand painted with white lettering that tell no more than a name and dates of birth and death. It is one more sign of the growing poverty as Zimbabweans struggle to survive.

Not far away is the children's cemetery, packed with bodies of those who did not live long enough to go to school.

At the far end of the road, where there is almost no more room to spare, the recent arrivals are easy to spot. Multicoloured plastic flowers adorn the freshly turned earth mounds that are almost on top of each other.

Odian Ncube is digging a new grave in front of the last resting place of Sibonginkosi Dube, who was buried last week at the age of 30.

"We have enough for two more rows of graves before we reach the road," he said. "Maybe they will find room somewhere else. Perhaps this whole city will be a graveyard."

President Robert Mugabe's destruction of his own economy as he fights to hold on to power -- with inflation running above 4 500%, power and water cuts a daily reality, shops rapidly emptying of food and the grain harvest expected to fail yet again after the seizure of white-owned farms and drought -- has played a large part in the surging number of deaths.

Millions are underfed, weakening immune systems and leading to Aids. Few can afford the drugs to treat the illnesses that the disease brings on, even if the medicines are available which, increasingly, they are not.

Many of the country's doctors and nurses have left for South Africa or Europe.

The World Health Organisation estimates that that lethal combination is claiming 3 500 lives a week in the former British colony. The World Food Programme says four million Zimbabweans, one-third of the population, will need food aid this year.

Ncube's team of diggers is making four to five new graves each day, and that is just in one corner of one cemetery. "We work harder now. There are many many more. Look, you can see it's different. Over there the graves are like they used to be, a certain distance apart. Now we put them almost on top of each other," he said.

Many of the dead are laid to rest in cardboard coffins or cloth bags. Ncube says some people come in and bury their relatives at night in the graves dug during the day because they cannot afford the funerals or the ubiquitous burial societies, a savings club that provides a decent funeral for the dead if nothing for the surviving family.

The number of burials in Bulawayo is rising by about 20% each month. The mayor, Japhet Ndabeni-Ncube, says the time has come when people will have to be buried one on top of the other or not at all. He wants the city's residents to accept two bodies in a grave or cremation, a social taboo for many.

"It is very real. In most cases we run away from facing reality," he told a council meeting last week. "It is incumbent upon us to go and spread the message on cremation and the burying in the same grave, and at the same time continue with the fight against Aids."

Another councillor, Amen Mpofu, said the real problem was not how to bury the dead but how to save the living. "I think the most important question we should ask ourselves as we discuss this is why are people dying at this rate? I think this is what we should zero in on," he said. -- (c) Guardian News & Media Ltd 2007

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